HP Upline: a disappointing bet

Here's the email I've received from HP's Upline program.

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 12:46 AM, HP Upline Paypal Notifications wrote:

Dear HP Upline Service subscriber,



On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.



Please accept our sincere apology for this unanticipated interruption of your access to the Upline Service. We appreciate your patience as we launch this new service, and are working hard to minimize inconvenience caused by this service interruption.



If you are a resident of the United States, your subscription will remain in effect and you will be able to continue using the Upline Service for the duration of your subscription period once the Upline Service is operational again. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to providing you with the HP Upline Service.



If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States. We thank you for your early adoption of the Upline Service, and look forward to being able to provide the HP Upline Service to you when we launch it in your country of residence. Since the HP Upline Service is presently offered for use within the United States only, we will be discontinuing your current subscription. After we notify you that the Upline Service is operational again, you will have a limited period of time to access and download files that you have uploaded onto the HP Upline Service servers. After that time period, you will no longer have access to your present HP Upline Service account. If you would like to be contacted by us when the HP Upline Service is made available in your country of residence, please send us an email at help@upline.com. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

The HP Upline Team

And here's my response:
==
TO: Help@upline.com, upline-paypal@hp.com
FROM: Alex Linhares
Dear Hulu provincians,
you should bear in mind that the web is international. --Alex Linhares





Well, what else could I say?

Chase and Simon (1973) Perception in chess, Cognitive Psychology 4:55-81. A scientific blunder.

Here´s an email I´ve sent some months ago to a number of very bright people.

The 1000 dollars offer holds until the end of this year.

Imagine if two famous biologists published a study, over 30 years ago, with two parts: in the first part, they unequivocally showed that sharks and dolphins had a strikingly different nature. In the second part, however, they tried to explain that difference by looking at the habitats of a dolphin and the habitat of a shark (i.e., the same data). Imagine that that paper would be cited by hundreds of people, for decades.

Now imagine that Chase and Simon, writing a study entitled "Perception in chess", in Cognitive Psychology 4, p.55—81 (1973), divided it into two parts. The first part (p.55—61) of the paper showed that when chess masters looked at a board for 5 seconds, they could reproduce it with enormous accuracy, while beginners could not reproduce it for more than a few pieces. This difference could not be explained by masters' greater memory, for, in randomized positions, the effect disappeared, with masters and beginners able to reproduce only a few pieces of the board. Sharks and Dolphins, it was clear, were different.

Now, what was the nature of the chunks like? The second part of the paper devised two tasks, a 'perception task', and a 'memory task'. These tasks looked at masters and beginners 'interpiece interval times' (within glances at the board, and in between glances) in reconstructing the boards. The results were unequivocal: the data was exactly the same for masters and beginners (figs 3 and 4). They pointed this out clearly:

[Perception task, p.65] "The first thing to notice is that the data are quite similar for all subjects. The latencies show the same systematic trends, and, for the probabilities, the product moment correlation between subjects are quite high: Master vs Class A=.93; Master vs Class B=.95, and Class A vs Class B =.92. The same is true for the between glance data… Thus, the same kinds and degrees of relatedness between successive pieces holds for subjects of very different skills."

[Memory task] "Again the pattern of latencies and probabilities look the same for all subjects, and the correlations are about the same as in the perception of data: Master vs Class A=.91, Master vs. Class B=.95, and Class A vs. Class B=.95".

The obvious conclusion is, of course, that whatever difference exists between Masters and Class B players, it cannot be obtained from this dataset. Nothing about the "nature of the chess chunk" can ever be obtained here.

Yet, with that dataset at hand, the authors proceeded to study the nature of the chess chunk: "These probabilities are informative about the underlying structures that the subjects are perceiving" (p. 68). How can they be, if a Master subject perceives the global meaning of the position, and a Class B perceives nothing?

"Our data gives us an operational method of characterizing chunks, which we will apply to the middle-game memory experiments of subject M[=Master]" (p.78). One wonders: why bother? Send the master home. They could gather all they needed a from a Class B subject, or from a yanomami, after that non sequitur.

Chase and Simon 1973 explained the difference between sharks and dolphins by looking at their habitats, and the whole world bought it. At the risk of running into utter humiliation, I will paypal one thousand dollars to the first person on this list that proves me wrong. The deadline for your thousand shiny dollars is 24h before the deadline for submission to cogsci in Nashville, when I will go on and commit scientific suicide.

Any takers?

On the drawing of lines

They invented this thing called www.facebook.com. They also invented this thing called breasts, and this other thing called babies. Then facebook said that women should not post pictures breast-feeding their babies.

As TechCrunch duly points out, it's hard to pin down what exactly is offensive and what isn't. That will depend on your upbringing, your friends, lifestyle, culture, religion, and so forth. So facebook seems to be really picking up a wrong fight here.

A comment in TechCrunch reads the classic cliché, the bureaucrat's grandest fantasy, word for word: “They do have to draw the line, though.”

This is last century's thinking. They don't have to draw the line, and shouldn't. It is a big mistake for Facebook to draw such lines, because now people will be “testing” the system to its limits.

What Facebook should do is CROWDSOURCE. Let the users draw the line. That is what web2.0 is all about, right? If Facebook starts to preach to people who they have to be, facebook can only go down in the long run, no matter how strong they might be now. They'll be picking up daily fights with, as The Economist once put it, both perverts and puritans (I wonder which group is worse--these are nasty people you really don't want to mess with; what they have in common is that they have nothing else to do but bring you down--hey, am I preaching or what?).

CROWDSOURCE THIS THING, folks. Just put a button: “Do you find this image offensive?”, then let people vote and let people take down the offensive ones. People should draw the line, not some random employee. Show the votes as they occur. Make it transparent.

I think I heard it somewhere: “don’t fight the internet”?

Wonderful, wonderful, tech world!

Let's just bridge the digital divide.

When is this thing going to end?

From the pages of The Economist:

STRATEGY lies on the high ground of business management, the zone where long-term plans are made and far-sighted visionaries set their companies on course to untold riches. Books on the subject establish their authors' intellectual reputation, for strategy is full of paradoxes and dilemmas that challenge the brain to find seven simple steps to their resolution.

"seven simple steps to their resolution"; is such hilariously beautiful mockery of the whole ordeal warranted?

I mean, isn't it ridiculous that these books are still being churned out by the dozen? The Economist was reviewing books by publishers such as Currency and Harvard Business School Press. It is absurd that people in charge--not only in America but everywhere--keep on reading this type of nonrefutable, nonscientific nonsense, mixing causation with correlation, backed only by in hindsight anecdotal evidence (and under a most convenient interpretation). Authors of these things get notoriety, some get some money or tenure, university research funds go to these frauds, as these self-help cooking recipes get spread around the globe. It gets so impregnated in Businesspeople that they can't see there's serious stuff to absorb out there. Some time ago I had a discussion with a student or two concerning what I see as relevant in the field of decision making. And since it did not include these seven magic steps to "untold riches", I guess that student wasn't too pleased--but here's a student who's supposed to write a master thesis. All I could say was the obvious: "I think the Swedish academy is on to something relevant--though, of course, you may not agree"; or "Science is much too important to be left to scientists alone".

We barely understand how humans can play chess. To get explanations with seven magic steps about systems as complex as corporations in a mere 208 pages is a fraud as large as intelligent design. Intelligent design, however, is always on the spotlight. These business book frauds, however, are passed on and on as serious works, and are often conducted on serious universities. And they'll eventually influence people in charge. What a sad, sad, ordeal.

Isn't it refreshing to see The Economist bringing it on to them?

Donnelly on statistical intuitions

Peter Donnelly comments on some of our terrible failings in statistical intuitions. Hilarious talk, serious stuff.

The major blunder in cognitive science, perhaps ever?

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 4, 55-61 (1973)

PERCEPTION IN CHESS

WILLIAM G. CHASE AND HERBERT A. SIMON
Carnegie-Mellon University

This paper develops a technique for isolating and studying the perceptual structures that chess players perceive. Three chess players of varying strength - from master to novice - were confronted with two tasks: ( 1) A perception task, where the player reproduces a chess position in plain view, and (2) de Groot’s (1965) short-term recall task, where the player reproduces a chess position after viewing it for 5 sec. The successive glances at the position in the perceptual task and long pauses in tbe memory task were used to segment the structures in the reconstruction protocol. The size and nature of these structures were then analyzed as a function of chess skill.

This study is legendary and has created whole fields, such as "situation awareness", in which you investigate whether experts (say, a jet pilot) are aware of the situation they're in (by, for instance, suddenly blanking out all instruments).

I think this study is, quite bluntly, a non-sequitur.

But hey, this is Chase and Simon 73, and who am I to say that without presenting evidence?

Step forward Mr. Brum!

If you've just arrived from Mars, please read Alan Sokal's paper

It is such a tragicomic piece... Dr Sokal is a Physicist, and he wrote a little, hilarious, non sequitur paper and had it published in "Social Crap Text". This piece, with its "syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever", should be mandatory reading for all students in the sciences, humanities, etcetera. Someone might also want to rip a couple of pages from the Q'ran and thrown this one in there. If you're into this kind of thing I'm sure you'd like to take a look at the (modern Eliza) postmodernism generator. But nothing beats Sokal:

The fundamental silliness of my article lies, however, not in its numerous solecisms but in the dubiousness of its central thesis and of the ``reasoning'' adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that quantum gravity -- the still-speculative theory of space and time on scales of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter -- has profound politicalimplications (which, of course, are ``progressive''). In support of this improbable proposition, I proceed as follows: First, I quote some controversial philosophical pronouncements of Heisenberg and Bohr, and assert (without argument) that quantum physics is profoundly consonant with ``postmodernist epistemology.'' Next, I assemble a pastiche -- Derrida and general relativity, Lacan and topology, Irigaray and quantum gravity -- held together by vague rhetoric about ``nonlinearity'', ``flux'' and ``interconnectedness.'' Finally, I jump (again without argument) to the assertion that ``postmodern science'' has abolished the concept of objective reality. Nowhere in all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.

In its concluding passages, my article becomes especially egregious. Having abolished reality as a constraint on science, I go on to suggest (once again without argument) that science, in order to be ``liberatory,'' must be subordinated to political strategies. I finish the article by observing that ``a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics.'' We can see hints of an ``emancipatory mathematics,'' I suggest, ``in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.'' I add that ``catastrophe theory, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis.'' It's understandable that the editors of Social Text were unable to evaluate critically the technical aspects of my article (which is exactly why they should have consulted a scientist). What's more surprising is how readily they accepted my implication that the search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political agenda, and how oblivious they were to the article's overall illogic.

Here's the original article. Here's the above-quoted piece; and here's a third piece that was later rejected in "Social Text", for "not meeting their intellectual standards".

What a joyride!

How to paint yourself into a corner

This post is part of a series called "a crisis is something just too valuable to waste".

This is a blog about science. All sciences related to decision-making welcome. Science, not politics. Having said that, we cannot refrain from that occasional indulgence...

The Economist just ran a piece (subscription required) over Brazil's civil aviation collapse:

The underlying problems are that the air force runs air-traffic control and it and the government have failed to keep up with booming traffic. This has grown at 15% a year or more since 2004, notes Andre Castellini of Bain, a consultancy. The government ignored repeated calls for more air-traffic controllers and investment. While control towers lacked essential equipment, airports received expensive facelifts.

After a bumbling beginning, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is now taking steps to avoid chaos during the peak holiday season. Air-traffic controllers are being drafted out of retirement and backup equipment is being installed. Some responsibility is to be decentralised from the overburdened control centre in Brasília. If that is not enough to ensure a trouble-free Christmas and Carnival, the defence minister offered another solution: prayer.

Of course, more panic, crimes, and general confusion ensued during the holiday season (and it's not even over yet, so, ladies and gentleman, please hold your breath). Airlines are either deceiving customers or totally unaware of what's going on. And the consequences are severely bitter: A kid needing an organ transfer just took too long at the airports to make it.

The fault is not due to the airlines. It is due to a collapsing air-control system. Of course credit goes up all the way to the presidential team, which held back resources needed to keep up with the surge in civil aviation. The government's position, of course, is to deny all accusations and to please the public with their amusing internal fights.

There is no solution to this problem, because the solution has been thrown away during our recent elections. Lula, the Messiah turned president (he is called by the foreign policy minister as "our guide"), accused his challenger, Alckmin, a former Governor of São Paulo state, of planning to privatize large state-owned companies, "destroying the Brazilian people's hard-earned assets". He won the election, but painted himself into a corner.

This whole thing comes to me as an "I told you so" moment of relief. A couple or so of years ago I was asked to review the state of Brazilian logistics("Por uma nova logística nacional"), and I obviously argued the obvious: money is needed, and the government has none; so the time has come to privatize Brazil's airports and aviation infrastructure (such as prosperous countries have done). This was published in a 2-book series from the Getulio Vargas Foundation. That option, however, is now a closed avenue, for the re-elected president decided to close it in his election accusations.

This administration is a textbook example of biases departing from rationality. From overconfidence to groupthink, it's all in there. Historians of Brazil had better start studying their social psychology and behavioural economics.

In another context, Nobel prize winner Thomas Schelling argues that sometimes it is to your advantage to close some decision avenues with his 'strategic commitment' concept... perhaps that's what Lula the Messiah is reading. If only he could read it while sober we might have somewhere to go during vacation time.

Disclaimer: I have briefly met Mr. Alckmin for activities of the Club of Rome. Yet, the paper was written long before such collaborations ever took place.