links, links, links

[gusl]

Ed Fredkin - Five big questions with pretty simple answers. This paper makes it somewhat clearer what digital mechanics is about. It talks about the physical consequences of the finite nature assumption. I wonder if this theory elegantly explains previous results. Does it "compress" our knowledge? (the analogy here is the information-theoretic view of learning)


Some interesting Pinker papers

The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about it?
We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g., words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g., speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic.

Language as an Adaptation to the Cognitive Niche


a nice list of science books


courtesy of edge.org:

Susskind vs. Smolin on the Anthropic Principle

CURIOUS MINDS: HOW A CHILD BECOMES A SCIENTIST

A Talk with Daniel Gilbert about Affective Forecasting. Our errors in affective forecasting are like optical illusions rather than like illiteracy.

[Gilbert] points out that "many economists believe that affective forecasting errors are impediments to rational action and hence should be eliminated—just as we would all agree that illiteracy or innumeracy are bad things that deserve to be eradicated. But cognitive errors may be more like optical illusions than they are like illiteracy. The human visual system is susceptible to a variety of optical illusions, but if someone offered to surgically restructure your eyes and your visual cortex so that parallel lines no longer appeared to converge on the horizon, you should run as far and fast as possible."

Judith Rich Harris - Children Don't do Things Half Way [why children turn out the way they do]

The core of her theory seems to be that parents don't have a big effect on children's personality, and that the "nurture" part comes almost entirely from their peer groups, in the following 3 ways:

HARRIS: Yes, it's true: kids who belong to the same group were similar to each other to begin with. That's not a valid criticism of my theory — it's one of the premises of my theory. Children identify with a group because they see that it consists of people like themselves. But once they've identified with it, three things happen. They become even more like their groupmates in some ways, less like them in other ways, and the differences between groups get wider.

The first effect is called assimilation. It's how socialization occurs — how children acquire the behaviors and attitudes of their culture. It's how the children of immigrants end up with the language and accent of their peers, not the language or accent of their parents.

The second is differentiation within the group. I think this is where most of the nongenetic variation in personality comes from. The members of a group don't act as a group all the time — sometimes they act as individuals. They vie with each other for dominance. They choose or are chosen for various roles and niches within the group — "group clown," for instance. These roles can be very stable — the dominant members tend to remain on top and those on the bottom tend to remain at the bottom — and I believe they have permanent effects on the personality.

The third thing that happens is called the group contrast effect. When kids split up into two groups — girls versus boys, jocks versus nerds — the differences between groups become exaggerated. The girls become more girlish. The nerds become nerdier. The kids who pride themselves on being weird or bad (these are often kids who were rejected by other groups) become weirder and badder. There's also likely to be hostility between groups, especially at times when group identification is salient, even though individual members of different groups might be friends with each other at other times.

Comments

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

Good links. Thank you.