Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
“Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.”
—Stuart Sutherland in the International Dictionary of Psychology (1989)
“Fodor doesn’t know the frame problem from a bunch of bananas.” (Hayes 1987, p. 132)
(Here’s one explanation.)
Hayes, P. J. (1987). What the frame problem is and isn’t. In The robot’s dilemma: The frame problem in artificial intelligence. Ed. Z. W. Pylyshyn. Ablex Publishing.
Tamara Russell and colleagues have discovered that, despite stereotypes to the contrary, men did better in a theory of mind test than women. The authors argue that the men used a systemizing strategy, thus, I presume were just pretending to empathise.
Interesting article by Robert Dover (2007) on how SIS and co help out the British arms trade. There are some nice little insights from (anonymous) interviews, for instance:
The success of an Ambassador’s period of tenure is partly judged upon whether they have assisted in securing a significant quantity of export trade, including arms sales, for UK companies (interview 24IS).
The author’s conclusions:
This research has shown intelligence to be used in support of British-based private commercial businesses, and occasionally in providing intelligence on the negotiating positions of rival manufacturers. This in itself raises some important questions about the role of the state in the private sphere, and particularly with reference to using sensitive assets that imply that this industry has a core governmental function. The elite interviews conducted with government officials revealed an interesting trend of eliding the interests of the state with the commercial success of a set of industrial manufacturers. That the elision of interests has been allowed to develop is no surprise; what is more surprising is that there is little critical engagement among officials, politicians and the intelligence agencies on the issue of their very commercial role, or of how this work fits into ‘New’ Labour’s foreign policy with its ‘ethical dimension’
Dover, R. (2007). For queen and company: The role of intelligence in the UK’s arms trade. Political Studies, 55(4):683-708.
“Psychology – like Psyche – is a beautiful bastard. It promises much to young students who specialize in it. Yet at its heart it has been eternally homeless. It has tried to locate its parents in physiology, physics, or even in art – to be rebuffed by all these alleged parents as either not solid enough – or not sufficiently beautiful. So it continues to wander in the World – between societies – looking for its place. At times it finds a temporary place where there is some ideological order for its products – like tests or ways to re-direct blame for various actions between groups in a society. Yet such applied success – selling one’s actions while hiding one’s soul – does not lead to the latter’s discovery of its own identity, unsuccessfully sought after in Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats, or (currently) in fMRI pictures.”
—Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa, from Chapter 1 of The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology
“I did not make a deliberate decision to adopt a particular methodology: I had the good fortune to work alongside gifted colleagues from backgrounds in different disciplines, and their various techniques seemed to be producing results. With hindsight, I should describe how one learns from both experiments and intelligent software in terms of the distinction that philosophers draw between the correspondence and the coherence theories of truth. An assertion is true according to the first theory if it corresponds to some state of affairs in the world; true according to the second if it coheres with a set of assertions constituting a general body of knowledge. Experiments provide information about correspondence with the facts, but they exert a dangerous pull in the direction of empirical pedantry, where the only things that count are facts, no matter how limited their purview. Computer programs provide information about the coherence of a set of assumptions, but they exert a dangerous pull in the direction of systematic delusion, where all that counts is internal consistency, no matter how remote from reality. Give up one approach and you turn into a Gradgrind, the teacher in Dicken’s novel Hard Times, whose only concern is with the facts; give up the other and you become an architect for the Flat Earth Society. Those, at least, are the dangers.”
From the prologue to Mental Models by Philip Johnson-Laird
From an Appendix to An R and S-PLUS Companion to Applied Regression:
“A cynical view of SEMs is that their popularity in the social sciences reflects the legitimacy that the models appear to lend to causal interpretation of observational data, when in fact such interpretation is no less problematic than for other kinds of regression models applied to observational data. A more charitable interpretation is that SEMs are close to the kind of informal thinking about causal relationships that is common in social-science theorizing, and that, therefore, these models facilitate translating such theories into data analysis.”
Apparently many NSA grant codes begin “MDA904”. Try Google Scholar – often authors acknowledge the NSA. Quite a lot of hardcore pure maths. Other stuff too: e.g. bits of logic (satisfiability checking), there’s some probability (with tenuous link to psychology), and a bit of cog sci (an ACT-R model of how people search for information).
What a brilliant way to begin a paper:
“A friend of ours, who was a brilliant mathematician, has been hospitalized because of long-term abuse of hallucinogenic drugs. We decide to give him a digital clock for his room. However, his doctor suggests that the hour and minute displays together might be too confusing. So, we put tape over the minute display, turning our gift into a digital hour clock.”
(from over here.)