Category Archives: psychology

subconscious perception

Holding the cat, I looked in the mirror and was startled. Fluffie’s face is asymmetrical, but I couldn’t have told you which side has this or that feature. (Can you say without looking which was Moshe Dayan’s good eye?) And … Continue reading

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yet another way in which I’m like Einstein

“I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family.” Found in Quotations from Mathematicians

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where they stood

Animation of Congress. For those three of you who haven’t seen it: Keith Poole‘s team at U.Houston tabulated the roll-call votes in Congress from 1879 to 1998 and did a factor analysis; the two dimensions shown in the animation are … Continue reading

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exegesis of intelligence

Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his Natural History essays, wrote: I believe that any solution to this key puzzle in Darwinian biography must begin with a proper exegesis of intelligence – one that rejects Charles Spearman’s old notion of … Continue reading

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paper forever

In the New Yorker, a review of The Myth of the Paperless Office. (Link from Monty Solomon on a private list.) Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. . . . The piles look … Continue reading

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Schelling points

New Scientist: Neural network ‘in-jokes’ could pass secrets This reminds me of a discussion, years ago on Extropians, of “Schelling points”: for under-constrained problems there may be a cultural preference for particular solutions. For example, if I ask you to … Continue reading

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Thinkers and Feelers

Jay Zilber argues: The human race is perpetually at war — not simply between the good guys and the bad guys, nor even between liberals and conservatives. If only it were so convenient to draw the lines in this struggle … Continue reading

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