Tag: quotations

On the importance of procrastination

“I had been preparing myself (though I did not always realize it) from the day that I was born, preparing myself, wrote Harsnet (typed Goldberg), but always aware of the dangers of beginning too soon. For there is nothing worse, he wrote, than beginning too soon. It is much worse to begin too soon, he wrote, than not to begin at all. Much worse to begin too soon than to begin too late. Much worse to begin too soon and realize one has begun too soon than to begin too late and realize one has begun too late. Much worse to begin too soon and realize one is inadequately prepared then to begin too late and realize one is over-prepared. Much worse to begin too soon and reach the end too quickly, typed Goldberg, squinting at the manuscript before him, than to begin at the right time and discover one has nothing to begin. That is why, wrote Harsnet, I have been preparing myself for that moment for a long time, that is why I have cleared the decks and prepared the ground, because unless the decks are cleared and the ground prepared there is little hope is succeeding in what one has planned to do, little hope of achieving anything of lasting value, though lasting is a relative term and so is value and whatever it is one has planned to do is certain to be altered in the process, which does not of course mean, he wrote, that one can start anywhere at any time. It is just because whatever one has planned to do is bound to be altered in the process that it is important to start at the right moment, he wrote. It is just because whatever one has planned is bound to change as one proceeds that it is fatal to start too soon or too late, though it may be no less fatal, he wrote (and Goldberg typed), to start at the right time, for then there is no excuse, no excuse whatsoever. I have done with excuses, wrote Harsnet (typed Goldberg), I have done with excuses towards myself and towards others, that is the meaning of the right time, he wrote, that I have done with excuses, that I have used up all the excuses and reached the bottom of excuses, that I have wrung the neck of excuses, that I have settled the hash of excuses. To begin at the right time, he wrote, means to be done with the excuses once and for all. Excuses, wrote Goldberg in the margin of his typescript with a felt-tip pen, an end to excuses…”

From The Big Glass by Josipovici

Individual differences (continued)

“I am surprised that the author has used this data set. In my lab, when we collect data with such large individual differences, we refer to the data as ‘junk’. We then redesign our stimuli and/or experimental procedures, and run a new experiment. The junk data never appear in publications”

—An anonymous reviewer in 2005, commenting on research that sought to model individual differences in cognition.

From the intro to Navarro, D. J.; Griffiths, T. L.; Steyvers, M. & Lee, M. D. Modeling individual differences using Dirichlet processes. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 2006, 50, 101-122

Competence vs. performance

It’s all Chomsky’s fault (Chomsky 1965, p. 4):

“We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). […] A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that have been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance.”

So the idea is that people are trying to do C but only manage to do P, because of various constraints. We (children, adults, theorists) see (imperfect) P, and want to infer C. We go to school and go through various rigmaroles to better approximate C. The same distinction is applied in reasoning. Various options: people are irrational (with respect to C); maybe C = P, if we look hard enough to see it. Or bright people have P = C. Or bright people want P = C.

What fascinates me in reasoning is the role played by small groups of experts who produce particular systems of reasoning – logical calculi, probabilistic machinery – along with proofs that they have properties which they argue are reasonable properties to have. Then others come along to use the systems. Hey, this looks like a good logic to know; maybe it’ll help make my arguments better if I use it. Maybe this probability calculus will make it easier to diagnose illness in my patients. And so on. Then somebody else comes along and decides whether or not we’re consistent with a competence theory’s judgements, or whether we’re interpreting things a different way; whether another competence theory (application thereof) might be more appropriate for a given situation or a different psychological model of the situation.

Easy to get tied up in knots.

References

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.

disorder

It may be taken for granted that any attempt at defining disorder in a formal way will lead to a contradiction. This does not mean that the notion of disorder is contradictory. It is so, however, as soon as I try to formalize it.

–Hans Freudenthal, cited in Michiel van Lambalgen’s PhD thesis

What is cognition?

People often talk about “cognition” as if it means “conscious thinking”. But that’s not how the term is used in cognitive science – at least not always! Here’s a little collection of quotations by folk attempting to define the concept:

1. Williamson (2006) – analytic philosophy:

“Cognition is usually defined as something like the process of acquiring, retaining and applying knowledge. To a first approximation, therefore, cognitive science is the science of knowing. Knowing is a relation between the knower and the known. Typically, although not always, what is known involves the environment external to the knower. Thus knowing typically involves a relation between the agent and the external environment. It is not internal to the agent, for the internal may be the same whether or not it is related to the external in a way that constitutes knowing.”

2. LeDoux (1995) – psychology:

“If cognition is defined broadly to include sensory information processing, such as that occurring in the sensory thalamus and/or sensory cortex, as well as the processing that occurs in complex association areas of cortex in the frontal lobes or hippocampus, then emotional processing by the amygdala is highly dependent on cognitive processing. If cognitive processing is defined narrowly to include only the higher mental functions most likely mediated by complex association cortex, then emotion is not necessarily dependent on prior cognitive processing.”

3. Clark and Grush (1999) – philosophy:

“Is not the notion of a truly cognitive agent, at root, the notion of something like a reflective agent? What is needed, we believe, is just a principled way to make this idea (of a reflective agent) precise and to purge it of its original (but probably superficial) associations with episodes of conscious reflection. […] Cognizers, on our account, must display the capacity for environmentally decoupled thought and the contemplation of options. The cognizer is thus the being who can think or reason about its world without directly engaging those aspects of the world that its thoughts concern.”

4. Neisser (1967) – cognitive psychology:

“… the term “cognition” refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations… Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary.”

References

Clark, A., & Grush, R. (1999). Towards a cognitive robotics. Adaptive Behavior, 7 (1), 5-16.

LeDoux, J. E. (1995). Emotion: Clues from the brain. Annual Reviews of Psychology, 46, 209-235.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. Meredith Publishing Company.

Williamson, T. (2006). Can cognition be factorized into internal and external components? In R. J. Stainton (Ed.), Contemporary debates in cognitive science. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Psycho-neuron-babblist…

This is brilliant (thanks to the BPS Research Digest).

Lord Falconer hit the nail on the head:

“Why are we talking about the precise detail of Gordon’s personality traits… why aren’t we talking about the substance of the issues?”

“Forget all this… sort of psycho-babble from… the Penguin guide to… And LET’S LOOK AT THE REAL ISSUES!”

“You’re a most irresponsible programme for doing all of this.”

“You don’t need a man who’s a psycho-neuron-babblist to come and say is he connecting… for goodness sake.”

Some advice on factor analysis from the 60s

“What are the alternatives to factor (or component) analysis if one has a correlation whose analysis one cannot escape? There is only one alternative method of analysing a correlation matrix which needs to be mentioned, and that is to LOOK AT IT.” (p. 204)

“Quite the best alternative to factor analysis is to avoid being saddled with the analysis of a correlation matrix in the first place. (Just to collect a lot of people, to measure them all on a lot of variables, and then to compute a correlation matrix is, after all, not a very advanced way of investigating anything.)” (p. 205)

Andrew S. C. Ehrenberg (1962). Some Questions About Factor Analysis. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series D (The Statistician), 12(3), 191-208. Based on “Factor Analysis in Market Research” published in 1959 as Research Paper No. 1 by the British Market Research Bureau Limited.

How perception determines your world

From a lovely article by John Hull:

“Sighted people, for the most part, do not recognise themselves as sighted. What I mean is that they seldom appreciate the extent to which they live in a world which is a projection from their sighted bodies. This leads to the common mistake of thinking that one’s own world is actually the only world, and so sighted people tend to unconsciously look upon those who are not in their sighted world as being without any world, and thus to be pitied. It took me a long time to realise that blindness is actually a world, a distinctive human way of living and being.”

— John Hull (10 April 2008)

Publish AND perish?

From Exploiting the Young by John R. Lucas:

“The fundamental activity of the university is thinking, but it is only slowly and fitfully that thinking is congealed into publicly accessible thoughts. The intense arguments in the half hour after the seminar and before hall, the afternoon spent with the graduate student, the proof of a lemma vital for a colleague’s theorem thought up over a game of chess in the Mathematical Institute, the unlikely reference vouchsafed during lab tea, the long country walk exploring a new interpretation of an old master—these are pre-eminently the activities of the young, but none register unless in the fullness of time they result in a publication. True, even in old age one seeks to continue in the ways of one’s youth, but as one concentrates on getting one piece of work finished, one has to leave intriguing by-ways unexplored, and resolutely refuse to move on yet to fresh pastures. I am more disciplined, more concentrated in my thinking now than I was when I was young, but for that very reason less wide-ranging, less sparky, less ebullient. I have gained in competence, but lost in fizz.

“Does fizz matter? I think it does. We do not need to have universities in order to encourage people to do well tasks that other people can approve and assess: what is special to universities is that they are places where people are able to think things that others had not thought of before. We damage ourselves if we pressure the young to publish what they hope will be approved-of works in order to get a living wage, we are acting contrary to our most important values if we stick with a pay scale that rewards academics less for doing what is most important than for the later residue of such activities.”

Happily ever after

Great podcast over at the Maudsley. My favourite bits:

  • Robert Plomin: “… you can’t come up with a personality scale that doesn’t show about 30% heritability… but it isn’t enough to show it’s all determined. […] I don’t really think the genetics of this is all that relevant myself.”
    Robin Murray, slightly taken aback: “Well this is… is a first.”
  • Rachel Perkins: “But actually I have to say that… it always strikes me as the last resort that you go to, you know… survival value for primitive man seems to be when we run out of explanatory ideas.”