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Re: Stanford Diet Study Casts Doubt on Calorie Counting - Bloomberg

toddistark — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 02:05:39 -0000

I think that there is a line of evidence suggesting that a high percentage of people who successfully maintain a reduced weight over long periods of time do indeed *track* intake and activity but do not necessarily go that additional step of trying to do sone sort of energy compensation as a strategy.

I strongly suspect that most of the benefit people sometimes get from “calorie counting” is actually a behavioral effect from being explicit what they are doing rather than mindless. People are usually surprised at how much they’ve been eating when they finally try to track it accurately.

I think various factors conspire to make “balancing energy” a weak strategy, most of them have to do with how difficult it is to keep accurate track and how difficult it is to simply adjust intake by force of will without also taking things like reward and satiety and preferences and cravings and compensatory hunger from activity into account.

One other thing I think has been clearly shown to be a dead end is the search for a magic proportion of macronutrients that helps anyone lose weight and keep it off. I don’t understand why that failed line of inquiry still shows up in articles as if it were some sort of eternal dialectic of carbs vs fats that wil never be solved. It was simply the wrong way to think about weight control I suggest.

Re: Why Do You Read What You Read? (A Strategy for Choosing Books)

toddistark — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 13:12:20 -0000

I've been thinking that while "what to read" is a useful question in prioritizing your list if you are already planning to read a lot, "how to read" is actually a more vital question for our development. With that in mind, I suggest that Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions," one of the first books on analytical reading written for a general audience, is still near the top of the list. They present the still very relevant rationale for a question-based reading strategy, a framework of questions for parsing the organization of a piece and identifying the reasoning in what we are reading, and then detailed questions for assessing the argumentation in the piece.

It is very accessible and provides exercises to develop practical skills and in my opinion also reflects the authors' deep understanding of what it takes to understand and evaluate what someone else has written, while neither missing their point nor accepting their claims uncritically, the two different mistakes we typically make in reading difficult or controversial material. There's a free copy of the PDF online but I recommend getting a paper copy so you can make margin notes to engage the thinking of Browne and Keeley yourself, which is the point of the book.

http://smartthinking.ir/dl/...

Re: Avoid These 5 Traps that Can Destroy Your Good Habits.

toddistark — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 10:37:26 -0000

Ok, yes, I've read through more of your materials and now I see you take a distinctive individual differences approach. Thanks very much.

Re: Avoid These 5 Traps that Can Destroy Your Good Habits.

toddistark — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:03:44 -0000

Hi Gretchen,

If I understand these tips, you seem to be implying that perfect compliance with a habit is the most conducive strategy to long term persistence. Especially principle 4, which I'll call your "zero tolerance" or "no excuses" principle. I understand the general idea that each deviation from a habit reflects a lapse in responsibility for maintaining that habit, but did you also mean to imply that even planned or controlled lapses in compliance are always destructive to maintaining the habit in the long run?

If so, I'm curious, what line of evidence supports the principle that sticking to a habit without ever deviating from it leads to better long term success? My intuition is that for a habit where we are continually pitting ourselves against determined resistance, occasionally deliberate breaks from the habit could potentially be beneficial.

While consistency is an important driver of habit formation and maintenance, I'm not sure that extends to perfect compliance. And the principle that we shouldn't beat ourselves up with recriminations and regrets over lapses (#2) seems difficult to reconcile in practice with the zero tolerance principle. Do you think my intuition is misleading me?

Re: Kindred spirits

toddistark — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:02:33 -0000

I'll offer an opposing side to the anti-history argument. If we don't have a grasp of the intellectual history of a line of thinking, and a concept of the philosophical and research traditions it is based upon, we don't have any realistic sense of whose shoulders we are standing on and why. That means we are going to base our decisions about the ideas on our own experience and on a narrow range of sources. I think that limits our capacity for reasoned thought. I disagree about the value of the history of the ideas. They are important in the long run.

I find that often people who are very clever but neglect to drag with them some recognition of the traditions they rely upon often tend to go off on strange tangents making avoidable mistakes and never realize it until they are too committed to turn back. They may know the background but their writing doesn't take it into account, so they tend to neglect aspects of it that are not in their mind. And their readers of course may not know the conceptual background and context at all and think the current writer manufactured the ideas themselves.

Re: If My Opponent Believes That, Then I Surely Can’t

toddistark — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:42:00 -0000

I found the source article difficult to read because of something about the tone of the writing, but I like the use of examples.

Recently I've been thinking that most "cognitive biases" seem linked back in an important way to something I'll call the "transparency bias" which I think in a sense a kind of master schema that drives them.
By transparency bias I simply mean the automatic and unavoidable tendency to feel that the world and other people are exactly as we perceive them to be. It's probably derived from the fundamental need for animals to act on signals as they perceive and process them.

Hominids of course have this particularly remarkable capacity to ignore their own immediate processing priorities or delay response to them, which we have culturally built into philosophies of reflection and philosophies of doubt. I think the function of those is straightforward for the most part, compensating for the transparency bias.
I'm not saying something new of course, I'm sure this is part of what ancient philosophers were getting at, and many since them. That's the point, I think it is fundamental and might be put in psychological as well as philosophical terms in order to learn more about it and link epistemology back better to science.

If people generally reason through specific perspectives or lenses, comprised of cognitive schema (and I believe they do), and these lenses can vary, and the transparency bias seems to present an asymmetry. We each think we are reasoning in a very straightforward way about our own ideas and those of people we disagree with. The asymmetry is that we tend to reason more carefully and with more precision about our own ideas, and to generalize and stereotype opposing views more. That relates back to all the literature on cognitive conservatism, egocentric bias, and "myside bias" as well as attitude polarization.

To get to the point at last, I think this list is a very good set of examples in which our natural tendency to perspectival asymmetry is being demonstrated most dramatically. The relentless drift toward seeing opposing viewpoints in a more general form and our own in a more nuanced and flexible way.

Transparency bias --> perspectival asymmetry --> seeing our own view or perceived supportive views in a more nuanced and flexible way than opposing or perceived threatening views.

Does that make any sense?

Re: Three Ways to Catch a Liar | In Their Own Words | Big Think

toddistark — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 02:25:51 -0000

I note that a number of reactions here perceive this as a book promotion article rather than useful information. I don't disagree that Ekman is promoting his book here to some extent, and I don't disagree that the information here is limited.

I do however want to make the point that he is very explicit (and I agree with him) that these identifiers are effectively skills that need to be internalized through practice with specific strategic applications, not things you can just learn from a list to look for. That is, he is identifying a form of expertise, not a set of formal rules you can learn from an article or a book.

So it is not at all in appropriate to just give a few examples and principles consider that as a representation of the ideas. Reading the book won't give you the skills any more than reading the article, just by virtue of listing more indicators, it will just give you more details. That's the general point I think he is making, and I tend to agree. If you're looking to learn lie-detection by reading about it, then I think you'll ultimately be disappointed regardless of the length and the amount of detail.

Re: Post | Moments of Genius | My Account | Big Think | Big Think

toddistark — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:11:30 -0000

I think one of the keys to understanding naturalistic cognition is to recognize that it is fundamentally different from either formal or informal logic. It most likely is rooted in something akin to a network of tacit knowledge and probably relies on something like a Bayesian modification process. That is completely different from our intuitive sense of how we think. We explain, which is what shows up in the light, but it isn't explanation that drives our thinking, explanation is one of the tricks we learn based on the underlying dark cognitive processes.

Rationalist thinking is mostly based on the idea that the dark part is just a machine for generating good explanations and adaptive behaviors and that we can tweak the gears to get it produce formal logic if we know where the clunky parts are.

I don't think it works that way, I think the dark parts can be compensated by various tricks and strategies in order to shape our thinking with effort toward hypothetical rationality, but we never escape the basic boundness and non-rationality of the dark parts of cognition.

I think that's why just learning about biases and heuristics has relatively little practical effect on clear thinking, whereas people do, with great effort over time, learn to compensate for biases under some conditions, and mostly by after-the-fact habits and tactics once they notice clues of their dark cognition doing things that are inconsistent with their current conscious objectives.

Re: Making Education Fun Through Game-Based Learning

toddistark — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:02:20 -0000

The focus here is the factors that are needed to make games engaging, but the other side is that they also have to teach the right things. There are a lot of engaging games that teach useless things. The educational challenge is more than just adding games to learning, it's using games *for* learning.

Re: Why Religious People Are Scared of Atheists | Belief | AlterNet

toddistark — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 13:42:02 -0000

@Julian: Thanks very much, we seem to agree on the substantive points in spite of using some terms differently. I think you're right and that there is some data showing that failures of deductive logic are a relatively small source of error under most realistic conditions, although I wouldn't run very far with that either. I never meant to imply that logic wasn't crucial for detecting and correcting some kinds of errors, on the contrary. I just think superior logical precision is an inadequate basis for assuming that our thinking is superior in general. E.g. the best logicians are not *always* the best thinkers, even though logic and thinking are not _entirely_ independent. We probably agree that really poor logicians do not tend to make great thinkers, and there are many notable examples of people who are or were both great logicians and great thinkers (Aristotle and Bertand Russell are the ones that come most immediately to my mind). So I think there is a relationship between being smart and being good at being logically consistent, but I think the relationship varies along the curve. Too much inconsistency is bad for thinking because we wouldn't detect and find otherwise obvious errors. Like the simpleton trying to reason about a complex argument and not even realizing that what they already know contradicts what they are saying. On the other hand, too much blind consistency with premises is less bad, but still not optimal for good thinking ("a foolish consistency" as the saying goes) if we never question the premises we are reasoning from. We've probably beaten this horse to death at this point since we don't really seem to be disagreeing on much. Thanks again!

Re: Why Religious People Are Scared of Atheists | Belief | AlterNet

toddistark — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:58:52 -0000

@Julian: I don't want to put too fine a point on this by any means but to me of course it's not neccessarily a bad thing to deviate from logical consistency from time to time. If deviating from logical consistency were a bad thing we would never get beyond what we can discover through deduction from first principles. We would still be doing pre-Aristotelian science. And one of the hallmarks of human cognition is to me our ability to imagine things that seem false or even ridiculous at first. Surely consistency is a valuable norm that lets us extend our knowledge through logic most of the time and see where one idea conflicts with another, but it's not an absolute best practice of good thinking under all conditions by any means. Perhaps some would say that logical consistency is central to communication, in order to convey the logic of an argument. And perhaps logical consistency really is central to an Objectivist, or other extreme rationalist, but I'm not sure I really understand the way those folks think well enough to converse about it usefully. I think most of us recognize that logic is very powerful, but we don't fail at thinking because we fail at logic most of the time, we fail more often because of systematic biases and shortcuts I think.

Re: Why Religious People Are Scared of Atheists | Belief | AlterNet

toddistark — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:23:32 -0000

@Julian: To me, it seems clearly the case that religion is not required for oppression (although it is also clearly the case that religion often reinforces oppression). No, personally, I wouldn't say that challenging ideas is any kind of intolerance. An open society requires us to challenge ideas. But we are going way, way beyond just challenging ideas when we say that someone praying or celebrating a holiday is itself a danger to other people. At that point we are relying on a whole, and to me very dubious, rationalist framework that assumes that simply deviating from scientific consensus or logical consistency is itself a neccessarily bad thing and a slippery slope. Yes it can be, and yes I agree it is a bad omen for practicing science, but so can intolerant scientism have those same downfalls. It is the ethic of inquiry that upholds positive rationalism in my opinion, not simply being certain that we are right. On that rather abstract point, I don't want to argue, just state an opinion. Respectfully, Todd.

Re: Why Religious People Are Scared of Atheists | Belief | AlterNet

toddistark — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:32:18 -0000

My perception is in agreement with the people who say that we (meaning atheists) often come off as arrogant, intolerant asshats, at least many of our most outspoken and well spoken brethren. I also agree that being right (or more precisely being certain that we're right) is not an excuse for being intolerant. I for one would like to see more tolerance of innocuous religious practices (and of whatever it is in human nature that makes so many of us religious), just as I'd like to see more tolerance of non-belief ... but I find this position gets me labelled as the worst of all scum, an "accomodationist," (to be said with a definite sneer). I know, I know, for many atheists there's no such thing as an innocuous religious practice, and being factually accurate and not falling for superstition is the ultimate intellectual priority. Still, the sneering doesn't quite go along with attitudes that I think support rational inquiry. Sometimes I think we should take the PR problem more seriously. We certainly aren't arrogant and offensive for existing, but that doesn't stop us from being arrogant and offensive by our own efforts sometimes.

Re: What Happened When I Yelled Back at the "Christians" Calling My Wife a Murderer | Sex & Relationships | AlterNet

toddistark — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:20:17 -0000

The following recipient(s) could not be reached: todd.stark@proactiveusa.com. Email subject: [alternet] Re: What Happened When I Yelled Back at the "Christians" Calling My Wife a Murderer | Sex & Relationships | AlterNet

Re: What Happened When I Yelled Back at the "Christians" Calling My Wife a Murderer | Sex & Relationships | AlterNet

toddistark — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:06:12 -0000

Re: What Happened When I Yelled Back at the "Christians" Calling My Wife a Murderer | Sex & Relationships | AlterNet

toddistark — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 16:04:09 -0000

@Teresa: I have to say this is one of very few responses on this issue I've ever seen that actually seems to be based fairly solidly on Christian moral principles, at least as I incompletely understand them. The assumption that judging people based on the gross circumstances that might bring them to a clinic is the same as "helping" them is about as far from a Christian act as I can imagine. There's wanting to help on the one hand, and then on the other hand there's taking action that has a chance of actually helping. These protestors seem to be nothing more than a (usually) relatively non-violent species of terrorists wanting to bring attention without taking real responsibility for the cost of their own actions.

Re: Daniel Pink on How the 21st Century Brain Affects Creativity

toddistark — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:48:01 -0000

I apologize for apparently playing the cynic here, it wasn't my intention. I guess my background is not typical for the readership here, I come from a cog sci and psych background and was looking for a different sort of appetizer for a book on motivational research. I jumped in out of context. My mistake. It won't stop me from reading and hopefully learning from it. Thanks again! And apologies to Keen and Pink as well.

Re: Daniel Pink on How the 21st Century Brain Affects Creativity

toddistark — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:47:29 -0000

Interesting point.

I recognize that the traditional ethic of scholarship has shifted out of importance for most people because of our perceived need for more information to act on more quickly. I think you are in the mainstream there with your comments. There's a certain amount of good in that shift, I agree. That is, I think, at least when the information is processed through legitimate expertise. "Those with the knowledge" as you say, but knowledge means more than just having access to a lot of information!!

It seems to me that the research on performance of firefighters and other people who have to make fast, intelligent decisions shows that rapid cognition can't just rely on surface information, it requires us to have a deeper understanding of the situation rapidly assessed through shaping the individual mind via expertise and training. We now know that "intuition" is a trained result of experience, not something we automatically have just because there is a lot of information surrounding us. We know that we are subject to all sorts of cognitive biases when we just act quickly on the available information, no matter how much of it there is.

The philosophy of simply relying on being in a sea of information will drown us if we don't also have depth of understanding within each person to do the filtering and decision making.

So there are good reasons for authors to help us understand the human knowledge base a little more deeply, to help us think about it more deeply and make more intelligent decisions, in addition to giving us good new ideas to get excited about.

Thanks for giving me something to think about.

Re: Daniel Pink on How the 21st Century Brain Affects Creativity

toddistark — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:44:19 -0000

Luxury, thanks very much for helping me put this clip into better context.

Re: Daniel Pink on How the 21st Century Brain Affects Creativity

toddistark — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 18:41:22 -0000

His ideal seems reasonable, but the details of his argument seem strange to me. A lot of neuroscience savants worked hard to debunk the popular myth of the "creative right brain" because the reality of brain function is so much more interesting than that. I'm sure Pink knows that. I guess it is just too strong an archetype an too tempting to use to make a point, it will never succomb to mere science. So long as we want to imagine ourselves as "logical" people vs "creative" people I guess we'll hold onto simplistic models of how creativity really works.

I guess he wants to say that we are shifting from constrained modes of problem solving ("spreadsheets") to ones with more degrees of freedom, but the specializations of both hemispheres play an important role in all useful thinking, and creativity is a process not a hemisphere-specialization. His model of going from "compliance" to "engagement" has been a nice ideal for a long time, and it involves a lot more than brain hemisphere specialization. There's a very rich albeit still young scientific literature on the creative process and this seems to barely engage it at all.

I guess I think he's right but his view seems a little shallow on specifics and science to me. I haven't read his book, maybe I have a misleading impression from this interview.

John McCrone (2000) --> http://www.rense.com/genera...

Donald Taylot (2009) --> http://donaldhtaylor.wordpr...

Robert Ornstein --> http://www.amazon.com/Right...

Re: Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society

toddistark — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:28:18 -0000

Sadly, I have to agree with Seth.

I suspect there's a dilemma behind this, navigating between what it takes to get attention and promote ideas and inspire people to act, and what it takes to grasp a complex issue. The thinking and the work we do to promote ideas seem to have a tendency to corrupt sincere inquiry, and the mindset for being reflective and nuanced doesn't usually lead to activity that generates widespread excitement.

What I see as the core of the "pessimist" argument is not pessimistic at all, it is simply that increasing connectivity in and of itself does not solve problems. "Optimists" usually acknowledge this but their optimism consists in assuming that we will develop and apply the tools for making sense of the information.

So the pragmatic "pessimist" argument to me is mostly about *what it takes* to avoid letting commercial interest, special interests, tribalism, and self-promotion swamp the creation and availability of meaningful content. Tim Lee for example seems to assume that we will not only develop but effectively use the right tools to do this, and he doesn't worry too much about the details as far as that is concerned. My experience has been that this happens only under relatively narrow conditions, and that we do have to worry about the details of how to preserve credibility and meaningfulness in networked content. Between motivated thinkers, the ads and the narrow self-interest tend to nudge out the content in a never-ending struggle to understand each other.

I enjoy the connections I get to smart people through Twitter, and the spread of ideas, but what makes the connections possible is its very superficiality and brevity, making it a frustrating way to share more nuanced thinking at the same time. Then blogs and forums allow us to connect more deeply. But we are constantly also fighting the distractions made possible by the same technology that lets us connect.

Example. I strongly prefer reading a book of your best thoughts to a series of tweets about them, but I am likely to find out about your book from people I respect promoting it through Twitter. I perceive that the pessimistic viewpoint at its extreme would eliminate the tweets and lose the benefits of easy connectivity, but the optimistic one would replace the book with the tweets, and lose the deeper structure of your thinking. I suspect that the optimists at their most idealistic are ignorant or less indful of the deeper levels of structure neccessary for serious learning, while the pessimists at their most cynical are ignoring the power of successfully taking advantage of technology to allow trust networks that are not face to face.

kind regards,

Todd

Re: Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society

toddistark — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:13:10 -0000

This is one of the more thoughtful and inclusive pieces I've seen on this issue, thanks very much for a very good summary.

Re: I am HUGELY skeptical of the word “objectivity”.

toddistark — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:06:35 -0000

I trust that it is the use of "the word objectivity" and its use as a rhetorical device to support abuses of testing that you are skeptical of rather than the ideal of objectivity: weighing evidence independently of individual belief. My feeling is that it is probably possible and helpful to argue about the limits of testing in a specific and constructive way without attacking the ideal of objectivity? Being skeptical of objectivity per se makes ones own claims to knowing anything useful rather moot. ;)

Re: Sumner on Experts

toddistark — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:42:05 -0000

One of the valid points that I think Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) makes is that in some fields expertise doesn't neccessarily improve outcomes or predictive ability, so those fields don't really have experts in the sense of people who have privileged knowledge or justified authority. I don't think we should generallize this to all fields, but it does seem true in some. Taleb seems to be saying that the difference is the role played by rare but consequential surprises that can't bre predicted regardless of experience.

Re: 10 Principles for the Future of Learning

toddistark — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:33:55 -0000

Thank you, I like the gist of this. I do have a concern about one of the assumptions I think I see here. To me there is a classic dilemma regarding authority: we rely on it for accurate knowledge (because expertise is not evenly distributed!) and we can also be manipulated by it and rely on it too much.

The currently popular philosophy of knowledge seems to be that we are sociallizing knowledge and that our intelligence and expertise are becoming a collective web of some sort. This abstract is certainly interesting and provocative, but really it is unlikely to be true at least in the near future. The important features of individual minds don't scale to networks of humans. Individual expertise and intelligence does not appear as a property of human social networks. Also, groups are subject to fallacies just as individuals are. Those fallacies just follow a different pattern. Collective editing is not neccessarily self-correcting, it can amplify mistakes under various conditions.

So we can't just make that dilemma of authority go away by saying that we are collectively the new authority source or that there is no more need for authoritative sources or pretending that social networks are themselves experts or that expertise is becoming more evenly distributed. It clearly is not.

As of right now, there are still a few people who know much more than nearly all others about each domain. I don't say that lightly. It's a fundamental scaling that results from the effort required to achieve true expertise in any domain. It's a result of expertise research, not political or social philosophy.

So I feel as if there is a serious but very common epistemological flaw of confusing wide dissemination of information with even distribution of expertise. The misused term "knowledge" seems to be used in this service, since we often carelessly use it to mean both information and expertise.

Of course we should make use of collective sources like Wikipedia, but we should not make the further glib assumption that these can replace individual expertise. That's why we really do need some of those criteria for making limited use of collectively derived sources. They don't neccessarily provide us with the best information for all uses, and our natural temptation is to just transfer credibility to them.

We need to not only make better use of collectively derived sources but also transfer proportionately our critical thinking normative principles from individual authority to those collective sources and learn new principles for evaluating them.

Sometimes the crowd is wrong. And most of the time the crowd gets the least common denominator most right. That's probably good enough for a high school project, but not for serious scholarship. In my opinion. Thinking remains a property of individual minds, facilitated by the social network but not (God help us) replaced by it.

kind regards,

Todd