experimental subject

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pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

In 1979, Lord, Ross, and Lepper conducted an experiment that was designed to explore how people thought through arguments they felt passionately about. The researchers rounded up experimental subjects with strong views in favor of, or against, the death penalty. They showed the experimental subjects summaries of two imaginary studies. One of these made-up studies demonstrated that the death penalty deterred serious crime; the other, by the fictitious researchers Palmer and Crandall, showed the opposite.18 As one might expect, the experimental subjects were inclined to dismiss studies that contradicted their cherished beliefs. But Lord and his colleagues discovered something more surprising: the more detail people were presented with—graphs, research methods, commentary by other fictional academics—the easier they found it to disbelieve unwelcome evidence.

• Anna Powell-Smith, MissingNumbers.org Nearly seven decades ago, the noted psychologist Solomon Asch gave a simple task to 123 experimental subjects. They were shown two illustrations, one with three quite different lines and the other with a “reference line,” and Asch asked them to pick which of the three lines was the same length as the reference line. Asch had a trick up his sleeve: he surrounded each subject with stooges who would unanimously pick the wrong line. Confused, the experimental subjects were often (though not always) swayed by the errors of those around them. The Asch experiments are endlessly fascinating, and I often find myself discussing them in my writing and talks: they are a great starting point for a conversation about the pressure we all feel to conform, and they provide a memorable window into human nature.

A couple of decades ago, psychologists Kari Edwards and Edward Smith conducted an experiment in which they asked people in the United States to produce arguments in favor of and against the politically fraught positions of the day such as abortion rights, spanking children, allowing homosexual couples to adopt, quotas for hiring minorities, and the death penalty for those under sixteen years of age.13 Unsurprisingly, they found that people had biases: the study participants found it hard to construct the kind of arguments that their opponents would use to defend their views. More strikingly, Edwards and Smith showed that those biases tended to appear more clearly in negative arguments. Disbelief flowed more fluidly than belief. The experimental subjects found it much easier to argue against positions they disliked than in favor of those they supported. There was a special power in doubt. Doubt is also easy to sell because it is a part of the process of scientific exploration and debate. Most of us are—or should be—taught at school to question the evidence.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

As long as people had been appropriately briefed (“mistakes are human, try incorporating them into your work”) they did better work and reported that they had more fun.16 A third experiment was conducted by a team including Paul Howard-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol. Researchers showed their experimental subjects a set of three words, and then asked them to tell a brief story involving the three words. Sometimes the words had obvious connections, such as “teeth, brush, dentist” or “car, driver, road.” Sometimes the words were unconnected, such as “cow, zip, star” or “melon, book, thunder.” The more random, obscure, challenging combinations spurred the subjects into spinning far more creative tales.17 These are, admittedly, artificial one-off situations with nothing at stake for the experimental subjects. When someone relies on creativity for a living, mucking them around becomes much more fraught: think of poor Carlos Alomar, too talented and too professional to be comfortable playing “crap”; or Phil Collins, so frustrated with Eno’s unpredictable requests that he started throwing beer cans around the studio.

In one, Charlan Nemeth and Julianne Kwan showed pairs of people bluish/greenish slides, asking them to shout out whether they were blue or green. The experimenters had a trick to play, however: one member of each pair was actually a confederate of the researchers, who would sometimes call out baffling responses—“green” when the slide was clearly blue. Having been thoroughly baffled, the experimental subjects were then asked to free-associate words connected with “green” and “blue”—sky, sea, eyes. Those who had been subjected to a confusing mess of signals produced more original word associations: jazz, flame, pornography, sad, Picasso. There was something about the sheer disruptiveness of the setup that unlocked creative responses.15 In another study, led by psychologist Ellen Langer, researchers assigned creative tasks to their subjects, then started messing with them.

Asch found that people would sometimes suppress their own judgments in order to agree with a unanimous group, even though the group was clearly in the wrong. (The group was made up of actors working for Solomon Asch, surrounding a single, rather confused participant, unaware that he was being set up.) The cure for this groupthink? Even a single dissenting voice broke the spell, and the experimental subjects felt much more able to express their own dissent.16 More recently, complexity scientist Scott Page published The Difference,17 a book that uses a mathematical rather than a psychological framework to explore similar questions. Page showed that in many problem-solving contexts, “diversity trumps ability.”


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

As they went round the table, each one called out the same answer – a wrong answer. By the time Asch turned to the real experimental subject, the poor man would be baffled. Frequently, he would fall in with the group, and later interviews revealed that this was often because he genuinely believed his eyes were deceiving him. As few as three actors were enough to create this effect. Less famous but just as important is Asch’s follow-up experiment, in which one of the actors gave a different answer from the rest. Immediately, the pressure to conform was released. Experimental subjects who gave the wrong answer when outnumbered ten to one happily dissented and gave the right answer when outnumbered nine to two.

Cognitive dissonance describes the mind’s difficulty in holding two apparently contradictory thoughts simultaneously: in Tharp’s case, ‘I am a capable, experienced and respected choreographer’ and ‘My latest creation is stupefyingly clichéd.’ This odd phenomenon was first pinned down in an ingenious laboratory experiment half a century ago. Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith asked their experimental subjects to perform a tedious task – emptying and refilling a tray with spools, using one hand – for half an hour. On some plausible-sounding pretext they then offered a third of their subjects $1 – a small sum even in 1959, about an hour’s wage – to tell the next experimental subject (actually an actress) what a great time they’d had stacking spools onto trays for half an hour. They offered another third of their subjects a much more substantial sum, $20, half a week’s typical wages, to do the same thing.

How profoundly this tendency runs in the human brain was demonstrated by a team of researchers including the psychologist Daniel Gilbert. The researchers showed their experimental subjects an array of six prints of paintings by Claude Monet – the lilies, the Houses of Parliament at sunset, the haystacks, and others – and asked them to rank the images in order from the one they liked most to the one they liked the least. The researchers then offered the experimental subjects a choice of two spare prints they ‘just happened’ to have, and the spares were always the pair ranked in the middle – number three and number four.


Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

In the negotiations at Montreal, the United States, which is the center of the big biotech industries and genetic engineering, was demanding that the issue be determined under WTO rules. According to those rules, the experimental subjects have to provide scientific evidence that it’s going to harm them, or else the transcendent value of corporate rights prevails and they can do what they want. That’s what Ed Herman calls “producer sovereignty.”13 Europe and most of the rest of the world insisted on the precautionary principle, that is, the right of people to say, I don’t want to be an experimental subject. I don’t have scientific proof that it’s going to harm me, but I don’t want to be subjected to that. I want to wait until it’s understood.

I don’t have scientific proof that it’s going to harm me, but I don’t want to be subjected to that. I want to wait until it’s understood. That’s a very clear indication of what’s at stake, an attack on the rights of people to make their own decisions over things even as simple as whether you’re going to be an experimental subject, let alone controlling your own resources or setting conditions on foreign investment or transferring your economy into the hands of foreign investment firms and banks. Those are the issues that are really at stake. It’s a major assault against popular sovereignty in favor of the concentration of power in the hands of a kind of state-corporate nexus, a few mega­ corporations and the few states that primarily cater to their interests.

., there’s been relatively little discussion and concern about it. In Europe, India, Latin America and elsewhere, there’s been great concern and a lot of very activist popular protest. The French farmers are one case. The same is true in England and elsewhere, quite extensively. There’s a lot of concern about being forced to become experimental subjects for interventions in the food system, both in production and consumption, that have unknown consequences. That did cross the Atlantic in a way that I don’t entirely understand. At some point last fall the concerns became manifested over here as well, to the extent that something quite unusual happened.


pages: 211 words: 69,380

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

classic study, Day of the Dead, experimental subject, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Kibera, Lao Tzu, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, security theater, selection bias, Steve Jobs, summit fever, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, traveling salesman, World Values Survey

Could it be that ironic process theory also sheds light on what is wrong with our efforts to achieve happiness, and on the way that our efforts to feel positive seem so frequently to bring about the opposite result? In the years since his earliest white bear experiments, Wegner’s research, and that of others, has turned up more and more evidence to support that notion. One example: when experimental subjects are told of an unhappy event, but then instructed to try not to feel sad about it, they end up feeling worse than people who are informed of the event, but given no instructions about how to feel. In another study, when patients who were suffering from panic disorders listened to relaxation tapes, their hearts beat faster than patients who listened to audiobooks with no explicitly ‘relaxing’ content.

Over the last few years, the German-born psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have constructed a series of experiments designed to unearth the truth about ‘positive fantasies about the future’. The results are striking: spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people’s motivation to achieve them. Experimental subjects who were encouraged to think about how they were going to have a particularly high-achieving week at work, for example, ended up achieving less than those who were invited to reflect on the coming week, but given no further guidelines on how to do so. In one ingenious experiment, Oettingen had some of the participants rendered mildly dehydrated.

‘It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices,’ wrote Becker – leaders ‘who seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction – what calm, what relief.’ Mortality salience makes itself felt in numerous other, sometimes unexpected ways. Experimental subjects who have been prompted to think about death demonstrate more intense reactions of disgust to discussions of human bodily waste. They agree more strongly with statements such as ‘If I see someone vomit, it makes me sick to my stomach.’ They are more likely to rank certain hypothetical scenarios as ‘very disgusting’, for example seeing maggots on a piece of meat.


pages: 519 words: 104,396

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

Stevens’s psychology Ph.D. was awarded, per Harvard custom of the time, by the Department of Philosophy. War made Stevens’s reputation. At the behest of the U.S. Air Force, he founded the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory in 1940. Its location, the basement of Harvard’s neogothic Memorial Hall, belied its somewhat incredible mission: to study the effects of extremely loud noises on pilots. Experimental subjects listened to deafening 115-decibel blasts for seven hours a day. Stevens found that the noise did not impair mental performance too much. The main problem was that nobody could hear what anyone else was saying. Stevens’s lab took on the task of designing intercoms for noisy cockpits. Stevens retained a gruff military manner throughout his career.

In the actual experiments, a dozen distinct bets were used. They were somewhat more complicated than the examples above, in that the player stood a chance of losing money as well as winning it. (This is more like familiar sports or casino bets: you have to put up some money to play and risk losing it.) The experimental subjects were first shown bets two at a time and asked to choose which they preferred. Then they were shown the same set of bets one at a time and asked to price them. In this part, they were told that they “owned” the bet in question and could sell it back to the house for sure cash. What was the minimum price they would accept?

Neale asked her mother, a real estate broker, for advice. She advised playing up the networking possibilities. Agents would welcome the chance to make some connections with the faculty, she said. Agent Katherine Martin of Tucson Realty and Trust agreed to let them use one of her listings. The experimental subjects were 54 junior and senior undergraduate business students and 47 local real estate agents. For those real estate professionals, the Tucson market was their bread and butter. On average, they bought or sold 16 properties a year and had been selling real estate in Tucson for more than eight years.


pages: 471 words: 147,210

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

experimental subject, gravity well, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, machine translation, microbiome, pattern recognition, post scarcity, remote working, side project, telepresence, theory of mind

She had moved as much as she could but now needed him to take his own turn before she could continue playing. Senkovi suspected he should probably get away from the tanks and go have human contact or something healthy like that. On the other hand, he’d just had an actual conversation, which was quite wearying, and he could hardly disappoint such a keen experimental subject. He sat down again, dropping a tile into the virtual space and waiting to see what Salome would do. 5. Siri Skai would be in charge of the orbiting module in Baltiel’s absence. She and four others would have relatively little to do except continue to round off the rough edges of the database the computer was assembling on the Nod biosphere (Senkovi’s joke name having gradually infiltrated the collective consciousness).

According to his diagnostics there were half a dozen net presences in the Aegean’s system, weird undirected processes lurching around trying to access ship systems. He’d thought his demand must have come too late, but Senkovi obviously caught it before flipping the switch. ‘All right, boss, here’s the lowdown,’ came the reply. ‘I may have failed to contain my experimental subjects properly.’ ‘Explain.’ ‘I’ve been training them up, teaching them basic communications so they could interact with the equipment on Damascus. They’ll be useful. We’ll need them. Only they’re curious, right? It’s inbuilt with them, and I’ve been using the Rus-Califi viral catalyst to select for that, only I didn’t realize how quickly they’d catch on.’

This, of course, was the main reason he had stayed behind, out of contact with the human race. He was going to try and save his pets, and he didn’t want Han and the others to laugh at him, to recast him from eccentric to pathetic. But, just like the dog lover who goes back into the burning building to save little Floofums, he was going to try and keep some of his experimental subjects alive until the ship came back online. Baltiel will want them all dead, he knew, but he could handle Baltiel. He would go against Baltiel if he had to, a full-on war in heaven of angry messages cast across the void. The nearest tank had shattered, as had the next two. The denizens had, like Senkovi, been too clever for their own good and found some physical egress, and now he’d killed them by evacuating the chamber.


pages: 314 words: 91,652

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Ian Hacking

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, cuban missile crisis, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Those characteristics include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance. There is even evidence that these same characteristics are built into the nature of the perceptual process itself. In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures.

In their most usual form, of course, gestalt experiments illustrate only the nature of perceptual transformations. They tell us nothing about the role of paradigms or of previously assimilated experience in the process of perception. But on that point there is a rich body of psychological literature, much of it stemming from the pioneering work of the Hanover Institute. An experimental subject who puts on goggles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. At the start his perceptual apparatus functions as it had been trained to function in the absence of the goggles, and the result is extreme disorientation, an acute personal crisis. But after the subject has begun to learn to deal with his new world, his entire visual field flips over, usually after an intervening period in which vision is simply confused.

The scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments. If there were some higher authority by recourse to which his vision might be shown to have shifted, then that authority would itself become the source of his data, and the behavior of his vision would become a source of problems (as that of the experimental subject is for the psychologist). The same sorts of problems would arise if the scientist could switch back and forth like the subject of the gestalt experiments. The period during which light was “sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle” was a period of crisis—a period when something was wrong—and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

As a walking embodiment of the European tradition, he became enormously influential. At one point, one in ten of the academic psychiatrists in the United States trained directly under him, launching a school of psychiatry that was dubbed Meyerian. He also introduced the field to its standard experimental subject, the albino rat. Coining the word psychobiology, he constantly exhorted his students to set theories aside and seek the facts. Visiting Meyer’s office for the first time on an October afternoon in 1928, Kanner was awestruck. An impeccably polite secretary invited him to wait in an adjacent library that seemed to extend for miles, with a convenient array of stepladders for retrieving volumes on the upper shelves.

The possibility that Beth was responding in a comprehensible way to the bizarre behavior of the people around her didn’t enter Lovaas’s mind. Extinguishing Beth’s self-injurious behavior by ignoring her would have been “a slow procedure requiring several sessions or days,” Lovaas predicted. He had good reason to fear that his sole experimental subject—on whom his National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funding depended—might hurt herself so badly that his experiments could no longer go on. So Lovaas sought a more expeditious solution, which came to him in a flash one day in the lab. He was talking with a colleague, when Beth began striking her head against the sharp edge of a metal cabinet.

So I let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more, and that was pretty much it. She hit herself a few times more, but we had the problem licked. Under the laws of the University of California, Lovaas was required to have his research proposals approved by the Human Subjects Board, so explaining that he wanted to “really lay it on” his experimental subjects wouldn’t do. But there was an alternate way of saying basically the same thing that was acceptable in the lexicon of behaviorism. He began exploring the use of aversive stimuli—otherwise known in the trade as “punishment”—as a less time-consuming way of extinguishing self-injury. — THE USE OF PUNISHMENT on human subjects was controversial among Lovaas’s colleagues.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The question that’s at stake is whether people have the right to refuse to be experimental subjects. So, to personalize it, suppose the biology department at the university were to walk in and tell you, “You folks have to be experimental subjects in an experiment we’re carrying out, where we’re going to stick electrodes in your brain and see what happens. You can refuse, but only if you provide scientific evidence that it’s going to harm you.” Usually you can’t provide scientific evidence. The question is, do you have a right to refuse? Under World Trade Organization rules, you don’t. You have to be experimental subjects. It’s a form of what Edward Herman has called “producer sovereignty.”17 The producer reigns; consumers have to somehow defend themselves.

There is an overriding principle. The principle is that the powerful and the privileged have to be able to do what they want (of course, pleading high motives). The corollary is that sovereignty and democratic rights of people must go, in this case—and that’s what makes it so dramatic—their reluctance to be experimental subjects when US-based corporations can profit by the experiment. The US appeal to the World Trade Organization rules is very natural, since they codified that principle; that’s the point. These issues, although they’re very real and are affecting a huge number of people in the world, are actually secondary to other modalities to reduce sovereignty in favor of private power.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Deci’s conclusion that payment can crowd out other kinds of motivation flew in the face of both existing theory and practice. His experiment and the subsequent research on the crowding-out effect kicked off an academic disagreement that continues today. In 1994, Judy Cameron and David Pierce of the University of Alberta analyzed the results of dozens of studies that had paid experimental subjects to perform various tasks. Their meta-analysis (as such studies of multiple experiments are called) denied the existence of any such crowding-out effect. Deci and research partner Richard Ryan responded in 1999, pointing out that Cameron and Pierce had included a large number of studies noting that people were more motivated to do uninteresting tasks if you paid them, a result no one disputed.

This result—fairly intuitive, if you imagine yourself on the short end of that particular stick—was a shock to neoclassical theory (what rational actor would give up a free dollar for the sake of mere emotional satisfaction?). As the results of the Ultimatum Game became more widespread, so did the challenges to its conclusions. Versions were run with hundreds of dollars at stake, with ever-tighter controls on the anonymity between the participants so they wouldn’t worry about retribution, with experimental subjects of different ages, different classes, and different cultures. In one version called the Dictator Game, the proposer is able to declare the terms of the split without the recipient’s having any say at all. Even here, the proposed split was more generous than expected. The experiment was performed in countless variations, but the attempt to uncover the secretly rational core of humanity simply failed.

(Zuerichbergstrasse, Zurich: Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, 1999), http://ideas.repec.org/s/zur/iewwpx.html. 73 this sort of crowding out can appear in children as young as fourteen months: Tomasello’s research on children and their view of how things should be, by some ethical compass (a trait called “normativity,” or the understanding and abiding by norms), was published as “The Sources of Normativity: Young Children’s Awareness of the Normative Structure of Games,” with his coauthors, H. Rakoczy and F. Wameken, in Developmental Psychology 44.3 (2008): 875-81. 74 dozens of studies that had paid experimental subjects: Judy Cameron and David Pierce, “Reinforcement, Reward, and Intrinsic Motivation: A Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 64.3 (1994): 363-423. 74 people were more motivated to do uninteresting tasks if you paid them: Edward L., Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan, “A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 125.6 (1999): 627-68. 74 crowding out of free choice can occur with the introduction of extrinsic motivations: J.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Practically speaking, we’re living in the middle of this experiment, the principles of which were created in the pages of esoteric journals by economists, in the labs of high-tech companies, often (but not always) overlaid by a particular political orientation that comes with being starstruck by the efficiency of the market. Although the experimental subjects (that’s us) are nearly always blind to the consequences of this experimentation, don’t suffer under the delusion that market planners have all the answers. Science doesn’t provide clear guidance on any of this stuff. People (including at least some economists) have a delusional sense about what economic science is capable of forecasting.

Every time you book a room on Airbnb, order a car through Uber, browse on Amazon, or click on an ad—so convenient! so easy!—you help the process of reshaping our social institutions, possibly into something that none of us would recognize. You may not mean to, but you do. The question for someone in the midst of an experiment is, Do you want to be an experimental subject? Maybe. But to really know the answer, you have to have a better sense of the possible consequences, both personally and socially. And because the scientists have some hypotheses but don’t—can’t, really—know the outcome, we’re left with competing visions of the world. At one end of the spectrum are the back-to-the-earthers who want us all to stay local and barter for what we need.

But that’s really all that Gale and Shapley provided: a conceptual framework that market designers have, for several decades now, been applying, evaluating, and refining. They’ve learned from its successes and, unfortunately, learned even more from its inevitable failures: modeling real-life exchanges is an imprecise, iterative process in which many of us find ourselves as experimental subjects. The Complicated Job of Engineering Matches Market designer Al Roth likes to use a bridge-building metaphor to explain the contrast between his own work and that of design pioneers like Shapley. Suppose you want to build a suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan. In confronting decisions like where to place the suspension cables and how thick each should be, you’d better have paid attention in physics class.


pages: 277 words: 79,360

The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch

behavioural economics, endowment effect, experimental subject, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, loss aversion, public intellectual, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“I would make some big mistake in my dating life, and I would see myself making a mistake, and I saw that I was going to go ahead and make it, even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I knew what the right thing was and I knew all the psychology about the wrong thing, but I couldn’t stop myself.” Apparently, if he and his experimental subjects were riding something, it was no obedient horse. “Elephants are really smart, and they’re really, really big, and I felt like a small boy perched atop a giant elephant. If the elephant didn’t have any plans of its own, the boy can kind of prick it and turn it this way and that.” But if the elephant has its own ideas, it goes whichever way it pleases.

But the stereotype about bitterness is, if anything, the opposite of the truth. A few years ago, a group of German psychologists decided to look at how people at the two ends of adult life process regret. Led by Stefanie Brassen of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, they gathered three groups of experimental subjects: emotionally healthy young men whose average age was twenty-five, emotionally healthy older men whose average age was sixty-six, and depressed older men, also averaging sixty-six years old. All were given a task much like the games which contestants play on the TV program Let’s Make a Deal: They were shown an array of eight mysterious squares (“boxes”) and told to “open” them sequentially.

His field, primarily, is geriatric psychiatry and the study of successful aging. In the previous chapter, I mentioned his finding that people report higher subjective wellbeing as they move through the late decades of life, even while they grow more infirm. He is also a brain researcher, someone who spends a lot of time (and money) putting experimental subjects inside deafening magnetic-resonance imaging machines to observe their mental circuits firing. The day I visited him, he was conducting an experiment to learn more about how older brains process compassion. I dwell on Jeste’s scientific credentials because he has another side which is quite different, one which challenges mainstream psychiatry in fundamental ways.


pages: 412 words: 115,266

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

Therefore, having presented an experimental subject with a written statement—e.g., the United States is larger than Guatemala—and watched him mark it as “true,” it may occur to us to wonder whether we can take him at his word. Does he really believe that the United States is larger than Guatemala? Does this statement, in other words, really seem true to him? This is rather like worrying, with reference to a subject who has just performed a lexical decision task, whether a given stimulus really seems like a word to him. While it may seem reasonable to worry that experimental subjects might be poor judges of what they believe, or that they might attempt to deceive experimenters, such concerns seem misplaced—or if appropriate here, they should haunt all studies of human perception and cognition.

Haidt is pessimistic about our ever making realistic claims about right and wrong, or good and evil, because he has observed that human beings tend to make moral decisions on the basis of emotion, justify these decisions with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their reasoning demonstrably fails. He notes that when asked to justify their responses to specific moral (and pseudo-moral) dilemmas, people are often “morally dumbfounded.” His experimental subjects would “stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to find supporting reasons, yet they would not change their initial judgments …” The same can be said, however, about our failures to reason effectively. Consider the Monty Hall Problem (based on the television game show Let’s Make a Deal).

For instance, if asked to recall the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and then asked to estimate the number of doctors practicing in San Francisco, the resulting numbers will show a statistically significant relationship. Needless to say, when the order of questions is reversed, this effect disappears.36 There have been a few efforts to put a brave face on such departures from rationality, construing them as random performance errors or as a sign that experimental subjects have misunderstood the tasks presented to them—or even as proof that research psychologists themselves have been beguiled by false norms of reasoning. But efforts to exonerate our mental limitations have generally failed. There are some things that we are just naturally bad at. And the mistakes people tend to make across a wide range of reasoning tasks are not mere errors; they are systematic errors that are strongly associated both within and across tasks.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

If everyone acts cooperatively the returns for the whole group are the greatest. But at the same time there is an incentive to act selfishly: I achieve the best outcome for myself if everyone else puts his money into the pot—to be augmented and shared—but I act selfishly. There is a standard wisdom about the outcomes of such games: experimental subjects initially play such games with some degree of cooperation, but if the games are repeated they first learn that some other players are defectors and then they themselves increasingly defect. After many repetitions of the game all players are playing selfishly. The behavior pattern is very basic: it has been documented in monkeys as well as in humans.8 But Fehr and Gächter had an idea.

One of us (Akerlof ) has written extensively on this subject with Rachel Kranton.13 We have shown that a great deal of what makes people happy is living up to what they think they should be doing. In this sense most of the time people want to be fair. They consider it an insult if others do not think they are fair. At the same time, people also want others to live up to what they think those others should be doing. People get upset (think of Fehr’s experimental subjects and their desire to punish) when they think others are not being fair. Fairness then involves bringing into economics these concepts of how people think they and others should or should not behave. Fairness and the Economy Considerations of fairness are a major motivator in many economic decisions and are related to our sense of confidence and our ability to work effectively together.

Small wonder that many policy recommendations —which are based on the standard theory of saving, which is in turn based on the economic fundamentals, and therefore has nothing to say about these cues—are very often simply wrong. An experiment by economists Hersh Shefrin and Richard Thaler demonstrates just such a tendency to grasp at straws. They asked experimental subjects how much they would likely spend out of an unexpected, one-time-only windfall of $2,400 in each of three possible situational framings. In the first framing the additional income is a new bonus at work that will be paid out at a rate of $200 a month over the next year. The median subject said that $100 a month would be consumed, for a total of $1,200.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

All the axioms are consequences, as well as antecedents, of a consistent utility function. So it must be possible to prove that the experimental subjects above can’t have a consistent utility function over outcomes. And indeed, you can’t simultaneously have: U($24,000) > (33/34) × U($27,000) + (1/34) × U($0) 0.34 × U($24,000) + 0.66 × U($0) < 0.33 × U($27,000) + 0.67 × U($0). These two equations are algebraically inconsistent, regardless of U, so the Allais Paradox has nothing to do with the diminishing marginal utility of money. Maurice Allais initially defended the revealed preferences of the experimental subjects—he saw the experiment as exposing a flaw in the conventional ideas of utility, rather than exposing a flaw in human psychology.

The experimental result is not a long wait before helping, but simply failure to help: if it’s a genetic benefit to help when you’re the only person who can do it (as does happen in the experiments) then the group equilibrium should not be no one helping (as happens in the experiments). So I don’t think an arms race of delay is a plausible evolutionary explanation. More likely, I think, is that we’re looking at a nonancestral problem. If the experimental subjects actually know the apparent victim, the chances of helping go way up (i.e., we’re not looking at the correlate of helping an actual fellow band member). If I recall correctly, if the experimental subjects know each other, the chances of action also go up. Nervousness about public action may also play a role. If Robin Hanson is right about the evolutionary role of “choking,” then being first to act in an emergency might also be taken as a dangerous bid for high status.

For a human, rationality often means becoming more self-aware about your feelings, so you can factor them into your decisions. Rationality can even be about knowing when not to overthink things. When selecting a poster to put on their wall, or predicting the outcome of a basketball game, experimental subjects have been found to perform worse if they carefully analyzed their reasons.3,4 There are some problems where conscious deliberation serves us better, and others where snap judgments serve us better. Psychologists who work on dual process theories distinguish the brain’s “System 1” processes (fast, implicit, associative, automatic cognition) from its “System 2” processes (slow, explicit, intellectual, controlled cognition).5 The stereotype is for rationalists to rely entirely on System 2, disregarding their feelings and impulses.


pages: 202 words: 58,823

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

To avoid reaching the endpoint too soon, we might prolong a challenge at the expense of the formal objective. Boxers dominating a fight may fail to finish off their opponents in order to savor the win. An experiment reported in the journal Econometrica documented a more mundane example of players who sacrifice winnings to stay in the game. Experimental subjects playing computer games in a lab chose a strategy and watched their winnings increase or decrease over time. If their winnings dropped below a threshold, they became bankrupt, and their payoff would be zero. The subjects ended up selecting strategies that kept them alive in the game but lowered their expected payout.

The author interprets this as evidence that a “deeply ingrained (and usually reliable) heuristic towards survival leads subjects to associate survival with optimality.” On this basis, he speculates that real-world managers conduct business too conservatively if they suffer from “survival bias.”15 Maybe. But I can imagine myself behaving like the experimental subjects, particularly since they couldn’t leave the lab early and the amount of money at stake was only a few dollars. Watching after I’d been eliminated would be boring, so I’d forgo a payout to stay in the game. In Life of Alexander, Plutarch describes Alexander the Great grappling with this conundrum: Whenever he heard Philip [II of Macedon] had taken any town of importance, or won any signal victory, instead of rejoicing at it altogether, he would tell his companions that his father would anticipate everything, and leave him and them no opportunities of performing great and illustrious actions.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

At 150 volts, they begged to end the experiment and be released. By 165 volts, they were screaming to stop. At 300 volts, the learners shouted that they would no longer answer questions. As the voltage increased, they ceased to respond at all, stunned into near-paralysis. In fact, the learners were actors—the real experimental subjects were the “teachers.” And not one teacher in the experiment ceased administering shocks before the 300-volt level. Two-thirds continued administering shocks until they had reached the last switch on their electrocution machine—450 volts. Teachers would continue despite showing obvious signs of distress themselves—sweating, stuttering, requests to the researcher to allow the experiment to stop.

Whatever the protestations of the learners regarding the need to complete the experiment, no “teacher” would continue zapping a man in a white coat if he told them to stop. And if there were two researchers who argued over continuing the shocks, “teachers” universally stopped the experiment. Absent clear cues from authority to do the wrong thing, the experimental subjects behaved humanely. Milgram’s study was prompted by the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in an attempt to understand how so many people could have committed such obscene acts under his command. At least in part, the answer appears to be that people respond to authority and social cues even when those cues are morally repellent.


pages: 443 words: 123,526

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

air gap, cognitive dissonance, experimental subject, gravity well, lateral thinking, loose coupling, military-industrial complex, operational security, peer-to-peer, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, sensible shoes, theory of mind, white picket fence

Your cohort—all ten of you, one of the twenty groups we're introducing to this section of the polity over the next five megs—will meet once a week, on Sundays, in a parish center called the Church of the Nazarene, where you can discuss whatever you've learned. To make the simulation work better, there are a lot of nonplayer characters, zombies run by the Gamesmaster, and for much of the time you'll be interacting with these rather than with other experimental subjects. Everything's laid out in a collection of hab segments linked by gates so they feel like a single geographical continuum, just like a traditional planetary surface." He calms down a little. "Questions?" "What are the society's ground rules?" asks a male with dark skin in a light suit from the back row.

He looks at me thoughtfully. "Promise." "Okay, I promise." I pause. "So what's wrong?" His shoulders are hunched. "I've just come out of memory surgery," he says slowly. "I think that's where Fiore and Yourdon and their crowd found most of us, by the way. A redaction clinic must be a great place to find experimental subjects who're healthy but who've forgotten everything they knew. People who've come adrift from the patterns of life, and who have minimal social connections. People with active close ties don't go in for memory surgery, do they?" "Not often, I don't think," I say, vaguely disturbed by a recollection of military officers briefing me: trouble in another life, urgent plotting against an evil contingency.

And I am particularly worried because some aspects of the YFH-Polity experimental protocol, as published, sound alarmingly amenable to redirection along these lines. My biggest reason for wanting you to have undergone major memory erasure prior to injection into YFH-Polity is this: I suspect that when the incoming experimental subjects are issued with new bodies, they are filtered through an A-gate infected with a live, patched copy of Curious Yellow. Therefore preemptive memory redaction is the only sure way of preventing such a verminiferous gate from identifying you as a threat for its owners to eliminate. I watch myself writing this letter to myself.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Lieberman at the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UCLA, and Kip Williams, a social psychologist now at Purdue University, deliberately induced feelings of social rejection among a group of subjects, and then identified the regions of the brain that were most activated during the stimulus using fMRI techniques.16 How do you deliberately induce social rejection in a laboratory setting? The experimental subjects—UCLA students—were placed in MRI machines and told they were playing a cooperative computer game called Cyberball with two other players, also in MRI machines, to monitor how their neural activity synchronized as they played. This was a lie. In fact, Cyberball was a psychological test devised by Williams to measure the reactions of people being ostracized.

And what about the simple pleasures of making money? In 2001, a team led by Hans Breiter at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital—a team that included Daniel Kahneman—used fMRI scans to determine what happened in the human brain when a person experienced financial gains and losses in real time.22 Breiter’s experimental subjects were given a $50 stake to play a simple gambling game. The screen displayed one of three computer-animated spinners, similar to the kind found in children’s board games, divided equally into three possible outcomes: the “good” spinner with $10, $2.50, and $0; the “intermediate” spinner with $2.50, $0, and −$1.50; and the “bad” spinner with $0, −$1.50, and −$6.23 Unknown to the test subjects, the outcomes of the spinners only appeared to be random.

Does risk-seeking behavior have an explanation in the neurology of pleasure? To answer this question, Camelia M. Kuhnen and Brian Knutson at Stanford University followed up Breiter’s experiments with another fMRI study.24 Kuhnen and Knutson designed a financial computer game—more formally, the Behavioral Investment Allocation Strategy (BIAS) task—that their experimental subjects played while being scanned in an MRI machine. The players were presented with three investment options: a “safe” bond or one of two risky stocks with prices that fluctuated randomly. Unknown to the players, one of the two stocks was a “good” stock that always increased in value over time, and the other was a “bad” stock that always declined in value.


pages: 285 words: 78,180

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

We looked at B. subtilis, which had been used by a Japanese team to grow large segments of a bacterial algae genome.14 But while B. subtilis could indeed accommodate the large 290kb segments, there was no way to recover the DNA intact from these cells, so we looked elsewhere. The solution came from the more complex cellular world of the eukaryote and a favorite experimental subject of scientists around the world studying eukaryotic biology: brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. For centuries S. cerevisiae has been used for alcohol fermentation as well as for making bread, but in the laboratory it has been routinely exploited because it has a relatively small genome and an array of genetic tools that make genetic manipulation easy.

The achievement of the Roslin Institute rested on many factors, from a technical understanding of the cell cycle to practical considerations, such as protecting reconstructing embryos in a shell of protective agar.4 But Dolly was far from being the first clone and was not the first cloned sheep, either, as many believe.5 The history of nuclear transfer actually dates back to 1938 and the highly creative and influential German embryologist Hans Spemann (1869–1941), who published the first nuclear-transplantation experiments.6 Spemann was the pioneer of what he called Entwicklungsmechanik, or “developmental mechanics,” and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1935. With Hilde Mangold (1898–1924) he conducted the first nuclear-transfer experiments on the newt, which was an ideal experimental subject because of its large, easily manipulated eggs. In 1938 Spemann published the milestone text Embryonic Development and Induction, which described how his experiment rested on the dexterous use of microscopy, tweezers, and a delicate hair, probably plucked from his daughter Margrette. Spemann used the hair as a noose to divide the cytoplasm of a newly fertilized salamander egg under the gaze of a binocular microscope, creating a dumbbell-shaped embryo.


pages: 317 words: 87,566

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

Wundt was keen to avoid resorting to introspection of the sort that many English psychologists had used during the 1850s and 1860s. The purpose of the laboratory was to study mental processes in a more objective fashion than that. He and his assistants built various tools to test the response of experimental subjects to different stimuli. They also borrowed various instruments from physiology and physics labs to time neural reflexes. And they built their own version of a tachistoscope, which was used to time how long it took to get a person’s attention. The eyes were a crucial area of study for the pioneering psychologists, but not merely in a physiological sense.

One of the key differences – which also distinguishes this early psychological research from what would come later – was that the subjects being experimented on were scholarly associates and students of Wundt. They were fully aware of what the experiments were seeking to test and contributed their own subjective insights to the findings. The perspective of the experimental subject was important here, and there was no sense in which they were being manipulated. Conscious thought processes needed to be respected in their own right and not reduced to naturalistic questions of cause and effect. For instance, the speed of conscious reaction (when the subject became aware of something) could be compared to the speed of unconscious reaction (when the physical reflex occurred).


pages: 284 words: 84,169

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

The “language governs thought” idea has always been an intellectually attractive one. Brown’s article was a minor sensation. He initially got hundreds of letters, and donors supported his development of Loglan. A group of followers agreed to learn and propagate the language.2 But he never got his improbable plan – to expose experimental subjects to eight months of intensive Loglan – off the ground. Funding for his project began drying up. A group of Loglan enthusiasts, led by Bob Le Chevalier, who thought they had his tacit blessing, had continued adding words and ideas to Loglan. When he found out, Brown was furious: Loglan was his.

Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist who specialises in language and thought at the University of California San Diego, has researched how simple differences in metaphor make a big difference in the kind of policy solutions people support. For example, she and Paul Thibodeau gave one group of experimental subjects a news paragraph about a fictional town, Addison, beginning “Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison” (emphasis mine), and went on to describe the crime problem in detailed statistics. When questioned afterwards, 71% of the subjects recommended some form of tougher law-and-order policies for Addison.


pages: 294 words: 86,601

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson

Columbine, double helix, epigenetics, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, James Watt: steam engine, l'esprit de l'escalier, lateral thinking, mirror neurons, pattern recognition, phenotype, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, zero-sum game

So Joy agrees to make a last-minute addition: a final stage during which I’m shown a single sentence from my book and given the entire forty seconds to ruminate. Then Joy walks me through the risks. “We’re looking at your brain here. So there’s a very small chance that we might see something in these scans, some abnormality.” I nod. “You mean a brain tumor.” “Sometimes when we do work with experimental subjects-people who come in to help with our research, and who don’t have any symptoms-they say, ‘If you see something in there, don’t tell me.’ ” “Hey, if you see something in there that you don’t like,” I smile ruefully, “by all means let me know.” Then she moves on to the dangers associated with the scanner itself.

The first stage comes almost immediately: Joy gives a quick glance at the conventional MRI images of my brain, and announces that I have a healthy specimen. “Everything looks great,” she says as she slaps the X-ray-like film onto a light board. “A textbook brain.” I glow with pride for a second, and then think, She probably tells this to all her experimental subjects. Still, I find myself more pleased than I had expected to find out that I have no visible brain tumors. I think, At least I’ve got that going for me. The second stage is where it gets interesting. A few days pass, and Joy sends an email to let me know that the results are in. “You’re going to like this,” she writes temptingly.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

His father, Juste Constant was a wealthy and eccentric Swiss colonel who was obsessed with the idea that you could take a child and fashion them into an ideal version of your values if you had complete control of their upbringing. So Constant was intended to be his father’s prodigy. He would be instructed in lofty academic subjects from an early age and sent to the best tutors in Europe to create a true Renaissance man for modernity. Not all of Juste’s experimental subjects were so lucky. In 1761, he stumbled across an intelligent young girl called Marianne Magnin in a village and proceeded to kidnap her, pay off the parents, and have her tutored in isolation so that she could be turned into the perfect mistress. By 1772 – when Constant was four, Marianne 20 and Juste 46 – she was made the child’s carer.

Sherif told them he wanted to give the boys ‘a wholesome cooperative living experience which will prepare the youngsters for better citizenship and to be leaders in their communities.’ No mention was made of the real purpose of the experiment. After 300 hours of selection Sherif whittled down the list to 22 ‘experimental subjects,’ who would be split into two groups of 11 each. His plan was split into three phases, each lasting a week. In the first, the two groups would be kept apart and watched for how they developed a group identity. Towards the end of the week they would slowly be given evidence of the existence of the other group.

The lines were not remotely similar. Anyone could see what the right answer was. In a control test ahead of the experiment, the error rate was below one per cent. The eight students went into the room. But in reality, only one was a college student – the other seven were actors. They were lined up ahead of the experimental subject so that he would see all but one of them give their answers before he gave his. These seven actors were given detailed instructions about how they should behave. For the first two rounds they would all say the same obviously right answer. Then, in the third round, they would all give the same wrong answer.


pages: 302 words: 90,215

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

It was a powerful simulation of an event that exists far outside of the lived experience of most people, reinforced by audio, visual, and even physical touch feedback. If information about the environmental consequences of our paper consumption were tied to such an experience, we wondered, would it have a stronger effect than if the consequences were described in print? In this first study, 50 experimental subjects were given statistics Sun Joo had computed based on the amount of toilet paper an American consumes, about 24 rolls per year. They were told that using nonrecycled toilet paper for the duration of their lives would cause the felling of two full-sized, standing trees. Then, half of the subjects read a carefully crafted written account describing what it would be like to cut down a tree, while the other half experienced the virtual tree-cutting.

In the first study to look at the Midas Touch in virtual space, Wijnand had two people chat online using instant messaging. One was the subject, while the other was a “confederate,” a person who is part of the experiment but pretends to be another participant in the study. During the interaction, experimental subjects wore a sleeve on their arm that used six points of vibration contact to simulate being tapped on the arm. Some subjects received the virtual touch from the confederate, who could activate the vibrating sleeve on a networked computer, and others did not. After the experiment was over, the confederate got up from the computer station in front of the subject and dropped eighteen coins on the ground.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

Unfortunately, even the most fundamental mechanism eluded Aldini—that the organ that should be stimulated is the heart, not the brain. In fact, he repeatedly and explicitly refuted the idea that the heart could be affected by electrification at all. His focus on spectacle over basic science had misled him.17 So it came as no surprise to him that none of his experimental subjects—human or animal—were ever shocked back to life. Neither was such an outcome ever his goal for the hanged Forster. “Our object here was not to produce reanimation, merely to obtain a practical knowledge of how far Galvanism might be employed as an auxiliary to other means in attempts to revive,” he wrote in an 1803 account of the experiment.

Berger was determined to find the psychophysiological basis for mental telepathy. In 1902, he discovered Caton’s work on detecting the brain’s electrical currents with an electrometer. After twenty more years of trying to find commensurate signatures in the brain, he finally got his hands on a string galvanometer. His first experimental subject was a seventeen-year-old college student named Zedel, who had been left with a large hole in his skull after the removal of a brain tumor. Berger attached Zedel’s electrodes to a string galvanometer he had borrowed from the university hospital, where it was normally used to do early versions of the ECG.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

These subjects were placed near one end of a line of actors who presented themselves as fellow experimental subjects, but were actually in cahoots with the experimenters. Cards were held up with one line marked on them, and then another card was held up with three lines of different lengths: six inches, eight inches, ten inches. Everyone called out in turn which line on the second card was the same length as the line on the first. For six of the eighteen pairs of cards the accomplices gave the correct answer; but for the other twelve they called out the wrong answer. In all but a quarter of the cases, the experimental subjects went along with the incorrect answer from the crowd of accomplices on one or more occasions, defying the clear evidence of their own senses.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Decades after Hobbes, John Locke, philosophical mentor to Thomas Jefferson, asserted that humans could govern through social contracts rather than coercive authority.8 Since the time of Hobbes and Locke, political philosophers, sociologists, economists, and candidates for public office have argued over the role of central authority in governance, markets, and human affairs. The argument became scientific as well as philosophical when researchers began to systematically observe the way people really do work together. Laboratory investigators began to formulate experiments to probe cooperative behavior. The experiments were based on simple games in which experimental subjects can win or lose money (more about game theory shortly). In the 1950s, economist Mancur L. Olson found that small groups are more likely to exhibit voluntary cooperation in these experimental games than larger groups and that cooperative behaviors increase when the games are repeated over and over with the same groups and when communication is permitted among the participants.9 In 1982, Olson wrote, “Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.”10 One unavoidable question remained.

The other player, the “responder,” can accept the deal and the money is split as proposed, or the second player can refuse the deal and neither player gets any money. The result that is not surprising to people who value fairness but puzzles those who see humans as rational creatures who act in their self-interest is that two-thirds of the experimental subjects offer between $40 and $50 out of $100 total. Only four in one hundred people offer less than 20 percent, and more than half of the responders reject offers smaller than 20 percent of the total. Why would anyone turn down 20 percent of something in exchange for nothing? Martin A. Nowak, Karl Sigmund, and Karen M.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

After only a few minutes examining their bedrooms, the strangers could produce eerily accurate descriptions of the subjects’ personalities. Gosling wondered whether Facebook pages would be equally revealing, so he repeated the experiment online, arranging to have strangers inspect the Facebook pages of experimental subjects. Sure enough, they were able to accurately describe those personalities, too. The ambient signals given off by status updates and streams of photos can be as powerful as those from real-life objects. Indeed, they’re sometimes more revelatory. One of the hilarities of ambient life is discovering how much weirder people are than you thought, even those you believed you knew well.

Resnick, Roger Säljö, Clotilde Pontecorvo, and Barbara Burge (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1997), 41–62, accessed March 26, 2013, www.ida.liu.se/~729G12/mtrl/Suchman_Centres_of_coordination.pdf; and a personal interview with Heath. a form of proprioception: Portions of my writing here appeared in “Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense,” Wired, June 2007, accessed March 26, 2013, www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson. have strangers inspect the Facebook pages of experimental subjects: My description of Gosling’s work comes from Samuel D. Gosling, Sei Jin Ko, Thomas Mannarelli, and Margaret E. Morris, “A Room with a Cue: Personality Judgments Based on Offices and Bedrooms,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, no. 3 (2002): 379–98, accessed March 26, 2013, homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/Gosling/reprints/JPSP02-Roomwithacue.pdf; Sam Gosling, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (New York: Basic Books, 2009), Kindle edition; Samuel D.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

It had been a challenging and exhilarating to build this new system for augmenting thought -- but it wasn't as much fun having one's work habits augmented at a forced-march pace. When both the old-timers and newcomers to the growing project faced the task of learning new roles, changing old attitudes, adopting different methods, on regular basis, just because the system enabled them to do so, the great adventure became more arduous than any of the ARC pioneers/experimental subjects had anticipated. So a psychologist was brought in to consult about those parts of the system that weren't found in the circuitry or software, but in the thoughts and relationships of the people who were building and using the system. Dr. James Fadiman joined ARC as an observer-catalyst-therapist.

The system was set up to collect data on its own operations, in order to test the hypothesis that a teleconference-like system could enhance the effectiveness of research communities. The Electronic Information Exchange System, known as EIES (pronounced "eyes"), was one of those experiments that never shut itself down because the experimental subjects just wouldn't let go of it. It seemed to happen with every new development of interactive computing -- people would simply refuse to stop experimenting with the system, and wouldn't give up the experimental tools when the experiment was over. As Jim Fadiman noted of ARC, people seem to be as reluctant to be deaugmented as they are resistant to augmentation in the first place.


pages: 372 words: 117,038

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

But, echoing Berthold’s research on the means by which the testes communicated with the rest of the body, Bayliss aimed to determine whether the pancreas communicated with the digestive organs through the blood, or alternatively, through the nervous system. The latter explanation was generally accepted and favored by the world’s most influential physiologist at the time, a Russian called Ivan Pavlov. (You may remember Pavlov from his famous experiments on dogs.) Dogs were also Bayliss and Starling’s experimental subjects, although their dogs had a more miserable fate. The subject of Bayliss and Starling’s “crucial experiment,” as they called it, was anesthetized with its digestive system surgically exposed. They discovered that when acid was introduced into the small intestine, it produced a “well marked secretion.”

So T may increase aggression, but only in a subset of men. This finding helps explain the lack of consistency in previous studies. If the study design includes only a small number of men (which is usually the case, since these studies are complex and expensive), then a significant result is less likely, because there might not be enough experimental subjects with the right personality traits. To more fully explore the relationship between T and aggression, these researchers ran a follow-up experiment, the largest of its kind to date. They recruited over three hundred men, who, among other tasks, filled out a questionnaire about their personality and played a computer game.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

.: Hall, James, “Men in Their Late 40s Living in London Are the Unhappiest in the UK,” The Telegraph, February 28, 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9110941/Men-in-their-late-40s-living-in-London-are-the-unhappiest-in-the-UK.html (accessed March 3, 2012); Office for National Statistics, “Analysis of Experimental Subjective Well-Being Data from the Annual Population Survey, April to September 2011,” February 28, 2012, www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/wellbeing/measuring-subjective-wellbeing-in-the-uk/analysis-of-experimental-subjective-well-being-data-from-the-annual-population-survey–april—september-2011/report-april-to-september-2011.html (accessed March 3, 2012). Architects’ brains: Kirk, U., M. Skov, M. S. Christensen, and N.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The team found that the drivers of new, expensive cars were twice as likely to cut off other vehicles or pedestrians as the drivers of old, cheap cars. In another test, experimental subjects with higher real-world incomes were more likely to deceive a hypothetical job applicant in order to persuade him or her to accept a lower salary—an accomplishment that earned the manager in the experiment a bonus. Even imagining you were rich changed the way experimental subjects behaved. In another study, participants were prompted to think of themselves as either very rich or very poor, and were then invited to take candy from a jar that afterward would be given to children in a nearby lab.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

He even came to blows with one forty-six-year-old woman who turned the shock machine off. Williams turned it back on and demanded she continue.12 ‘The slavish obedience to authority,’ writes Gina Perry, ‘comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings.’13 The key question is whether the experimental subjects believed they were administering real shocks at all. Shortly after the experiment, Milgram wrote that ‘with few exceptions subjects were convinced of the reality of the experimental situation’.14 Yet his archives are filled with statements from participants expressing doubt. Perhaps that’s not very surprising when you consider how bizarre this situation must have seemed.

Eichmann assured him.31 Or as he’d already declared in 1945: ‘I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.’32 Reading through the thirteen hundred pages of interviews, teeming with warped ideas and fantasies, it’s patently obvious that Eichmann was no brainless bureaucrat. He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good. Although transcripts of the Sassen interviews were available at the time of the trial, Eichmann managed to cast doubt on their authenticity. And so he put the whole world on the wrong track. All that time, the interview tapes lay mouldering in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, where the philosopher Bettina Stangneth found them fifty years later.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

British officials, merchants, and investors “amassed vast fortunes,” gaining “wealth beyond the dreams of avarice” (Parker). That was particularly true in Bengal, which, Keay continues, “was destabilized and impoverished by a disastrous experiment in sponsored government”—one of the many “experiments” in the Third World that have not exactly redounded to the benefit of the experimental subjects. Two English historians of India, Edward Thompson and G.T. Garrett, described the early history of British India as “perhaps the world’s high-water mark of graft”: “a gold-lust unequalled since the hysteria that took hold of the Spaniards of Cortes’ and Pizzaro’s age filled the English mind.

In earlier days, Vietnam was described as “a going laboratory where we see subversive insurgency...being applied in all its forms” (Maxwell Taylor), providing opportunities for “experiments with population and resource control methods” and “nation building.” The Marine occupation of Haiti was described in similar terms, as we have seen. The technical posturing appears to sustain the self-image, at least.7 One finds no intimation that the experimental subjects might have the right to sign consent forms, or even to know what is happening to them. On the contrary, they scarcely have the rights of laboratory animals. We will determine what is best for them, as we always have; another hallmark of the 500 years. The wise among us just know, for example, that maximizing consumption is a core human value: “If we weren’t influencing the world” in this direction, “it would be someone else because what we are seeing everywhere is an expression of the basic human desire to consume,” Boston University professor of management Lawrence Wortzel explains.


pages: 473 words: 130,141

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

Scholars looking for the consistent application of moral rules have traditionally considered two main ideas. They are the “utilitarian” and the “deontological” principles. Both work sometimes, but neither is followed all the time, which means they fail as general explanations.24 The utilitarian principle states that people should act to maximize the general good. Sometimes experimental subjects presented with moral problems conform to this idea. A popular dilemma for philosophers imagines a train hurtling down a track. An observer sees that, if she does nothing, five people are going to be killed. But she can pull a lever that diverts the train onto a side track, where it will kill only one person.

This led him to make a series of studies using an online game that he invented, called cyberball.47 Experiments by Williams and others showed that a mere two or three minutes of play with strangers, followed by being excluded, led predictably to sadness, anger, and a series of negative effects including feelings of alienation, depression, helplessness, and even a reduced sense of meaning in life. The effects did not depend on the subject’s personality or whether he or she felt similar to the ostracizers. Experimental subjects experienced elevated activation of a part of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, that is also activated by physical pain. To be ostracized, in short, engages a swift and strong series of neurally encoded responses that are very unpleasant. In the Pleistocene, the ostracism presumably involved familiars more than strangers.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

As Engelbart often said about NLS: "If ease of use was the only 26-04-2012 21:44 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 6 de 35 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/4.html valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles." EIES, like ARPANET, was another one of those experiments that never shut themselves down because the experimental subjects just wouldn't let go of them. EIES quickly expanded from pure scientific research communities to legislative and medical researchers. Some of the EIES users concentrated on designing new generations of conferencing systems, based on what they had learned from their EIES participation. In this way EIES was the protocommunity that seeded the Net with CMC designers.

They chose to investigate the social structure of the system by selecting a novice user of e-mail and chat in Japanese University NETwork (JUNET), a male graduate student of information technology, twenty-four years old, and introducing him to Fujitsu Habitat. For the eighty-one days they observed their experimental subject, "Mr. T.," Yoshida and Kakuta reported that Mr. T. showed magnificent social adaptation to the visual network society of Populopolis. From March 16, 1993, when the experimental observation was started, the daily access time increased rapidly. We would call this phenomenon `addiction.' Mr. T. smoothly got into the network group and became active to join an on-line election of a president of the town-block association and an on-line discussion about Osaka dialect, and also joined an off-line meeting at an early stage.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

One of the reasons Newton is remembered as perhaps the greatest genius in history is that from the beginning he did just that, plunging deeply not just into mathematics but into measurement of the world—at times to his own peril. * * * — Newton’s drawing of his bodkin experiment For example, in the early 1660s he wanted to know how the shape of the human eye might affect the perception of color. To find out, he turned to the nearest experimental subject, himself, and stuck a bodkin—a blunt needle—into the bottom of his eye socket and levered up. He meticulously recorded his results, including defining the curve he induced in his eyeball (“ye curvature a b c d e f”) and noting that the colored circles grew brighter “when I continued to rub my eye with ye point of ye bodkin.”

Nonetheless, Chandrasekhar, a Nobel laureate physicist, does offer a good introductory summary of the basic concepts in the first section of his book, and it is worth a look.) Another good account of the development of Newton’s thoughts on gravity through this period comes in A. Rupert Hall’s highly readable biography Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 58–63. TO FIND OUT, HE TURNED TO THE NEAREST EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECT Newton’s notebook, reproduced in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 95. WHAT HE CALLED THE EXPERIMENTUM CRUCIS For a detailed reconstruction of the steps Newton took to arrive at his theory of color, see Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 156–72. As Westfall documents, Newton’s journey to the crucial experiment was more involved than the legend has it (and Blake’s famous painting depicts)—and the demonstration that a spectrum can be recombined into white light passed through several different tests at Newton’s hand.


pages: 190 words: 53,409

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

In another study, the psychologist Martin Seligman and his coauthors asked people to engage in five exercises that had been shown in earlier work to boost feelings of well-being.15 One was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who had never been properly thanked for an earlier kindness. This step, they found, was associated with a larger and more persistent increase in happiness scores than any other of the four other exercises. Numerous other studies by psychologists report similar findings. Nancy Digdon and Amy Koble found that experimental subjects who were induced to feel gratitude toward others experienced subsequent reductions in anxiety and sounder sleep patterns.16 Nathan DeWall and his collaborators showed that people in whom feelings of gratitude had been induced were also more likely to experience empathy toward others and less likely to respond aggressively when provoked by others.17 Failure to appreciate luck’s importance is of course not the only reason the wealthy have been lobbying for additional tax cuts.


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

“Flowers for Algernon” is science fiction, but life mirrors art. Making IQ higher is easy. Keeping IQ higher is hard. Researchers call this “fadeout.” Fadeout for early childhood education is especially well documented. After six years in the famous Milwaukee Project, experimental subjects’ IQs were 32 points higher than controls’. By age fourteen, this advantage had declined to 10 points.83 In the Perry Preschool program, experimental subjects gained 13 points of IQ, but all this vanished by age 8.84 Head Start raises preschoolers’ IQs by a few points, but gains disappear by the end of kindergarten.85 You could object that preschoolers are unusually prone to forget what they learn, but the pattern extends all through high school.


pages: 528 words: 157,969

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

cloud computing, experimental subject, friendly fire, gravity well, hive mind, pattern recognition, prisoner's dilemma

Now, though, the pheromones that Fabian has released instil new behaviours in these individuals, bringing them to the silk side of his chamber, where they cut a neat exit wound for him to depart through. After they are done, he resets them, and they go about their duties with no sign that they were ever subverted. Fabian has been busy these last months in testing his discovery, with the whole of Great Nest as his experimental subject. He has listened to the news constantly recycled by the peer group. He knows who is causing Portia distress, who has tried to challenge the order of the world – other than himself. He is a male, vulnerable from the moment he slips from the peer house. He knows where he needs to go, but he fears journeying alone.

Still gouting out its contents into the hungry emptiness of space, the shattered satellite slipped free from its tangle of moorings, burning a hole in the great web, and was propelled away from the drones by the outrush of material from its jagged wounds. The drones themselves had given their all, the discharge of their weapons leaving their reactors cold and draining them dry. They tumbled off across the face of the web, to fall or to drift away. The satellite, though, had a more definite fate. It fell. Like Kern’s experimental subjects so very very long before, it was jolted out of its orbit, to be gathered up by the arms of the planet’s gravity, spiralling helplessly into the atmosphere, where it streaked across the sky, just an old barrel with a single ancient monkey in withered residence, delivering a final message to the anxious eyes below. 7.4 END TIMES They watched it burn its way across the sky.


The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations by Thomas Morris

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, New Journalism, parabiotic, placebo effect, popular electronics, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

Their apparatus pumped blood into a tilted glass cylinder filled with oxygen, which constantly rotated so that the blood spread out into a thin film covering the inner surface, maximising its surface area.19 By the time the blood emerged from the bottom of the cylinder it had been oxygenated, and was then pumped into the experimental subject. Von Frey and Gruber never planned to use the device to keep an animal alive, but instead successfully employed it to perfuse the kidneys and hind legs of dogs that had already been killed. The apparatus was simple – and strikingly similar in conception to the machine John Gibbon would invent more than half a century later.20 Several other artificial oxygenators were constructed around the turn of the twentieth century; most used either the bubble or film techniques, but one invented by the American physiologist Donald Hooker (the uncle of the Hollywood star Katharine Hepburn) employed a rotating flat disc to increase the surface area of the blood, a scheme which would be imitated by later investigators.21 When Gibbon began to design his own heart-lung machine in 1933 he had no idea that a Russian scientist had already been working on the problem for a decade.

He creates a mechanical heart, a pump which is filled with donkey blood, and successfully uses it to revive a cadaver. In true Gothic tradition the action reaches its macabre climax as a thunderstorm rages outside the dilapidated laboratory: the hapless scientist and his colleague realise that having started to pump they cannot stop without killing their experimental subject, who in a cruel twist turns out to be the physiologist’s brother. After hours of frantic pumping they become exhausted and are forced to abandon their hopeless task, as the briefly resuscitated corpse breathes his last for the second time.1 Ross’s story may not be great literature, but it shows remarkable vision.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

Today, psychologists show common biases by randomly splitting experimental subjects into subgroups that are given different prompts. For example, a question might be worded two different ways, resulting in different answers on average. Or an “I knew it all along” hindsight bias might be shown via telling different subgroups different outcomes, and asking subjects what chance they would have assigned before to seeing their chosen outcome. Because of random fluctuations that influence individual decisions, however, such experiments today usually require large groups of experimental subjects to see subtle effects. In contrast, em spurs could directly demonstrate such biases in individuals, and not just in large groups.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

In the Becker-Stigler world, since the norms are norms only because people have submitted to them, there is no reason why Hispanic students would not sometimes turn out to be hard working and the Asians the slackers. It is history and the social context that seem to be guiding us toward one norm rather than the other. LET’S TRY TO ACCOUNT FOR TASTES45 To investigate the way the social context influences us, researchers at the University of Zurich recruited a group of bankers as experimental subjects and asked them to flip a coin ten times and report online the outcomes they got.46 They were told that if they had more than a threshold number of heads (or tails) they would get twenty Swiss francs (about $20) for each extra head (or tail) they reported. Nobody checked whether or not they reported accurately, which created a very strong incentive to cheat.

Consistent with this, the estimate of how much they would need to be paid to give up Facebook for a second month was substantially lower at the end of the first month (after experiencing life without Facebook) than before. All of this seems very consistent with the view that Facebook is addictive in the sense that it is hard to imagine life without it, but when you do give it up, things are not obviously worse. However, it is interesting that after the month of abstinence, the experimental subjects still wanted to be paid to give up Facebook; they did not simply feel grateful to be rid of it. The researchers assumed this was because they actually missed it, if less than they had expected, and therefore concluded Facebook generates over $2,000 of well-being per user. How does this square with the fact that getting cut off made people happier on average?


pages: 436 words: 148,809

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille

23andMe, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, East Village, experimental subject, fear of failure, medical residency, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, sunk-cost fallacy, white flight

And so they encouraged patients to entrust the care of their children to babysitters, boarding schools, or other adults in the community. Chris eventually learned that his birth mother—one of Newton’s patients who had felt (or had been deemed) incapable of raising him—had agreed to hand him over to Jane. “This made me feel like I was an experimental subject raised by the core theorist of the group,” he said, wondering whether people never spoke about his origins because it might throw off the experiment as they watched to see how he would turn out. But the silence left him, as he put it, “a man without a story.” Until he was about five, Chris went every day to play in a big house on West Ninety-First Street, where Newton, who had by then divorced Jane Pearce, lived with his new family and about twenty other people in a building that also served as the new headquarters of the Sullivan Institute.

But she has told me, you know—it’s great for her to have this relationship with me.” What was harder for him to accept was Sue’s continued reluctance—and the reluctance of others in his life—to explain more about his origins. “That’s one of the things that makes me feel very much like an experiment, raised without my biological parents—like I’m the perfect experimental subject.” It felt as if Sue and everyone else in a position to know thought that telling him about his birth would somehow throw off the experiment. “So every time I am responded to with silence—every time I am not given an answer—I am immediately brought back to that place where I am a ‘control subject’ again.”


Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

We are helped to invent an association between our childhood selves and the product in question and then, so as to relive our carefree childhood years, we are encouraged to consume the product all over again. Testing whether it is possible for marketers to create childhood ‘memories’, a team of psychologists in the United States found that experimental subjects who were shown advertisements suggesting they had shaken hands with Mickey Mouse as children were more likely than a control group to believe that they had actually done so.10 To ensure that the advertisements were not acting simply as a prompt that helped people recall legitimate memories, a number of other experiments were conducted.


pages: 187 words: 62,861

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But if the responder rejects the offer, then both go home with nothing. Imagine you were playing this game and the proposer offered you some pittance, say, $1 of his $100. How would you respond? On one hand, a dollar is better than nothing. On the other hand, you think, “What the hell? This guy is being selfish! We’re both here as experimental subjects, he got lucky, why can’t he share more fairly! Screw him!” Sure, a dollar is technically better than nothing. Standard game theory would predict that respondents will always accept whatever is offered to them, because going home with something is better than going home with nothing. But knowing that the proposer had $100, most people would be tempted to punish him for his stinginess and reject the offer, leaving him with nothing.


pages: 257 words: 68,203

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How by Daniel Coyle

Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, deliberate practice, experimental subject, impulse control, Kaizen: continuous improvement, longitudinal study, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Want to catch up with a desirable group? Better get busy. Bargh and his colleagues have performed a number of similarly magical-seeming experiments, where they use tiny environmental cues (such as inspirational words hidden in a crossword puzzle) to manipulate motivation and effort among unknowing experimental subjects. They possess piles of supportive data to explain why this is so effective—for instance, the fact that the unconscious mind is able to process 11 million pieces of information per second, while the conscious mind can manage a mere 40. This disproportion points to the efficiency and necessity of relegating mental activities to the unconscious—and helps us to understand why appeals to the unconscious can be so effective.


Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes by Richard C. Francis

agricultural Revolution, autism spectrum disorder, cellular automata, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, meta-analysis, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

But there are reasons to suspect that epigenetic inheritance is less common in mammals than in other life-forms.20 Good examples of epigenetic inheritance have been identified in creatures as diverse as fruit flies and yeast.21 But some of the most dramatic examples of epigenetic inheritance occur in plants.22 As an experimental subject, the plant equivalent of a mouse is an unprepossessing member of the mustard family known only by its scientific name, Arabidopsis thalinia. In the wild, Arabidopsis thrives in diverse habitats throughout Eurasia; it also thrives in laboratory environments. It is a highly variable plant with respect to its size and flowering time, among other traits.


pages: 607 words: 168,497

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

Then, somewhere in the landscape, you must identify an event that repeats at precise regular intervals. The external event’s periodicity would have to be spaced just right. If the episodes are too close together, it would be useless to teach an animal the majestic secret of time; too far apart, and it would tax your experimental subject’s newly evolving memory. The final steps of your experiment will be most challenging: entraining the inner, physiological timer you created with the outer, naturally occurring clock you selected. All the while, you must energetically twiddle the dials on the immensely complicated new neurocircuitry you had to install hastily in the brain of this creature.

She began cycling in harmony with other women, she lost estrus signaling, and she gained a bothersome monthly period. But all the elements of your complicated plan were not yet in place. Three more steps would be required. Step Four: Intently, you searched for a recurrent event in nature that marked off an appropriate interval with which you could begin to entrain your experimental subject’s menstrual cycle. You knew you could not start your Pavlovian conditioning experiment until the rapidly evolving sections of Gyna sapiens’ brain, grappling with the novel concept of linear time, had two events, one internal and one external, to guide it. Another requirement: The recurrent event had to possess some sort of a spectacular indicator.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Alas, since rapid price increases based on fundamentals happen all the time, it’s never clear that a bubble has occurred until after it’s over—which is why people are fooled by them, again and again. Asset bubbles are a glitch inherent in markets. Vernon Smith, the Nobel Prize–winning pioneer in experimental economics, has demonstrated this in a lab setting where groups of experimental subjects tasked with trading an asset will regularly inflate bubbles.16 However, bubbles are more than a market failure; they are a human failure. The very same herd mentality that sweeps market participants into a speculative mania can extend to government regulators as well. This is what happened during the housing bubble.


AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol

computer age, electricity market, experimental subject, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Menlo Park, popular electronics, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thales of Miletus

Of all the combatants in the AC/DC struggle, it would be the loser who would fare best. For Thomas Edison, the defeat of his cherished DC standard was a bitter blow, but hardly fatal. The inventor was involved in far too many other projects for any one setback to derail him financially. However, Edison never again took up electricity as a serious experimental subject. He had tasted defeat in the field once, and that was quite enough. “People will forget my name ever was connected to anything electrical,” Edison said late in his life. It was less a prediction than a wish. Edison continued to refine his storage battery even after it was clear that batteries would never become a primary source of power for automobiles or industry.


pages: 612 words: 181,985

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, death from overwork, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, military-industrial complex, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, éminence grise

In the debris, I am surprised to find a few specimen jars and bottles intact, filled with preserved human and insect tissues.” Smith asked questions around the concentration camp to try to learn more. Prisoners told him that the laboratory had served Nazi doctors as an experimental medical ward, and that everyone was afraid of it because it was a place “where selected prisoners [were] used as experimental subjects without their consent.” Although it was not yet known by American or British intelligence at the time, what Dr. Marcus Smith had come upon at Dachau was the place where a group of Luftwaffe doctors had been conducting medical research experiments on humans. This work took place in a freestanding barracks, isolated from the others, and was called Experimental Cell Block Five.

Alexander learned that the experiments had been conducted on Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Catholic priests in the secret, freestanding barracks called Experimental Cell Block Five. “In general, the death of prisoners transferred to Block 5 was expected within 2–3 days,” testified John Bauduin. The second witness, Dr. Hussarek, a Czech scholar sent to Dachau for committing “literary crimes,” told Dr. Alexander that “only a few experimental subjects survived the low pressure experiments. Most were killed.” All three men agreed that only one individual was known to have survived the experiments, a Polish priest named Leo Michalowski. Father Michalowski’s testimony provided a critical missing link in the medical murder experiments and how they were so skillfully concealed.


pages: 631 words: 177,227

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, capital asset pricing model, Climategate, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demographic transition, disinformation, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, impulse control, language acquisition, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nash equilibrium, nocebo, out of africa, phenotype, placebo effect, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, side project, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, ultimatum game

This experiment illustrates some of the essential features that distinguish human social life in all societies from that of other species: • We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules. • Many of these rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary (e.g., fish taboos in Fiji). • Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations. • We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules. Figure 11.1. An experimental subject wagging his finger at Max the puppet, who is violating the rules for this context. As in the small-scale societies seen in earlier chapters, the social world faced by our Paleolithic ancestors would have been increasingly shaped by the emergence of an immense variety of norms, and by the selective spread of specific norms packaged in institutions, that fostered success in intergroup competition.

If three people free ride and only one person contributes his entire $4, then the free riders go home with $6 each while the contributor gets only $2. Thus, those aiming to maximize their payoff should contribute zero. However, most educated Westerners agree that—if asked—players should contribute all the money to the common project. Among the typical experimental subjects (undergraduates), the average contributions are commonly between 40% and 60%, with many people contributing either 100% (cooperators) or 0% (free riders).13 To examine whether high contributions in the Public Goods Game, and prosocial choices in other such games, result from automatic norm following, David Rand and his colleagues examined the relationship between the time people spent making their contribution decisions and the size of their contributions.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

The metaphor of the digital poorhouse is meant to resist the erasure of history and context when we talk about technology and inequality. The parallels between the county poorhouse and the digital poorhouse are striking. Both divert the poor from public benefits, contain their mobility, enforce work, split up families, lead to a loss of political rights, use the poor as experimental subjects, criminalize survival, construct suspect moral classifications, create ethical distance for the middle class, and reproduce racist and classist hierarchies of human value and worth. However, there are ways that the analogy between high-tech tools in public services and the brick-and-mortar poorhouse falls short.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

If you instead gave her a diary and asked her to record how she felt throughout the day, she wouldn’t be likely to keep up the entries with diligence—it’s simply too much work. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson’s breakthrough was to leverage new technology (for the time) to bring the question to the subject right when it mattered. In more detail, they outfitted experimental subjects with pagers. These pagers would beep at randomly selected intervals (in modern incarnations of this method, smartphone apps play the same role). When the beeper went off, the subjects would record what they were doing at the exact moment and how they felt. In some cases, they would be provided with a journal in which to record this information while in others they would be given a phone number to call to answer questions posed by a field-worker.


pages: 293 words: 76,294

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham

Alfred Russel Wallace, experimental subject, means of production, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence

If cooking softens food and softer food leads to greater energy gain, then humans should get more energy from cooked food than raw food not only because of processes such as gelatinization and denaturation, but also because it reduces the costs of digestion. This prediction has been studied in the Burmese python. Physiological ecologist Stephen Secor finds pythons to be superb experimental subjects because after swallowing a meal, the snakes lie in a cage doing little but digesting and breathing. By measuring how much oxygen the pythons consume before and after a meal, Secor measures precisely how much energy the snakes use, and can attribute it to the cost of digestion. He typically monitors the snakes for at least two weeks at a time.


pages: 301 words: 74,571

Idoru by William Gibson

experimental subject, Kowloon Walled City, means of production, pattern recognition, place-making, telepresence

"Have a seat," Laney said to Daniels. Daniels winced behind his glasses. "Now," Pursley said, "you were in a Federal Orphanage, in Gainesville, it says here, from age twelve to age seventeen." Laney looked at his eggs. "That's right." "During that time, you participated in a number of drug trials? You were an experimental subject?" 132 William Gibson S. "Yes," Laney said, his eggs looking somehow farther away, or like a picture in a magazine. "This was voluntary on your part?" "There were rewards." "Voluntary," Pursley said. "You get on any of that 5-SB?" "They didn't tell us what they were giving us," Laney said.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

And in fact alternative assumptions to homo economicus have come to be widely used in applied economics, even though it remains the most common starting point (Pesendorfer 2006). Outside both the artificial world of the computer and the offline world of humans, a third category of experiments has looked at the behaviour of many biological creatures in conditions of resource scarcity. Sometimes these experimental subjects, such as rats or pigeons, demonstrate emotional reactions, such as sharing with a friend, or punishing cheats even at a cost to themselves. But entities ranging from bacteria and fungi to capuchin monkeys also often seem to act like self-interested calculators, acting just like the agents of economic models or AI games.


Statistics in a Nutshell by Sarah Boslaugh

Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, business climate, computer age, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, experimental subject, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, income per capita, iterative process, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, linear programming, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, six sigma, sparse data, statistical model, systematic bias, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Two Sigma, Vilfredo Pareto

Practical and ethical considerations also come into play—some research designs can simply be impossible to execute, prohibitively expensive, or considered unethical—and the researcher must be aware of community as well as scientific standards concerning the ethical conduct of research. Basic Vocabulary Research designs can be divided into three types: experimental, quasi-experimental, and observational. For a design to be experimental, subjects must be randomly assigned to groups or categories. The classic experimental design is the randomized controlled trial used in medicine, in which subjects are randomly assigned to experimental and control groups, administered some treatment, and the outcomes collected for both groups. The controlled experiment is considered the strongest type of research design as far as drawing conclusions from the results of research (in fact, some refer to the results from experimental controlled trials as the gold standard of evidence), but it is not always possible or practical to conduct this type of research.

Responses The data collected after the treatment has been delivered that form the basis for evaluating the effects of the treatment. Besides the treatments that are the focus of the study, other variables might be believed to affect the responses. Some of these are characteristics of the experimental subjects; in the case of human subjects, they might include qualities such as age and gender. These characteristics can be of interest to the researchers (it might be hypothesized that a treatment is more successful with males than with females), or they might simply be nuisance variables or control variables that might obscure the relationship between treatment and response.


pages: 293 words: 81,183

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Second, while I just described giving in terms of choosing between a benefit to yourself or others, that’s not a good way of thinking about it because giving benefits the giver as well as the receiver. If anything, my life has become happier since I’ve started donating some of my income. That’s the upside of the “warm glow” effect. Indeed, academic studies suggest I’m not alone. In one case, experimental subjects ended up more satisfied when they were given money and told to use that money to benefit others, than when they were told to use that money to benefit themselves. (See Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness,” Science 319, no. 5,870 [March 21, 2008]: 1,687–8.)


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Naomi Eisenberger, a psychologist at UCLA, got volunteers to play a computer bat-and-ball game with, as it seemed on the screen, two other participants.342 The program was arranged so that after a while the other two virtual participants would start to pass the ball just between each other, so excluding the experimental subject. Brain scans showed that the areas of the brain activated by this experience of exclusion were the same areas as are activated by physical pain. In various species of monkeys these same brain areas have been found to play a role in offspring calling for, and mothers providing, maternal protection.


pages: 278 words: 83,468

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

We could begin with problems with clear right answers, perhaps drawn from the many international programming competitions that have developed databases of well-defined problems with clear solutions. These competitions also provide a clear baseline of how long it should take for various problems to be solved so that we could establish clearly the individual problem-solving prowess of the experimental subjects. Using this kind of setup for calibration, we could begin to vary the conditions of the experiments. The challenge will be to increase the level of uncertainty about what the right answer is while still being able to measure the quality of the outcome objectively. Perhaps we could use real-world customer problems and then have real consumers test the output of the teams’ work.


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

While Russian cosmonauts had flown slightly longer durations in the past, Kelly’s mission was unique in that he had an identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, who had also been an astronaut and agreed to be monitored by medical specialists while his brother was in space. This opportunity to have a control subject on Earth—right down to identical DNA—while the experimental subject was in space, along with extensive medical history on both men, was a first in space physiology studies. As it turned out, a number of surprises were in store for the NASA doctors. Scott Kelly experienced changes to his eyesight, which in his case appear to be permanent (women appear to experience this less than men, for reasons that are not yet clear).


pages: 277 words: 87,082

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

Because the eye as a whole is not a perfectly efficient photon detector, at least 90% of the photons in these flashes will be absorbed before they reach the retina. This means that on average, only three photons hit the rod cells each time. What might happen, then, if the photons in the flashes are placed in a superposition of states? How will that affect what the experimental subjects ‘see’? Would it set up some kind of superposition in the nerve impulse from the rod cell to the brain? Might it even create a superposition of perceptions? It seems rather likely that, if the experiment is ever performed (that hasn’t happened yet), the result will be not some strange, novel state of mind but just more of the same, since the rod cell will act like any other macroscopic measurement device to transform a quantum state to a classical one, decohering it in (literally) a flash.


pages: 290 words: 82,871

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

‘You put them into your aquarium and a year later you have hundreds,’ said Frank Lyko in 2018, after Eve’s offspring became briefly famous for scuttling free and over-running Madagascar.5 It was a headline writer’s dream: ‘Invasion of the mutant crayfish’. But the greater interest of these cloned creatures to science lay in an altogether different direction: in the marmorkrebs’ potential to help with that old and thorny question of the balance of forces between nature and nurture, as researchers realized they had stumbled on an ideal experimental subject. Ordinarily, it’s hard to tease apart why things turn out the way they do. If you fall ill with heart disease, there is a tangle of potential causes, genetic and environmental; the fault could be inherited, dietary, linked to exercise (too little/too much), stress, some combination, and so on.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

A hypothetical example of using this procedure to provide a numerical measure of utility is shown in Table 15.1. TABLE 15.1 Von Neumann’s procedure for working out a numerical value for utility Consumer: Joan Cheng An essential element of this procedure was that it had to be repeatable, and for obvious reasons. If it were done just once, and the experimental subject was hungry, then he might be unwilling to take the risk of starving that the gamble implied, if the outcome were that he had to forgo the banana he already had. Von Neumann was emphatic about this: to make sense, his procedure had to be applied to repeatable experiments only: Probability has often been visualized as a subjective concept more or less in the nature of an estimation.

Therefore the square root of 2 can’t be the ratio of two integers, and it is therefore irrational. 2 This is that for changing all incomes and prices by the same factor to have no effect, ‘all other nominal magnitudes [including] assets and liabilities that are expressed in nominal terms)’ (Friedman 1969: 1) have to be altered by the same factor as well – and even this ignores the fact that debt amortization makes the effect of interest rates nonlinear. 3 One example of this is the paper by Caplan (2000) which attempts to explain findings which show that experimental subjects do not conform to the neoclassical definition of rational. Rather than accepting that the neoclassical definition of rationality may be flawed, Caplan proposes that irrationality may be a ‘good,’ which people ‘consume’ like any other, and then represents a rationality–irrationality trade-off using indifference curves.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Between 1943 and 1945, more than a thousand twins were subjected to Mengele’s experiments.IV Egged on by his mentor, Otmar von Verschuer from Berlin, Mengele sought out twins for his studies by trawling through the ranks of incoming camp prisoners and shouting a phrase that would become etched into the memories of the camp dwellers: Zwillinge heraus (“Twins out”) or Zwillinge heraustreten (“Twins step out”). Yanked off the ramps, the twins were marked by special tattoos, housed in separate blocks, and systematically victimized by Mengele and his assistants (ironically, as experimental subjects, twins were also more likely to survive the camp than nontwin children, who were more casually exterminated). Mengele obsessively measured their body parts to compare genetic influences on growth. “There isn’t a piece of body that wasn’t measured and compared,” one twin recalled. “We were always sitting together—always nude.”

The notion that gender identity was not innate and was crafted through social performance and cultural mimicry (“you are who you act; nurture can overcome nature”) was in its full prime in that era—and Money was among its most ardent and most vocal proponents. Casting himself as the Henry Higgins of sexual transformation, Money advocated “sexual reassignment,” the reorientation of sexual identity through behavioral and hormonal therapy—a decades-long process invented by him that allowed his experimental subjects to emerge with their identities sanguinely switched. Based on Money’s advice, “Brenda” was dressed and treated as a girl. Her hair was grown long. She was given female dolls and a sewing machine. Her teachers and friends were never informed about the switch. Brenda had an identical twin—a boy named Brian—who was brought up as a male child.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

In 2006, two papers published in the journal Nature gave hope for a much wider use of neuroprosthetics to help those with damage to the nervous system regain the ability to interact with their environment. In the first, John Donoghue and colleagues at Brown University described how they implanted an array of ninety-six electrodes into the precentral gyrus area of the primary motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for movement. The experimental subject, Matt Nagle, was a man whose spinal cord had been entirely severed in an accident leaving him with no control over his limbs. Even though the experiment took place three years after Nagle’s injury, he was able to “think” hand movement and produce signals through the electrodes that were able to move a cursor on a screen, to control simulated e-mail, and to operate connected devices such as a TV.


pages: 268 words: 89,761

Unhealthy societies: the afflictions of inequality by Richard G. Wilkinson

attribution theory, business cycle, clean water, correlation coefficient, experimental subject, full employment, fundamental attribution error, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, invisible hand, land reform, longitudinal study, means of production, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, twin studies, upwardly mobile

Instead of an introspective process by which we reach into an inner source to experience the truth of what we are feeling, it was found that emotions were distinguished from each other largely by 146 Social cohesion and social conflict cognitive processes involving an interpretation of our situation. The emotional experience of a given state of physiological arousal was found to depend on the perception of situational clues. To demonstrate the cognitive and situational contribution to the experience of an emotion depended on manipulating the situation of experimental subjects so as to induce them to ‘misattribute’ their state of arousal from its initial cognitive source. Given some deceptive experimental manipulation of the environment, it was shown that physical arousal caused initially by fear, by humour or annoyance, by adrenaline injections or even by exercise, could be experienced as quite a different emotion and then give rise to behaviour expressive of a different emotion.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

There are some more-sophisticated economic models of rational choice in which both higher wages and harder work are rational as a response to turnover or imperfect information. But they are not what was being tested in the laboratory.) List realized that the laboratory experiments were not an especially realistic setting for this demonstration of irrationality. “Wages” were being offered in exchange for “work,” but all that was really happening was that experimental subjects were ticking boxes on a questionnaire and being paid small amounts based on their answers. It was just a laboratory-based game of “let’s pretend.” List and his colleague Uri Gneezy extended this artificial experimental work to real life. They advertised for and hired people to do actual jobs, such as data entry or door-to-door collection for a charity.


Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages by Derek Bickerton

colonial rule, dark matter, European colonialism, experimental subject, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, rent control, Suez crisis 1956

Over our campfire in Lanai, our pakalolo-induced visions had not included anything as mundane as hardware. But Tom and 1 were both serious players; once we were committ~d we would take it anywhe~e it had 116 BASTARD TONGUES to be taken. We would be responsible for the lives of thirty~odd people, experimental subjects and grad students. That meant we had to be able to stay in contact with someplace that had emer­ gency services, hospitals, helicopters, search-and-rescue teams. And we had to have a fast boat, nothing fancy, just an overpowered shell that would get us from A to B in a minimum of time. Plus that was said and done on the island had to be recorded, and visually.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Although this might seem admirably unpatronising, the reason for the hands-off approach was eugenic: only those whose genes deserved to survive – those who took responsibility for themselves – would benefit. The transparency of the building was also necessary so that the doctors could observe their experimental subjects, ‘looking through the glass walls of the Centre, as the cytologist may under his microscope watch living cells grow’.4 The Finsbury Health Centre was designed with very different aims in mind. Peckham was not a slum, and its residents were mostly tradesmen and skilled labourers, but Finsbury was a much poorer area.


The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Adam even filmed a few occasions when orangutans were bouncing their way along a branch, something that Susannah was able to replicate more easily with captive orangutans at Chester Zoo, England, filming them walking along purpose-built beams. Susannah and her research assistant Sam Coward also showed that holding on to branches could help an animal overcome another major difficulty of evolving bipedalism: keeping its balance. This time they used humans as a model species. Experimental subjects had to balance on a springboard while an image of trees swaying slightly in the wind was projected around them. Half the time the people had a flexible pole to hang on to, mimicking a handhold on a branch, while at other times they had no handhold. The people were filmed, and the neuronal activity in their thigh muscles was measured when the springboard was perturbed.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

A remarkable variety of government programs, either formally, or in effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs—marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots then sent through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments; behavior modification experiments that washed their brains with LSD; exposure to the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and Vietnam...the list goes on...literally millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring,5 The moral of this little slice of history is simple: If the United States government does not care about the health and welfare of its own soldiers, if our leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain and suffering of the wretched warriors enlisted to fight the empire's wars, how can it be argued, how can it be believed, that they care about foreign peoples?


pages: 347 words: 101,586

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by António R. Damásio

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discovery of DNA, experimental subject, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, theory of mind

Some evidence comes from neuropsychological studies correlating loss of feeling with damage to the brain regions necessary to represent body states (see chapter 5), but studies conducted in normal individuals are also telling in this respect as well, specifically those by Paul Ekman.14 When he gave normal experimental subjects instructions on how to move their facial muscles, in effect “composing” a specific emotional expression on the subjects’ faces without their knowing his purpose, the result was that the subjects experienced a feeling appropriate to the expression. For instance, a roughly and incompletely composed happy facial expression led to the subjects’ experiencing “happiness,” an angry facial expression to their experiencing “anger,” and so on.


pages: 340 words: 96,242

Mars Crossing by Geoffrey A. Landis

affirmative action, experimental subject, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Mars Society, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

She was so excited that she barely noticed the launch, and only when she saw her notepad floating out of her pocket did she realize, I'm really here; I'm in zero gravity. I made it. Tana's billet was to be the blue-shift medical officer, and in her spare time, a biology research technician and an experimental subject. The bio labs always needed both technicians and subjects. She liked being on space station. Ft was crowded and noisy and confusing. It was remarkably easy to get confused, and even—despite its small size—momentarily lost. The familiar route from one module to another that you've memorized as a left turn would, if you happen to be flipped, mutate into a right turn, or even an up or down turn.


pages: 321 words: 96,349

Among Chimpanzees by Nancy J. Merrick

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, experimental subject, Global Witness, Google Earth, impulse control, language acquisition, microcredit, profit motive, the scientific method

But all this can be of little consequence to a chimp named Tom, who was finally retired from research after more than 360 knock-downs (general anesthesia) and inoculation with the AIDS virus. Hundreds of chimps have been used over the years for cancer research, but here again, other animals—often mice—have proven to be superior experimental subjects, not only because the types of tumors they develop more closely resemble those of humans but also because they are far more plentiful and far less costly to conduct research on. Still, a number of entrenched research scientists claim that chimpanzees are absolutely key to future gains.7 So, what happens when other scientists examine the literature to see whether experimentation on chimps is really essential, especially to emerging new medical therapies?


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

With a price system, unlike under central planning, no central authority needs to know when there is an imbalance of supply and demand. Evidence that price movements can guide an economy to a stable outcome comes from experimental economics, in research done by Vernon Smith and others.12 An economy is simulated in the laboratory, with experimental subjects, usually undergraduate students, being put in the role of consumers and firms (and to get them to take their decision-making seriously, they are offered cash payments based on the outcomes of their decisions). Provided the experimental market’s rules are well designed, prices quickly settle down at their theoretical equilibrium levels (that is, where supply equals demand), even though no one in the economy knows enough to be able to figure out what those prices should be.


pages: 327 words: 97,720

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

A controlled experiment means studying people in a situation in which you can hold certain variables constant while you manipulate some other variable. Such an experiment also requires that the participants be randomly assigned to different levels of the manipulation taking place. To manipulate levels of perceived loneliness, we enlisted David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, to hypnotize our experimental subjects. Using precisely worded scripts, we guided our hypnotized student volunteers to re-experience moments in their lives that summoned up either profound feelings of loneliness or profound feelings of social connectedness. With some individuals we induced loneliness in their first hypnotic state and social connectedness in their second; with the others the order was reversed.


pages: 362 words: 104,308

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

bioinformatics, business intelligence, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kim Stanley Robinson, phenotype, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, the scientific method, zero-sum game

Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.” “I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided. So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IVed with two quarts of genetically engineered righteous indignation. “It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in The Journal of Immunology, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they got a patent for it!


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

“I went to the computer store to see what they had and the guy said, ‘Here try this. It’s just come in.’ Tetris was the perfect game, it was simple to learn, you had to practice to get good and there was a good learning curve.” So Haier bought some copies of Tetris for his lab and watched as his experimental subjects played the game. He did find neurological changes with experience—parts of the brain thickened and brain activity declined, suggesting experts’ brains worked more efficiently—but more relevant here, he found that his subjects relished playing the game. They signed up to play for forty-five minutes a day, five days a week, for up to eight weeks.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

For all their bravery, the credibility of these scientists’ findings is tainted. The experiments were conducted during the pandemic, at a time when it would have been impossible for them to ensure that their laboratories were free of contamination by the ubiquitous flu virus, so it is hard to know by which route their experimental subjects received the infection. Anyone paying attention will have noticed that Dujarric’s and Nicolle’s and Lebailly’s results contradict each other: Dujarric thought that he had given himself flu via an injection of filtrate into his blood, while the pair in Tunis ruled out the blood as a transmission route.


pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

The joy of tech As you will have gathered by now, I’ve spent a long time thinking about physical activity, as well as talking to many people who think about it even more. And so, much as I have stressed several times that this is not a book of advice, it seems fair to use this final chapter to set out what I’ve learned along the way in these months as researcher, writer and occasional experimental subject/guinea pig. One personal lesson is that despite an initial scepticism about the use of high-tech gadgets in monitoring and scrutinising activity levels, I in fact found they can be surprisingly useful to help you maintain a movement regime – or at least they can if you find the right device.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

He’s staff followed up with phone calls. They zeroed in on twenty eligible couples who seemed like the best fit. Then two researchers, an embryologist named Dr. Jinzhou Qin and a postdoctoral researcher who studied monkeys, packed their bags and started traveling around China. They visited the potential experimental subjects in their own homes. Travelling from major cities along China’s eastern seaboard to metropolises in the heartland, they combed the country—seeking out people who seemed right for the study. They even went to Xinjiang, the remote Uyghur autonomous region where China was testing out some of the most extreme surveillance and policing programs in the world.


pages: 936 words: 252,313

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

In 1952, however, Laurance Kinsell, director of the Institute for Metabolic Research at the Highland–Alameda County Hospital in Oakland, California, demonstrated that vegetable oil will decrease the amount of cholesterol circulating in our blood, and animal fats will raise it. That same year, J. J. Groen of the Netherlands reported that cholesterol levels were independent of the total amount of fat consumed: cholesterol levels in his experimental subjects were lowest on a vegetarian diet with a high fat content, he noted, and highest on an animal-fat diet that had less total fat. Keys eventually accepted that animal fats tend to raise cholesterol and vegetable fats to lower it, only after he managed to replicate Groen’s finding with his schizophrenic patients in Minnesota.

In effect, glucose regulates how much vitamin C is taken up by the cells, according to the University of Massachusetts nutritionist John Cunningham. If we increase blood-sugar levels, the cellular uptake of vitamin C will drop accordingly. Glucose also impairs the reabsorption of vitamin C by the kidney, and so, the higher the blood sugar, the more vitamin C will be lost in the urine. Infusing insulin into experimental subjects has been shown to cause a “marked fall” in vitamin-C levels in the circulation. In other words, there is significant reason to believe that the key factor determining the level of vitamin C in our cells and tissues is not how much or little we happen to be consuming in our diet, but whether the starches and refined carbohydrates in our diet serve to flush vitamin C out of our system, while simultaneously inhibiting the use of what vitamin C we do have.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Facebook conducts controlled experiments to see how changes to the rules driving which friends’ posts get displayed influence your engagement and usage of the product. I tested titles for this book, following in the footsteps of SuperCrunchers and The 4-Hour Workweek. Placed as ads on Google Adwords, Predictive Analytics, when displayed on tens of thousands of screens of unsuspecting experimental subjects across the country, was clicked almost twice as often as Geek Prophecies, and also beat out I Knew You Were Going to Do That and Clairvoyant Computers, plus the six remaining book titles that I also entered into this contest. It was convenient that the field’s very name came out as the top contender, an unquestionably fitting title for this book.


pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

True believers in telepathy were outraged because I considered its existence to be unproved. This is a question that is of deep concern to many readers. The most interesting response came from Rupert Sheldrake, who sent me papers describing his experiments studying telepathy in dogs. Dogs have several advantages over humans as experimental subjects. They do not get bored, they do not cheat, and they do not have any interest in the outcome of the experiment. Sheldrake’s experiments contradict my statement that telepathy cannot be studied scientifically. Unfortunately, the experiments were conducted by humans, not by dogs, and effects of human bias and selective reporting could not be altogether eliminated.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Cognitive science didn’t replace all learning theory findings, or even the explanations behind the findings. Rather, it just established a body of work that couldn’t have been produced within the learning theory framework. Science and Culture Bertrand Russell once observed that scientists studying the problem-solving behavior of animals saw in their experimental subjects the national characteristics of the scientists themselves. The pragmatic Americans and the theoretically inclined Germans had very different understandings of what was happening. Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

A historical and technological survey of GPS published in 2002 summarized the relationship between the two technologies/concepts: “GPS receivers without GIS have no knowledge of the real world.” This knowledge runs deep. Street View ultimately taught me nothing definitive about Fallen Man, but Street View images are perhaps thicker with real information than we realize. An MIT Media Lab study of “perceptual inequality” showed experimental subjects pairs of images selected randomly from a set of hundreds of street-level images of New York City, Boston, and two cities in Austria, Salzburg and Linz. For each pair, subjects answered the questions “Which place looks safer?” and “Which place looks more upper-class?” The study found that both positive and negative impressions were more clustered around geographic regions in the American cities, and more widely dispersed in the Austrian cities, suggesting that the cityscapes of Boston and New York City exhibit starker inequality.


pages: 460 words: 107,712

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Having given their consent, 1000 patients will be separated into 500 experimentals (who will receive the homeopathic dose) and 500 controls (who will not). Bending over backwards to respect the ‘holistic’ principle that every individual must be treated as an individual, we shall not insist on giving all experimental subjects the same dose. Nothing so crude. Instead, every patient in the trial shall be examined by a certified homeopath, and an individually tailored therapy prescribed. The different patients need not even receive the same homeopathic substance. But now comes the all-important double-blind randomization.


pages: 403 words: 106,707

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson

airport security, animal electricity, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frederick Winslow Taylor, glass ceiling, Iridium satellite, medical residency, megaproject, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Walter Mischel

“it may well have been my struggles and failures”: A. V. Hill, Muscular Activity (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1925). 19. an eighty-five-meter grass loop in Hill’s garden: In Hill’s 1923 QMJ paper, he describes the experiments taking place “around a circular grass track 92½ yds. (84½ metres) in circumference.” Hugh Long, a coauthor and experimental subject in Hill’s Manchester studies, recalls “running up and down stairs, or round the professor’s garden while at intervals healthy samples of blood were withdrawn from my arms”; quoted in “Archibald Vivian Hill. 26 September 1886–3 June 1977,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 24 (1978): 71–149. 20.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

Thus the Asch and Milgram experiments give us a different perspective on the overconfidence phenomenon: people are respectful of authorities in formulating the opinions about which they will later be so overconfident, transferring their confidence in authorities to their own judgments based upon them. Given the kind of behavior observed by Asch and Milgram, it is not at all surprising that many people are accepting of the perceived authority of others on such matters as stock market valuation. Most must certainly trust their own judgment in this area even less than the experimental subjects trusted the evidence of their own eyes about the lengths of lines on cards or the pain and suffering that a person sitting next to them was experiencing. Economic Theories of Herd Behavior and Information Cascades Even completely rational people can participate in herd behavior when they take into account the judgments of others, and even if they know that everyone else is behaving in a herdlike manner.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

This is important, because it turns out that cortisol directly impairs cognitive and decisionmaking ability: The stress-induced release of cortisol affects brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the hippocampus, which are important in cognitive functioning; in particular, the prefrontal cortex is important in suppression of impulsive responses. It is therefore no surprise that when experimental subjects are artificially put under stressful conditions in the laboratory, they are less likely to make the economically rational decision when faced with choosing among different alternatives.8 THE HEDGE What can the poor do to cope with these risks? A natural reaction when faced with a drop in wages or earnings is to try to work more.


pages: 339 words: 105,938

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

Left-siders purposely given the flu virus were less likely to get ill, too. All this evidence seems to correlate brain activity with positive/negative feelings and behaviours, and these in turn are correlated with self-reported happiness, but is there a more direct link? At least one widely discussed experiment suggests there is. All the experimental subjects — victims might be a better term — had a very hot pad applied to one of their legs. The pad was exactly the same temperature for everyone, but people gave very different reports of the level of pain. Nevertheless, the differing reports were highly correlated with brain activity, again suggesting that such reports are meaningful.6 Still, this experiment might seem worrying for the defenders of happiness surveys because it demonstrates so clearly that the same objective stimulus is described differently by different people.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The lines were drawn to make the answer obvious: one of the three choices matched the target line perfectly; the other two were not even close. But seven of the eight people in the room were accomplices of the experimenter who all deliberately gave the same wrong answer, with six of them answering before the real experimental subject got a turn. In the trials, about three-fourths of subjects conformed to the group at least once, despite the clear evidence of their own eyes. About a third went along with the group in a majority of trials. (Whereas in a control-group setting, where answers were not rigged, subjects had no trouble getting the answer right.)


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

What if the hold-up is that they are engaging in identity-protective cognition? To test this, Kahan performed an experiment on assessing the effectiveness of a new (fictitious) skin cream. To my knowledge, there is not and never has been any sort of science denial (or identity-based reasoning) on the basis of skin cream. Kahan set up the experiment with one thousand experimental subjects, who were first surveyed to assess their political beliefs, then given a set of fabricated data (see figure 2.1).62 Figure 2.1 Fabricated data used as stimuli in an experiment by Kahan et al., “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government” (2013). After doing a little math, we have all of the information we need to see whether the skin cream is effective on a rash.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

It turns out that you can understand what's being said much more easily if the words are selected from a very limited vocabulary, so there can be no confusion (this is why fighter jocks go in for that clipped alphafoxtrot-bravo jargon). Shortly after Shannon's paper came out, Miller says, he and two of his students decided to measure this effect in terms of information theory. They found that their experimental subjects could detect the difference between, say, "boy" and "heel" at quite high noise levels: it was just an either-or choice, requiring the perception of only one bit of information. But as they added more words to the list of possibilities-that is, as they demanded the perception of more and more bits of information-it rapidly became impossible for their subjects to detect the differences.

That introductory article he'd published with Fred Frick in 1949 had made information theory into something of a fad in psychology, espe- cially among the rising generation. And as these young researchers applied the theory to more and more aspects of human perception, they found more and more evidence for the same kind of "channel capacity" that Miller had found in the perception of words. Their experimental subjects could distinguish very well between different musical pitches, say, or different positions of points on a line, or even different levels of saltiness in a taste of water-if there were only two al- ternatives. Salty-not salty and so on were really just yes-no choices, meaning that the subjects had to perceive only one bit of information.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Newell and Rosenbloom hypothesized that a similar process is at work in all skill acquisition, not just chess. In perception and memory, a chunk is just a symbol that stands for a pattern of other symbols, like AI stands for artificial intelligence. Newell and Rosenbloom adapted this notion to the theory of problem solving that Newell and Simon had developed earlier. Newell and Simon asked experimental subjects to solve problems—for example, derive one mathematical formula from another on the blackboard—while narrating aloud how they were going about it. They found that humans solve problems by decomposing them into subproblems, subsubproblems, and so on and systematically reducing the differences between the initial state (the first formula, say) and the goal state (the second formula).


pages: 379 words: 113,656

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED AT THE TIME WE STUMBLED ONTO OUR EVENTUAL PROJECT, WE were studying, of all things, crickets. It sounds silly, but because this particular species of cricket—the snowy tree cricket—chirps in such a regular fashion and because (unlike pacemaker cells or neurons) it is such a well-behaved experimental subject, it is virtually an ideal specimen of biological oscillator. We were trying to test a deep mathematical hypothesis, originally proposed by Winfree, that only certain types of oscillators can synchronize. Since snowy tree crickets are extremely good at synchronizing, it seemed a natural step to determine experimentally what kind of oscillators they were and therefore whether or not the theoretical predictions were true.


pages: 396 words: 112,748

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

WINFREE TOLD THE STORY of an early researcher, George Mines, who in 1914 was twenty-eight years old. In his laboratory at McGill University in Montreal, Mines made a small device capable of delivering small, precisely regulated electrical impulses to the heart. “When Mines decided it was time to begin work with human beings, he chose the most readily available experimental subject: himself,” Winfree wrote. “At about six o’clock that evening, a janitor, thinking it was unusually quiet in the laboratory, entered the room. Mines was lying under the laboratory bench surrounded by twisted electrical equipment. A broken mechanism was attached to his chest over the heart and a piece of apparatus nearby was still recording the faltering heartbeat.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

More than most other groups, investors tend to exaggerate their own skill and deny the role of chance. They overestimate their own knowledge, underestimate the risks involved, and exaggerate their ability to control events. Kahneman’s tests show how well investors’ probability judgments are calibrated by asking experimental subjects for confidence intervals. He asks a question such as the following: What is your best estimate of the value of the Dow Jones one month from today? Next pick a high value, such that you are 99% sure (but not absolutely sure) that the Dow Jones a month from today will be lower than that value.


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

Pharmaceutical companies would be obliged to share information about the proposed manufacturing process, and about the chemical mechanism by which they believed the new drug offered a therapeutic benefit. And, before any human tests could begin, applicants would have to guarantee that an independent committee at each institution where the drug was to be studied would certify that the study was likely to have more benefits than risks; that any distress for experimental subjects would be minimized; and that all participants gave what was just starting to be known as “informed consent.”* The truly radical transformation, however, was what the FDA would demand of the studies themselves. Kelsey’s new system specified three sequential investigative stages for any new drug.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Hindsight bias arises in many other situations: judges weighing evidence in court cases, historians analyzing past events, and physicians assessing earlier clinical decisions. For example, in negligence cases, for guilt to be found, it must be shown that the person who committed the negligent act would have known that their actions would endanger others. When experimental subjects are presented with various negligence scenarios, they typically rate an outcome as more foreseeable the worse the outcome is, even when the negligent act is the same. In other words, the worse the outcome, the worse the hindsight bias. In the context of leadership and learning new roles, hindsight bias can keep you from learning from past events.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

(By nuclear structure he is of course referring to the core of the atom, as deduced by our experiments last year.) Then he explained how he was going to seat a gorgon on one side of a very large device he calls a cloud chamber, with big magnetic coils positioned above and below it, to see if there is some other physical phenomenon at work. I can now reveal the effects of our team's experimentation. Subject C is cooperating in a most professional manner, but despite Ernest's greatest efforts the cloud chamber bore no fruit--she can sit with her face pressed up against the glass window on one side, and blow a chicken's egg to flinders of red-hot pumice on the target stand, but no ionization trail appears in the saturated vapour of the chamber.


pages: 405 words: 121,531

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

The drive to be (and look) consistent constitutes a highly potent weapon of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interest. Consider what happened when researchers staged thefts on a New York City beach to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to halt the crime. In the study, an accomplice of the researchers would put a beach blanket down five feet from the blanket of a randomly chosen individual—the experimental subject. After several minutes of relaxing on the blanket and listening to music from a portable radio, the accomplice would stand up and leave the blanket to stroll down the beach. Soon thereafter, a researcher, pretending to be a thief, would approach, grab the radio, and try to hurry away with it.


pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

Solomon Asch’s legendary studies from the 1950s on conformity are among my favourite experiments of all time. Some people in a room are asked to judge the length of a line; all but one are stooges, and they unanimously assert what is obviously an incorrect answer. The one true, unsuspecting experimental subject conforms to the majority view, despite knowing that it’s incorrect, about a third of the time. This is a chilling result that feels just right, and over the past half-century researchers have replicated the study over a hundred times in seventeen countries, allowing hints of patterns to be spotted in the results.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Members of the control group spent about three and a half minutes (213 and 205 seconds) on the puzzle during the first two unsupervised windows, and four minutes (241 seconds) in the last window. Experimental-group members spent an average of four minutes (248 seconds) on the puzzle in the first window. Before the second hour started, experimental subjects were told they would receive a dollar for every puzzle they solved. With the added incentive, they spent more than five minutes (313 seconds) on the puzzle, 26 percent more time than in their first hour. Before the third hour, they were told that there was only enough money for one round of payment, so they wouldn’t be paid any more.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

More than most other groups, investors tend to exaggerate their own skill and deny the role of chance. They overestimate their own knowledge, underestimate the risks involved, and exaggerate their ability to control events. Kahneman’s tests show how well investors’ probability judgments are calibrated by asking experimental subjects for confidence intervals. He asks a question such as the following: What is your best estimate of the value of the Dow Jones one month from today? Next pick a high value, such that you are 99% sure (but not absolutely sure) that the Dow Jones a month from today will be lower than that value.


pages: 420 words: 121,881

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

Albert Einstein, experimental subject, feminist movement, Norman Mailer, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce

Whether this was directly a result of the pills or simply the anger she felt at suffering so many physical symptoms, she wasn’t sure. When she quit the pill after ten days, Blake went to see her doctor to make sure there was nothing wrong with her. “I shall forward you the bill,” she informed Pincus, “since, though I am glad to be an experimental subject for you, I don’t think I should lose money on the deal.” Blake’s letter might have served as a warning, but Pincus was still not terribly worried. Side effects were called side effects for a reason: they were not the main concern. The priority was to make sure no one taking the pill got pregnant.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Some evenings we made snacks from spores, fragments of cracker, and sour cream: tiny crumbs of mycorrhizal caviar that we had to prepare under the microscope and tweezer into our mouths. We didn’t learn much, but that wasn’t the point. It was an exercise that helped us to keep our balance as we careened from the small to the large. These were rare moments of unmediated contact with our experimental subjects, goofs to remind us that mycorrhizal fungi aren’t mechanical schematic entities—one can’t eat a machine or a concept—but living organisms engaged in lives that we still struggle to understand. * * * — PLANTS REMAIN THE easiest way in. It is through plants that the mycorrhizal extravaganza belowground most commonly erupts into everyday human life.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

It was emphasized that there would be no other negative or positive impacts on others from the existence of this person. The authors of the study found that people, on average, think that it’s a good thing to bring a new happy person into existence and that it’s a bad thing to bring a new unhappy person into existence. Moreover, these judgments were symmetrical: the experimental subjects were just as positive about the idea of bringing into existence a new happy person as they were negative about the idea of bringing into existence a new unhappy person. That is, those surveyed did not have the intuition of neutrality. Clumsy Gods: The Fragility of Identity A second argument against the intuition of neutrality again comes from Parfit.14 He noted that our existence in the world is exceptionally unlikely, and the identity of future people is exceptionally fragile, and that major ethical implications follow from this.


Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

Is it possible that an intensive, affect-laden time-extended group may open up a client who is stuck in therapy? My colleagues and I studied thirty-three such clients referred by individual therapists for a weekend encounter group. We assigned them to one of three groups: two affect-evoking gestalt marathons and a control group (a weekend of meditation, silence, and tai chi).22 Six weeks later, the experimental subjects showed slight but significant improvement in their individual therapy compared to the control subjects. By twelve weeks, however, all differences had disappeared, and there were no remaining measurable effects on the process of individual therapy. The marathon group phenomenon makes us mindful of the issue of transfer of learning.

Each participant’s outcome (judged from all assessment measures) was rated and placed in one of six categories: high learner, moderate changer, unchanged, negative changer, casualty (significant, enduring, psychological decompensation that was due to being in the group), and dropout. The results for all 206 experimental subjects and for the sixty-nine control subjects are summarized in Table 16.1. (“Short post” is at termination of group and “long post” is at six-month follow-up.) TABLE 16.1 Index of Change for All Participant Who Began Strudy TABLE 16.2 Index of Change for Those Who Completed Group (N = 179 Short Post, 133 Long Post) SOURCE: Morton A.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

Except that there happens to be a hiker walking in front of the iron weight. He will certainly be killed if Oscar pulls the switch, just as surely as Ned’s fat man. The difference is that Oscar’s hiker is not being used to stop the trolley: he is collateral damage, as in Denise’s dilemma. Like Hauser, and like most of Hauser’s experimental subjects, I feel that Oscar is permitted to throw the switch but Ned is not. But I also find it quite hard to justify my intuition. Hauser’s point is that such moral intuitions are often not well thought out but that we feel them strongly anyway, because of our evolutionary heritage. In an intriguing venture into anthropology, Hauser and his colleagues adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small Central American tribe with little contact with Westerners and no formal religion.


Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel

active measures, AGPL, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, collaborative editing, continuous integration, Contributor License Agreement, corporate governance, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, intentional community, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, natural language processing, off-by-one error, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pull request, revision control, Richard Stallman, selection bias, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, SpamAssassin, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Wayback Machine, web application, zero-sum game

Visitors are more likely to click on a link that says "Watch our 3 minute video" than on one that just says "Watch our video", because in the former case they know what they're getting into before they click — and they'll watch it better, because they've mentally prepared the necessary amount of commitment beforehand, and so won't tire mid-way through. As to where the four-minute limit came from: it's a scientific fact, determined through many attempts by the same experimental subject (who shall remain unnamed) to watch project videos. The limit does not apply to tutorials or other instructional material, of course; it's just for introductory videos. In case you don't already have preferred software for recording desktop interaction videos: I've had good luck with gtk-recordmydesktop on Debian GNU/Linux, and then the OpenShot video editor for post-capture editing.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

These subjects were only The ArrIval of the Real User 179 "half-real" or, in other words, they were model subjects, subjects who could be read as embodiments of the generic eye-hand system. The experiments were able to prove that using the mouse was as efficient as pointing, but people who point usually don't develop repetitive-stress injuries (RSls). The limitations in the definition of the user imposed by the cognitive-science conception of the user as an experimental subject thus laid ample groundwork for subsequent unintended consequences of the technology. To put it another way, the qualities of the" real" test subjects were selected in accord with and limited to the purpose of the testing, as the following state- ment by Larry Tesler shows: I really didn't believe in [the mouse]. . . .


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

The only people who can master this extremely simple task are ones who apply explicit quantitative reasoning and have the faith to stick with it even when it seems not to be working. Another simple Dorner experiment is to let people manage a few variables in a simple virtual village. The experimental subjects can devote resources to health care, irrigation, house building, and other projects. Here again, almost everyone creates disasters, however much training they receive and however often they replay the game. The tendency is to correct every short-term problem without considering the long-term consequences.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

That is the source of its power; there is nothing mysterious or mystical about it. It is nothing more or less than, as Joan Fisher Box said, “the skillful interrogation of Nature.” The experiment would, however, fail in its objective of simulating Model 2 if either the experimenter were allowed to use his own judgment to choose a fertilizer or the experimental subjects, in this case the plants, “knew” which card they had drawn. This is why clinical trials with human subjects go to great lengths to conceal this information from both the patients and the experimenters (a procedure known as double blinding). I will add to this a second punch line: there are other ways of simulating Model 2.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

And that’s exactly what the fMRI evidence shows. When subjects are randomly encouraged to mentalize, the mentalizing network is activated, but the networks for intelligence, reasoning, and working memory are not. And when the prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal regions are blocked by transcranial magnetic stimulation, experimental subjects lose their ability to manage false beliefs that are critical in mentalizing and intentionality. In addition to the strong fMRI and species-level evidence supporting the social brain hypothesis, researchers have recently examined the individual-level evidence by measuring the sizes of people’s brain regions devoted to mentalizing and the sizes of their corresponding personal social networks.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

She means this literally: as a result of a long-standing practice of meditation and shamanic rituals, she has received direct instructions from entities she considers to be plant spirits, who offer her advice on how to conceive and structure her experiments. Each of these encounters is then an introduction, an opening of the channel, which allows the experimental subject to speak for itself, for Mimosa to declare its ability, now that we are ready to hear it. And every time the plant speaks, the boundaries which we thought enclosed our worlds are shaken. If you’re sceptical, then fine. But it’s not necessary to accept the reality of Gagliano’s direct communication with plant spirits to accept the results of her experiments, which in every other way conform to the most stringent scientific norms, including peer review and reproducibility.7 I find aspects of Gagliano’s account hard to take seriously too.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Toward the end of the studies Robert McKim, a professor of industrial design at Stanford University, joined the project to help explore the relation between technical design and psychedelic drug use. Don Allen, a former Ampex engineer, and another man worked as “counselors.” A significant portion of the experimental subjects were engineers who worked at different companies on the Midpeninsula—a group of people who were believed to be very “uptight.” Before long the group published a glowing research report based on a survey of its first 153 subjects. The results were in the realm of the kind of advertisements found on late-night TV.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Another influential view involves stored “mental simulators” of experiences one has undergone, which, in response to a fresh stimulus, reactivate certain regions of the brain that were once stimulated by the closest experiences to the current stimulus. Behind all these efforts lies the appealing idea of non-homogeneous categories — that is, categories having stronger and weaker members — which amounts to distinguishing between more central and less central members. For example, if one times the responses of experimental subjects when they are asked questions of the form “Is an X a Y?”, or if one asks them to write down a list of members of a certain category, or if one gives them a list and asks them to indicate, for each item, its degree of typicality as a member of a specific category, one finds that some very striking trends emerge, and these trends turn out to be stable across all these different ways of testing.

It is very rare that, in real life, we rely on an analogy to a situation with which we are barely familiar at all. To put it more colorfully, when it comes to understanding novel situations, we reach out to our family and our friends rather than to the first random passerby. But in the source–target paradigm, experimental subjects are required to reach out to a random passerby — namely, the one that was imposed on them as a source situation by the experimenter. And so, what do the results obtained in the framework of this paradigm really demonstrate? What they show is that when people learn something superficially, they wind up making superficial analogies to it.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The Canadian province of Quebec has since passed a similar Act, and other countries are likely to follow suit. Many business corporations also recognise animals as sentient beings, though paradoxically, this often exposes the animals to rather unpleasant laboratory tests. For example, pharmaceutical companies routinely use rats as experimental subjects in the development of antidepressants. According to one widely used protocol, you take a hundred rats (for statistical reliability) and place each rat inside a glass tube filled with water. The rats struggle again and again to climb out of the tubes, without success. After fifteen minutes most give up and stop moving.


pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Most thought they would refuse to continue beyond the 150-volt shock (when the learner first demands to be released), and no one saw themselves going beyond 300 volts (when the learner refuses to answer). Their predictions of others’ behavior were only slightly less optimistic: respondents expected that only a pathological fringe of 1–2 percent of the population would proceed all the way to 450 volts. The psychiatrists Milgram surveyed thought that only one experimental subject in a thousand would proceed to the end of the shock board. 6.2.3 Results Milgram’s experiment shows something surprising, not only about our dispositions to obey but also about our self-understanding. The predictions of psychiatrists, students, and lay people fell shockingly far from reality.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Of course they were asking these questions on behalf of money managers, who need advice on how to handle the trillions of dollars they "run." 5. Besides comfortable self-sufficiency, one shouldn't discount the macho feel of having dominated chaos with a complex model. 6. In a prisoners' dilemma, two experimental subjects, metaphorically partners in crime, are given the choice of betraying each other or hanging tough for monetary reward. If one defects and the other doesn't, the skunk gets 3 units. If both defect, each gets 1. If both cooperate, each gets 2. 7. One doesn't want to get too carried away naturalizing temperament and values, but the model seems particularly to drive away women and nonwhites, at least in America, because of its chilly irreality.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

He sympathised with Kepler rather than Galileo. It is possible that this aspect of the Marxist tradition helped to attract scientists whose field (biology) or whose cast of mind made the mechanical-reductionist models of a science whose greatest triumph was physics, and the analytical method of isolating the experimental subject from its context (‘keeping other things equal’), seem particularly inapposite. Such men (Joseph Needham, C.H. Waddington) were interested in wholes rather than parts, in general systems theory – the phrase was not yet familiar – in ensembles which integrate, in a living reality, phenomena which conventional ‘scientific method’ separated; for instance, ‘bombed yet still functioning cities’ (to use an illustration by Needham suitable to the age of anti-fascism). 55 293 How to Change the World Thirdly, dialectical materialism appeared to provide a way out of the inconsistencies of science by embodying the concept of contradiction in its approach.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Their dissemination can be observed, and now, thanks to the Internet, we have a fine laboratory in which more data can be gathered. As always in a lab, there are prices to pay in restricting the phenomena to a circumscribed artificial environment and in the risk of deep bias in the population of our experimental subjects (not all language users are Internet users, obviously). It is no accident that the population of tokens of the “meme” species (the term), founded by Dawkins in 1976, languished somewhat until the Internet provided an ideal niche for their use. If words are the best memes, why didn’t Dawkins feature them prominently in his exposition?


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

Over the next six years, the foundation would process some 350 people. As James Fadiman and Don Allen recall those years at the foundation (both sat for extensive interviews), it was a thrilling and heady time to be working on what they were convinced was the frontier of human possibility. For the most part, their experimental subjects were “healthy normals” or what Fadiman described as “a healthy neurotic outpatient population.” Each client paid five hundred dollars for a package that included before-and-after personality testing, a guided LSD session, and some follow-up. Al Hubbard “would float in and out,” Don Allen recalls.


The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

Psychological experiments have given us some stunning demonstrations, which should worry any jurist inclined to give superior weight to ‘eye-witness’ evidence. A famous example was prepared by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois. Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

In 2012, Facebook ran an experiment in control. It selectively manipulated the newsfeeds of 680,000 users, showing them either happier or sadder status updates. Because Facebook constantly monitors its users—that’s how it turns its users into advertising revenue—it could easily monitor the experimental subjects and collect the results. It found that people who saw happier posts tended to write happier posts, and vice versa. I don’t want to make too much of this result. Facebook only did this for a week, and the effect was small. But once sites like Facebook figure out how to do this effectively, they will be able to monetize this.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

A very few professional gamblers are successful because they have observed anomalies, or studied the processes of apparent games of chance particularly carefully – Edward Thorp and the Ritz patrons – and the organisers of gambling establishments are anxious to identify them and exclude them from their casinos. But most regular gamblers are sad people, some in the grip of addiction, some suffering from persistent delusions about their own skill. It is true that when experimental subjects are asked to come up with subjective probabilities using these pignistic methods they can sometimes be persuaded to do so, usually with the aid of pressure from their professors and modest financial compensation for their cooperation. However this politeness in the face of silly requests provides no reason to believe that the numbers derived from such experiments bear any relation to an underlying set of consistent subjective probabilities.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Green thumbs they weren’t, though, and the food they farmed turned out to be insufficient to keep the participants on a typical diet. The lack of food wasn’t bad enough to result in malnutrition, but it did mean that the team members were frequently hungry. One of the prisoners (and by “prisoners” I mean “experimental subjects”) happened to be Roy Walford, a researcher from California whose studies on extending life in mice are still required reading for scientists entering the aging field. I have no reason to suspect that Walford sabotaged the crops, but the coincidence was rather fortuitous for his research; it gave him an opportunity to test his mouse-based findings on human subjects.


pages: 564 words: 163,106

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.

Barry Marshall: ulcers, clean water, cuban missile crisis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, rising living standards, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, V2 rocket

There is, though, another much more important reason why young doctors found research a less attractive option: the revolution of clinical science as initiated by Sir Thomas Lewis and carried on by John McMichael and his contemporaries had become exhausted. There are many forms of medical research – synthesising new drugs, inventing new technologies, experimenting on animal models of disease, and so on – but the distinguishing feature of clinical science is that it is practised by doctors with a unique access to the ‘experimental subjects’ – patients with illnesses. Most clinical science involves observing or measuring in some way the phenomena of disease in a living person, rather than a dead one in the autopsy room, usually with some special technique. Thus, in the post-war years at the Postgraduate Medical School, John McMichael used the cardiac catheter to measure pressures within the heart while Sheila Sherlock used the liver biopsy needle to take specimens of the liver from jaundiced patients to make a more accurate diagnosis.


pages: 742 words: 166,595

The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40 by Jonathon Sullivan, Andy Baker

An Inconvenient Truth, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, phenotype, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), the scientific method, Y Combinator

This abnormal form of hemoglobin can still carry oxygen, but its accumulation in the blood is a marker for the metabolic syndrome, the onset of Type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. I suspect HbA1c may also exert direct pathological effects, although this is not known for certain. An important systematic analysis of the data on progressive resistance exercise (that is, actual training) by Irvine and Taylor,22 encompassing 9 randomized controlled trials and 372 experimental subjects, found that strength training led to reductions in HbA1c in patients with Type 2 diabetes. Data on the beneficial effect of resistance training on insulin sensitivity and metabolic syndrome goes back decades,23 although its implications have been slow to percolate up into the consciousness of the public, or even the modern medical mind.


pages: 573 words: 163,302

Year's Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

air freight, Black Swan, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, gravity well, job automation, Kuiper Belt, phenotype, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, semantic web

“I don’t think anyone will be hurt by knowing calculus, do you?” Solada murmured, when Leslie explained why she was there. “You’re a biologist,” said Leslie. “You know how many forms you have to fill out to do human experimentation. If I want to ask a dozen freshmen whether they’d buy a cookie for a dollar, I have to fill out forms.” “Our experimental subjects filled out their forms,” said Solada. “The viruses fell slightly outside our predicted parameters and got transmitted to a few people close to the original test subjects and then a few people close to them. This is a problem we will remedy in future trials, I assure you.” A grad student with wire-rimmed glasses poked her head around the door.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

Campbell had also encouraged Asimov as much for what he represented as for what he was in himself. The editor had successfully given ideas to established writers, but he wondered whether it might be possible to build an author from the ground up, and Asimov came along at just the right time to serve as an experimental subject. In a letter, Campbell referred to him as “the fan who’s been trying to be a writer,” which was precisely how he saw him—as a representative, located conveniently nearby, of a rising generation of fans who had grown up with the magazine. It didn’t occur to him to lavish the same attention on Pohl, who never sold Campbell a story that he wrote on his own.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

As with previous CIA torture practice, for the program to be effective there had to be a range of professionals willing to assist. These included the two psychologists who helped devise the torture program over a period of seven years and were paid $81 million for their services.106 On one occasion they were escorted to Thailand, where Abu Zubaydah was being held, and given the opportunity to use the detainee as an experimental subject on whom to perfect the techniques they were developing, which directly drew on past CIA expertise in the field. In bidding for the contract, the psychologists recommended such techniques as “The attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, water-board, use of diapers, use of insects, and mock burial.”


Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

The currently ascendant European-style practice of monogamy is just one marriage system. Things like this are sometimes not easy to see. Many biases have historically underpinned the social sciences, biases that have resulted in the neglect of key features of family life and that have assumed, for instance, that the psychology of American college students (the classic experimental subjects) is applicable everywhere. To acknowledge this, contemporary social scientists have adopted the acronym WEIRD (which stands for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic”) to describe societies that, in fact, represent only a minority of human cultures and are composed of people quite distinct from a hypothetical “average” human.15 Indeed, roughly 85 percent of human societies have permitted polygyny at some point, and polygyny remains legal or generally accepted for at least part of the population in forty-one countries worldwide, primarily in Africa and Asia.16 And according to a survey conducted from 2000 to 2010, in twenty-six out of the thirty-five countries with polygamy data available, between 10 percent and 53 percent of women aged fifteen to forty-nine were in polygamous relationships.17 The minority of societies in the anthropological and historical record that have practiced monogamy fall into two broad categories at opposite extremes.


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

If you have the emotional discipline that this rule requires, Bght l d for e you will never consider a small gamble in isolation or be loss averse for a small gamble until you are actually on your deathbed—and not even then. This advice is not impossible to follow. Experienced traders in financial markets live by it every day, shielding themselves from the pain of losses by broad framing. As was mentioned earlier, we now know that experimental subjects could be almost cured of their loss aversion (in a particular context) by inducing them to “think like a trader,” just as experienced baseball card traders are not as susceptible to the endowment effect as novices are. Students made risky decisions (to accept or reject gambles in which they could lose) under different instructions.


What Makes Narcissists Tick by Kathleen Krajco

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, experimental subject, junk bonds, Norman Mailer, risk/return

Some sources have indicated a strong reaction to filth and vermin, although they had negligible reactions to the isolation. Others reacted violently to isolation in relatively clean cells. The predominant cause of breakdown in such situations is a lack of sensory stimulation (i.e., grayness of walls, lack of sound, absence of social contact, etc.). Experimental subjects exposed to this condition have reported vivid hallicinations and overwhelming fears of losing their sanity. 4. Control of Communication. This is one of the most effective methods for creating a sense of helplessness and despair. This measure might well be considered the cornerstone of the communist system of control.


pages: 647 words: 43,757

Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce

Albert Einstein, combinatorial explosion, experimental subject, finite state, functional programming, Henri Poincaré, higher-order functions, Perl 6, power law, Russell's paradox, sorting algorithm, Turing complete, Turing machine, type inference, Y Combinator

Indeed, we will see in Chapter 12 that no expression that can lead to non-terminating computations can be typed using only simple types.[9] So, instead of defining fix as a term in the language, we simply add it as a new primitive, with evaluation rules mimicking the behavior of the untyped fix combinator and a typing rule that captures its intended uses. These rules are written out in Figure 11-12. (The letrec abbreviation will be discussed below.) Figure 11-12: General Recursion The simply typed lambda-calculus with numbers and fix has long been a favorite experimental subject for programming language researchers, since it is the simplest language in which a range of subtle semantic phenomena such as full abstraction (Plotkin, 1977, Hyland and Ong, 2000, Abramsky, Jagadeesan, and Malacaria, 2000) arise. It is often called PCF. 11.11.1 Exercise [⋆⋆] Define equal, plus, times, and factorial using fix.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

If so, we should be able to catch people in the act of sensing the deep correspondences between superficially different realms that make for a useful analogy or conceptual metaphor. It’s easy to show that people sense the connection in simple metaphors based on a single dimension of space, such as HAPPY IS UP. When experimental subjects are shown words on a screen and have to evaluate whether they are positive (like agile, gracious, and sincere) or negative (like bitter, fickle, and vulgar), they are quicker when a positive word is flashed at the top of the screen or a negative word at the bottom than vice versa. 57 People are also quicker at moving their hand toward a button near their bodies to verify a sentence like Adam conveyed the message to you than to verify You conveyed the message to Adam, and vice versa when they have to move their hand to a button away from their bodies.


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Knowles and Gupta also injected it into three human volunteers (that is to say, “volunteers,” their freedom to decline having been a dubious matter), one of whom was a local man who had come to the hospital for treatment of a rat bite on his foot. This poor guy got very sick—not from the rat bite but from the injected malaria. In those experimental subjects (monkey and human) who suffered intermittent fevers, Knowles and Gupta noticed that the period of the fever cycle was one day, as distinct from the two-day or three-day cycles known for human malarias. Knowles and Gupta published a paper on the unusual parasite but didn’t give it a name. Soon afterward another set of scientists did, labeling it Plasmodium knowlesi in honor of its senior discoverer.


pages: 1,294 words: 210,361

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

Like lymphoblastic leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease is a rare illness, but the researchers did not need to look hard to find patients. Advanced Hodgkin’s disease, often accompanied by the spectral B symptoms, was uniformly fatal. Young men and women (the disease typically strikes men and women in their twenties and thirties) were often referred to the NCI as hopeless cases—and therefore ideal experimental subjects. In just three years, DeVita and Canellos thus accumulated cases at a furious clip, forty-three patients in all. Nine had been blasted with increasing fields of radiation, à la Kaplan, and still progressed inexorably to disseminated, widely metastatic disease. Others had been treated with an ad hoc mix of single agents.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

In fact, some insurance companies would rather welcome euthanasia, and would like to send patients home as soon as possible, a cynical view daily fought against by doctors. Without this relentless will to reject the inevitable, valuable lessons would be lost, and our collective ability to survive and overcome suffering would be hampered. Yet the societal impact of such efforts, along with less-noble enterprises of using terminal patients as experimental subjects, is tantamount to the denial of death until its very last act. So strong is the temporal and spatial confinement of death that the overwhelming majority of deaths (80 percent in the US, and a growing proportion in all countries: see figure 7.2 for Japan, a society with a strong family culture) takes place in hospital, very often in special intensive care units, with the bodies already removed from their social and emotional environments.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Her muscular motions were uncommonly violent.’67 Joseph Cottle recorded a rumour that another young woman was overcome by hysterical excitement, ran out of the laboratory, and rushed screaming down the street towards the Avon, where she was somewhat bizarrely reported to have ‘jumped over a large dog’ before she could be restrained and brought back. This case does not appear in Davy’s notes, but the idea that women could be made to lose their inhibitions, and might even be sexually aroused by nitrous oxide, persisted. With his experimental subjects, Davy monitored pulse rates, and required them to undergo certain standard tests, such as gazing at a candle flame and listening to bells. He wanted to record physiological changes, such as distortions of vision and hearing. But gradually he became more and more interested in subjective responses.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Serialized in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (December(?) 1986–February 1987). Thearling, Kurt (1992) “How We Will Build a Machine That Thinks.” A workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24–26. Vinge, Vernor (1966) “Bookworm, Run!” Analog (March), pp. 8–40. Early intelligence amplification story. The hero is the first experimental subject – a chimpanzee raised to human intelligence. Vinge, Vernor (1981) “True Names.” In Binary Star 5. New York: Dell. Vinge, Vernor (1983) “First Word.” Omni 10 (January). Earlier essay on “the Singularity.” “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” by Vernor Vinge, was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed. Unfortunately, the expressive rationality documented by Kahan in his experimental subjects also applies to editorialists and experts. The payoffs that determine their reputations don’t coincide with the accuracy of the predictions, since no one is keeping score. Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

A baby could experience the blooming and buzzing all its life unless it was equipped with a mental mechanism that interpreted the blooms and buzzes as the outward signs of persisting objects that follow mechanical laws. We should expect infants to show some appreciation of physics from the start. Only careful laboratory studies can tell us what it is like—rather, what it was like—to be a baby. Unfortunately, infants are difficult experimental subjects, worse than rats and sophomores. They can’t easily be conditioned, and they don’t talk. But an ingenious technique, refined by the psychologists Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon, capitalizes on one feat that infants are good at: getting bored. When infants see the same old thing again and again, they signal their boredom by looking away.


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

A venture by William Franklin into farming prompted his father to delve into the latest thinking on scientific agriculture. The possibility of starting a British silk industry propelled him into the natural history of the silkworm and the mulberry tree. He devised a new phonetic alphabet to regularize English spelling. Polly Stevenson was his experimental subject in this endeavor. “Diir Pali,” he wrote her—in a note that then introduced six invented letters (irreproducible without Franklin’s special fonts) and numerous redefinitions of use and pronunciation. He conceded that convincing anyone else to employ the new alphabet would be difficult. But it was worth trying.


pages: 1,051 words: 334,334

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

centre right, classic study, company town, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ought to be enough for anybody, plutocrats, random walk

For pity's sake, every day in Whitehall they're weighing and taking risks that make his, in this, seem almost trivial. Almost. There's something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold on—Psi Section might speak of ectoplasms—but he knows that the time has never been better, and that the exact experimental subject is in his hands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways, whose termination he knows. But he must remain open— even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. "We may all be right," he puts in his journal tonight, "so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

GRAPHS graphs in which each node is a phone number, and there is an edge between two if they engaged in a phone call over a given observation period [1, 328]. One can also use the fact that mobile phones with short-range wireless technology can detect other similar devices nearby. By equipping a group of experimental subjects with such devices and studying the traces they record, researchers can thereby build “face-to-face” graphs that record physical proximity: a node in such a graph is a person carrying one of the mobile devices, and there is an edge joining two people if they were detected to be in close physical proximity over a given observation period [140, 141].


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

I’m more reluctant to visit those I love and am bound to care for, when they’re sick, than those I care less about, and mean less to me. I adopt their disease that troubles me, and make it my own.69 Here we find him observing, more than 400 years before the experiments were done, what we know about empathy and mimesis. And he was his own experimental subject. Empathic as he was, he observed himself with detachment. This optimal relation of the self to others, and the optimal distance from oneself to achieve it, is embodied in the writings of many Renaissance writers, but as time wears on, one can feel it coming under strain. Donne has some fasci nating passages, both in his poems and in his Meditations, on the eyes and self-exploration; on seeing oneself reflected in other’s eyes.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

With the usual spaghetti of variables, it’s impossible to be certain what caused what, but the results are consistent with the idea that the disinterested justice of a decent Leviathan induces citizens to curb their impulse for revenge before it spirals into a destructive cycle. Revenge, for all its tendency to escalate, must come with a dimmer switch. If it didn’t, the Moralization Gap would inflate every affront into an escalating feud, like the experimental subjects who mashed down on each other’s fingers harder and harder with every round. Not only does revenge not always escalate, especially in civil societies with the rule of law, but we shouldn’t expect it to. The models of the evolution of cooperation showed that the most successful agents dial back their tit-for-tatting with contrition and forgiveness, especially when trapped in the same boat with other agents.


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

He required the same of his people, for such was his devotion that he went beyond the teachings of Islam without even knowing it, bending such rules as stood in his way as though they were made of rubber, and at the same time telling himself that, no, he never violated the Prophet's Holy Word, or Allah's Will. How could he be doing that? He was helping to bring the world back to the Faith. The prisoners, the experimental subjects, were all condemned men in one way or another. Even the thieves, lesser criminals, had four times violated the Holy Koran, and they had probably committed other crimes as well, perhaps-probably, he told himself-those worthy of death. Every day they were informed of the time for prayer, and though they knelt and bowed and mouthed the prayers, you could tell by watching them on the TV monitor that they were merely going through the ritual, not truly praying to Allah in the manner prescribed.