July 2010 – idiolect

Links for June-July 2010

‘Neuroplasticity is a dirty word’
Mind Hacks review by Mark Changizi ‘Mind Hacks over stacks of facts’
Jon Ronson on criminal profiling ‘It’s an ungainly, dull fact, but it is real. And that makes it lovely.’
thejohnnycashproject.com
Immensely pleasing Guardian portal from Phil Gyford
YouTube: Amazing Octopus Camoflage
Wikipedia: Twelve leverage points for intervening in complex systems
The Trouble With Intuition (Simons & Chabris contra Gladwell’s Blink)
David Harvey and the Crises of Capitalism (animated!)
TED Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man
Wikipedia’s intriguing List of countries by tax revenue as percentage of GDP
“the least heralded migration in American history”: ‘At the height of the Depression….over 100,000 Americans had applied for jobs working in brand new factories in Soviet Russia’
Beer: don’t automatically blame the brewer
Newsweek ‘The Creativity Crisis’ (evidence creativity can be taught)
Edge.org Dream-logic, the internet and artificial thought By David Gelernter (The ebb and flow of concentration is essential to human intelligence)
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research ‘If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started’
Vaughan lucid on cognitivism: ‘According to the Freudian model, the unconscious mind exists below the level of our awareness but still operates in terms of personal meaning. Contrast this with the cognitive model of the mind in which the conscious mind is interpretable in terms of personal meaning but the unconscious mind is ‘subpersonal’ or only interpretable in terms of computation or neurobiology.’
Age-related IQ decline is reduced markedly after adjustment for the Flynn effect.

Viewed as a language, theory has no substantive content; it is a set of tautologies. Its function is to serve as a filing system for organizing empirical material and facilitating our understanding of it; and the criteria by which it is to be judged are appropriate to a filing system. Are the categories clearly and precisely defined? Are they exhaustive? Do we know where to file each individual item, or is there considerable ambiguity? Is the system of headings and subheadings so designed that we can quickly find an item we want, or must we hunt from place to place? Are the items we shall want to consider jointly filed? Does the filing system avoid elaborate cross-references?

Milton Friedman, in Essays in Positive Economics (1953). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (thanks Dan!)