Theoreticians as Professional Outsiders

The book also contains essays on Schrodinger, Fisher, Pauling, George Price, and Rashevsky.

Theoreticians as Professional Outsiders: The Modeling Strategies of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Ehud Lamm in Biology Outside the Box: Boundary Crossers and Innovation in Biology, Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich (eds.))

Both von Neumann and Wiener were outsiders to biology. Both were inspired by biology and both proposed models and generalizations that proved inspirational for biologists. Around the same time in the 1940s von Neumann developed the notion of self reproducing automata and Wiener suggested an explication of teleology using the notion of negative feedback. These efforts were similar in spirit. Both von Neumann and Wiener used mathematical ideas to attack foundational issues in biology, and the concepts they articulated had lasting effect. But there were significant differences as well. Von Neumann presented a how-possibly model, which sparked interest by mathematicians and computer scientists, while Wiener collaborated more directly with biologists, and his proposal influenced the philosophy of biology. The two cases illustrate different strategies by which mathematicians, the “professional outsiders” of science, can choose to guide their engagement with biological questions and with the biological community, and illustrate different kinds of generalizations that mathematization can contribute to biology. The different strategies employed by von Neumann and Wiener and the types of models they constructed may have affected the fate of von Neumann’s and Wiener’s ideas – as well as the reputation, in biology, of von Neumann and Wiener themselves.

For and Against theory in biology:

... E.B. Wilson articulated the reserved attitude of biologists towards uninvited theoreticians. Wilson’s remarks at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology in 1934 were ostensibly about the “Mathematics of Growth” but it is impossible to fail to notice their tone and true scope. Wilson suggested orienting the discussion around five axioms or “platitudes” as he called them. The first two are probably enough to get his point across. Axiom 1 states that “science need not be mathematical,” and if that’s not bad enough, axiom 2 solidifies the reserved attitude towards mathematization by stating that “simply because a subject is mathematical it need not therefore be scientific.”

... While the idea of self-reproduction seems incredible, and some might even have thought it to involve a self-contradiction, with objects creating something as complex as they are themselves, von Neumann’s solution to the problem of self-reproduction was remarkably simple. It is based on two operations: (1) constructing an object according to a list of instructions, and (2) copying a list of instructions as is ... This procedure is trivial for anyone computer-literate to understand; it was a remarkable theoretical result in 1948. What, however, does it tell us about biology? It is often observed that von Neumann’s explanation, which involves treating the genetic material both as instructions and as data that is copied as-is, is analogous to the reproduction of cells, since DNA, the analogue of the instruction list, is passively replicated. Von Neumann compared the construction instructions that direct the automaton to genes, noting that genes probably do not constitute instructions fully specifying the construction of the objects their presence stimulates. He warned that genes are probably only general pointers or cues that affect development, a warning that alas did not curtail the “genetic program” metaphor that became dominant in years to come.

Von Neumann noted that his model explained how mutations that do not affect self- replication are possible. If the instruction list specifies not only the self-replicating automaton but also an additional structure, this structure will also be replicated. ...

... As Claude Shannon put it in a 1958 review of von Neumann’s contributions to automata theory, and specifically self-reproducing automata:

If reality is copied too closely in the model we have to deal with all of the complexity of nature, much of which is not particularly relevant to the self-reproducing question. However, by simplifying too much, the structure becomes so abstract and simplified that the problem is almost trivial and the solution is un-impressive with regard to solving the philosophical point that is involved. In one place, after a lengthy discussion of the difficulties of formulating the problem satisfactorily, von Neumann remarks: "I do not want to be seriously bothered with the objection that (a) everybody knows that automata can reproduce themselves (b) everybody knows that they cannot."

See also On Crick and Watson and Reliable Organization of Unreliable Components

Asia's Cauldron: the South China Sea and DF-21D ASBM

I recommend Robert Kaplan's Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific. A key question: how effective will conventional ballistic missiles (ASBM: e.g., DF-21D, CEP ~ 10m? recent report) and cruise missiles (ASCM) be against US carrier groups?

Over the last decade, the center of world power has been quietly shifting from Europe to Asia. With oil reserves of several billion barrels, an estimated nine hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and several centuries’ worth of competing territorial claims, the South China Sea in particular is a simmering pot of potential conflict. The underreported military buildup in the area where the Western Pacific meets the Indian Ocean means that it will likely be a hinge point for global war and peace for the foreseeable future.

In Asia’s Cauldron, Robert D. Kaplan offers up a vivid snapshot of the nations surrounding the South China Sea, the conflicts brewing in the region at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and their implications for global peace and stability. One of the world’s most perceptive foreign policy experts, Kaplan interprets America’s interests in Asia in the context of an increasingly assertive China. He explains how the region’s unique geography fosters the growth of navies but also impedes aggression. And he draws a striking parallel between China’s quest for hegemony in the South China Sea and the United States’ imperial adventure in the Caribbean more than a century ago.

To understand the future of conflict in East Asia, Kaplan argues, one must understand the goals and motivations of its leaders and its people. Part travelogue, part geopolitical primer, Asia’s Cauldron takes us on a journey through the region’s boom cities and ramshackle slums: from Vietnam, where the superfueled capitalism of the erstwhile colonial capital, Saigon, inspires the geostrategic pretensions of the official seat of government in Hanoi, to Malaysia, where a unique mix of authoritarian Islam and Western-style consumerism creates quite possibly the ultimate postmodern society; and from Singapore, whose “benevolent autocracy” helped foster an economic miracle, to the Philippines, where a different brand of authoritarianism under Ferdinand Marcos led not to economic growth but to decades of corruption and crime.

See also John Mearsheimer: Can China Rise Peacefully?

Chicago Conference on Genetics and Behavior (video)

This is video of my talk at the University of Chicago Conference on Genetics and Behavior back in April. Slides -- they are not very readable in the video. Here's another link to the talk on the Chicago page.

Ability, Effort, and Academic Achievement among Asian Americans

What accounts for the academic success of E. Asians? I would have guessed about equal parts cognitive advantage (ability) and hard work (grinding). The paper below tries to quantify this in more detail using data from two nationally representative cohort studies, comparing students of various of ethnicities who attend the same schools. Note the broad conclusion stated in the abstract applies better to Asian Americans (AAs) in aggregate, and less well to the E. Asian subpopulation alone -- see figures below.

Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites (PNAS)

The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

While all four AA subpopulations showed positive differences relative to white students in academic achievement and effort, only the E. Asian subgroup had a cognitive advantage.

From the Supplement: for E. Asians, the academic achievement gap appears to be ~ 1/3 due to cognitive ability and ~ 2/3 due to academic effort, with large uncertainties. For the other subpopulations the results are quite different (and actually rather strange). Click for larger version.

The Age of Ambition and The Fourth Revolution

Evan Osnos (New Yorker China correspondent; successor to Peter Hessler) on his new book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.




BONUS: Micklethwait and Wooldridge, co-authors of The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, on CELAP (also here).

WSJ: Buried in a Shanghai suburb, close to the city's smoggy Inner Ring Road, the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, or Celap, seems to have a military purpose. Razor wire curls along the fences around the huge compound, and guards stand at its gate. But drive into the campus from the curiously named Future Schedule Street, and you enter what looks like Harvard as redesigned by Dr. No.

In the middle of the academy stands a huge, bright-red building in the shape of a desk, with an equally monumental, scarlet inkwell beside it. Surrounding it are lakes and trees, libraries, a sports center and a series of low, brown dormitory buildings, all designed to look like unfolded books. Celap calls this a "campus," but the organization is too disciplined, hierarchical and businesslike to be a university. The locals are closer to the mark: They call it a "Cadre Training School." This is an organization bent on world domination.

Celap's students are China's future leaders. The egalitarian-looking sleeping quarters mask a strict pecking order, with suites for senior visitors from Beijing. The syllabus eschews ideology in favor of technocratic solutions. The two most common questions, says one teacher, are: What works best? And can it be applied here?

Today, Chinese students and officials hurtle around the world, studying successful models from Chile to Sweden. Some 1,300 years ago, Celap's staff remind you, imperial China sought out the brightest young people to become civil servants. For centuries, these mandarins ran the world's most advanced government—until the Europeans and then the Americans forged ahead. Better government has long been one of the West's great advantages. Now the Chinese want that title back.

Western policy makers should look at this effort the same way that Western businessmen looked at Chinese factories in the 1990s: with a mixture of awe and fear. Just as China deliberately set out to remaster the art of capitalism, it is now trying to remaster the art of government. The only difference is a chilling one: Many Chinese think there is far less to be gained from studying Western government than they did from studying Western capitalism. They visit Silicon Valley and Wall Street, not Washington, D.C.

The West pulled ahead of "the rest" because it created a permanent contest to improve its government machinery. In particular, it pioneered four great revolutions. The first was the security revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe's princes created modern nation states. As Spain, England and France competed around the globe, they improved statecraft in a way that introverted China never did.

The second great revolution, of the late 18th and 19th centuries, championed liberty and efficiency. Aristocratic patronage systems were replaced with leaner, more meritocratic governments, focused on providing services like schools and police. Under Britain's thrifty Victorians, the world's most powerful country reduced its tax take from £80 million in 1816 to less than £60 million in 1860—even as its population increased by 50%.

This vision of a limited but vigorous state was swept away in the third revolution. In the 20th century, Western government provided people with ever more help: first health care and unemployment pay but eventually college education and what President Lyndon B. Johnson called the Great Society. Despite counterattacks, notably the 1980s half-revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the sprawling welfare state remains the dominant Western model.

In the U.S., government spending increased from 7.5% of GDP in 1913 to 19.7% in 1937, to 27% in 1960, to 34% in 2000 and to 42% in 2011. Voters continue to demand more services, and politicians of all persuasions have indulged them—with the left delivering hospitals and schools, the right building prisons, armies and police forces, and everybody creating regulations like confetti.

In all three of these revolutions, the West led the way. But now, as China's ambitions illustrate, the emerging world is eager to compete again.

And why not? Over the past two years, while the U.S. political system has torn itself apart over Obamacare, China has extended pension coverage to an additional 240 million rural people. Lee Kwan Yew's authoritarian Singapore offers dramatically better education and health care than Uncle Sam, with a state that is a fraction of the U.S.'s size. If you are looking for the future of health care, India's attempt to apply mass-production techniques to hospitals is part of the answer. So too, Brazil's conditional cash transfers are part of the future of welfare. At the very least, the West no longer has a monopoly on ideas. ...

The first is that, while Western voters have overloaded the state with demands, they abhor the result. The U.S. Congress regularly scores an approval rating of 10%. In Britain, membership of the Tory Party slid from 3 million in 1950 to 123,000 today, a performance that would have put a private company into receivership. Voters are frustrated.

Second, government is going broke. The U.S. government has run a surplus only five times since 1960; France hasn't had one since 1974-75. And now the demographic challenge of caring for aging populations will push even left-wing parties toward hard choices about what—and whom—they want to save.

The third reason is more positive. Government can be reformed, but only if Western politicians and electorates decide what they want it to do.

Our own answer is, simply, much less. The overloaded modern state is a threat to democracy: The more responsibilities Leviathan assumes, the worse it performs them, and the angrier citizens get. ...

You may disagree. But this is part of a bigger argument that the West must start having now. A great contest is under way to reinvent the state, and the Chinese have the advantage of knowing what the consequences are if they lose.

Directional Personality and mate preferences

Some good old evo psych fun -- guaranteed to annoy certain people :-)  Nevertheless, interesting because it raises the point that measurements of Personality (e.g., Big 5 or other constructs) are complicated by the fact that people can behave differently depending on the target of the behavior.

Plenty of sociopaths in large organizations are pleasant to superiors but unpleasant to those below them in the hierarchy.

Kind toward whom? Mate preferences for personality traits are target specific (Evolution and Human Behavior 31 (2010) 29–38)

Previous mate preference studies indicate that people prefer partners whose personalities are extremely kind and trustworthy, but relatively non-dominant. This conclusion, however, is based on research that leaves unclear whether these traits describe the behavior a partner directs toward oneself, toward other classes of people or both. Because the fitness consequences of partners' behaviors likely differed depending on the classes of individuals toward whom behaviors were directed, we predicted that mate preferences for personality traits would change depending on the specific targets of a partner's behavioral acts. Consistent with this, two experiments demonstrated that people prefer partners who are extremely kind and trustworthy when considering behaviors directed toward themselves or their friends/family, but shift their preferences to much lower levels of these traits when considering behaviors directed toward other classes of individuals. In addition, both sexes preferred partners who direct higher levels of dominance toward members of the partner's own sex than toward any other behavioral target category, with women preferring levels of dominance toward other men as high as — or higher than — levels of kindness and trustworthiness. When asked to rate traits for which the behavioral target was left unspecified, furthermore, preferences were very similar to self-directed preferences, suggesting that previous trait-rating studies have not measured preferences for partners' behaviors directed toward people other than oneself. These findings may provide a basic contribution to the mate preference literature via their demonstration that ideal standards for romantic partners are importantly qualified by the targets of behavioral acts.

In the figure below, women (top graph) seem to prefer a larger self--rival asymmetry in their mates than men do. In other words, women like men who are kind to them but who are socially dominant towards other men. (Proponents of Game would argue that even this reflects a bit of false consciousness -- that women actually prefer men who are socially dominant towards them!) Click for larger version.

Thanks to a reader for the reference.

Information technology in higher eduction

Slides from a brief talk I gave to a meeting of IT administrators.

Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China

The study below discusses a psychological/cognitive/personality gradient between N and S China, possibly driven by a history of wheat vs rice cultivation.

Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture (Science)

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

Editor Summary: On a diverse and large set of cognitive tests, subjects in East Asian countries are more inclined to display collectivist choices, whereas subjects in the United States are more inclined to score as individualists. Talhelm et al. (p. 603; see the Perspective by Henrich) suggest that one historical source of influence was societal patterns of farming rice versus wheat, based on three cognitive measures of individualism and collectivism in 1000 subjects from rice- and wheat-growing regions in China.

The first author of the paper is interviewed below; his comments are quite illuminating. None of the discussants entertain the notion that any of these group differences could be partially genetic in causation.

Sinica: Rice, Wheat and Air Filters

This week on Sinica, we're delighted to be joined by Thomas Talhelm, Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of a recent paper proposing a fascinating connection between rice and wheat-growing communities, and persistent differences in psychological orientations of people from different parts of China. So join us as we talk about divorce, collectivism and violence, and get the dirt on all the various tests psychologists are using to measure it all here in the Middle Kingdom.

And even if psychology isn't your thing, we suspect that breathing is -- which is another reason to listen. In addition to his growing reputation in academic circles, Thomas is also known in China for his production and proselytization of do-it-yourself air filtration kits, which he sells through his company Smart Air Filters. If you are interested in getting a filter without spending a fortune, be sure to check them out.

I corresponded briefly with Talhelm, pointing out that his results are already a part of Chinese folk sociology, and even remarked upon by European visitors to China in the 18th century.

Rare mutations and severe intellectual disability

The paper below describes rare de novo mutations which cause severe intellectual disability. See also Structural genomic variants (CNVs) affect cognition.

By the principle of continuity, I suspect that rare variants of smaller negative effect on cognitive ability also exist. These alleles, although harder to detect, would account for part of the observed population variation in the normal range. As discussed in an earlier post (Common variants vs mutational load), these are likely responsible for additional heritability not included in the h2 ~ 0.5 due to common variants estimated from GCTA.

Genome sequencing identifies major causes of severe intellectual disability (Nature)

Severe intellectual disability (ID) occurs in 0.5% of newborns and is thought to be largely genetic in origin1, 2. The extensive genetic heterogeneity of this disorder requires a genome-wide detection of all types of genetic variation. Microarray studies and, more recently, exome sequencing have demonstrated the importance of de novo copy number variations (CNVs) and single-nucleotide variations (SNVs) in ID, but the majority of cases remain undiagnosed3, 4, 5, 6. Here we applied whole-genome sequencing to 50 patients with severe ID and their unaffected parents. All patients included had not received a molecular diagnosis after extensive genetic prescreening, including microarray-based CNV studies and exome sequencing. Notwithstanding this prescreening, 84 de novo SNVs affecting the coding region were identified, which showed a statistically significant enrichment of loss-of-function mutations as well as an enrichment for genes previously implicated in ID-related disorders. In addition, we identified eight de novo CNVs, including single-exon and intra-exonic deletions, as well as interchromosomal duplications. These CNVs affected known ID genes more frequently than expected. On the basis of diagnostic interpretation of all de novo variants, a conclusive genetic diagnosis was reached in 20 patients. Together with one compound heterozygous CNV causing disease in a recessive mode, this results in a diagnostic yield of 42% in this extensively studied cohort, and 62% as a cumulative estimate in an unselected cohort. These results suggest that de novo SNVs and CNVs affecting the coding region are a major cause of severe ID. Genome sequencing can be applied as a single genetic test to reliably identify and characterize the comprehensive spectrum of genetic variation, providing a genetic diagnosis in the majority of patients with severe ID.

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Strategic War (with cards)

War is a simple card game played by children. The most common version does not require decisions, so it's totally deterministic (outcome is determined) once the card order in each deck is fixed. Nevertheless it can be entertaining to watch/play: there are enough fluctuations to engage observers, mainly due to the treatment of ties. The question of how to determine the winner from the two deck orderings (without actually playing the entire game, which can take a long time) was one of the first aspects of computability / predictive modeling / chaotic behavior I thought about as a kid. This direction leads to things like classification of cellular automata and the halting problem.

My children came home with a version designed to teach multiplication -- each "hand" is two cards, rather than the usual single card, and the winner of the "battle" is the one with the higher product value of the two cards (face cards are removed). I thought this was still too boring: no strategy (my kids understood this right away, along with the meaning of deterministic; this puts them ahead of some philosophers), so I came up with a variant that has been quite fun to play.

Split the deck into red and black halves, removing face cards. Each hand (battle) is played with two cards, but they are chosen by each player. One card is placed face down simultaneously by each player, and the second cards played are chosen after the first cards have been revealed (flipped over). Winner of most hands is the victor.

This game ("strategic war") is simple to learn, but complex enough that it involves bluffing, calculation, and card counting (keeping track of which cards have been played). A speed version, with, say, 10 seconds allowed per card choice, goes very fast.

Has anyone seen heard of this game before? It's a bit like repeated two card poker (heads up), drawing from a fixed deck. Note the overall strength of hands for each player (combined multiplicative value of all cards) is fixed and equal. Playing strong hands early means weaker hands later in the game. The goal is to win each hand by as small a margin as possible.

Are there strategies which dominate random play (= select first card at random, second card from range not exceeding highest card required to guarantee a win)?


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Income, Cognitive Ability, and Education

The figure below is from Schooling, Intelligence, and Income (1997, American Psychologist) by Ceci and Williams.

Cognitive ability has a strong impact on earnings at each level of educational attainment.

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Those genius babies

This video has almost a million views. I think it's very well done :-)



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Reader survey

Every now and then I look at the statistics for this blog. My rough estimate is that there is a core group of at least several thousand who read it regularly (i.e., a few times per week or more), and typical posts are eventually read by ~ 10 thousand people or more.

I know very little about my readers, hence this survey. Answer whichever parts you like and paste into the comments. Many thanks!

1. Age, gender, ethnicity, nationality?

2. What's your background (education, profession, hobbies)?

3. What do you like best about this blog?

4. What do you like least about this blog?

5. How often do you find posts hard to understand?

6. Have we met in real life? Should we?

7. What should I do with my life?   :-)

I can guess that there are several overlapping subgroups of readers: physicists, genomicists, financiers, tech / startup types, professors, ... But I'd really like to know more!

Internet trends 2014

KPCB Internet trends 2014 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Verita$

Harvard senior survey conducted by the Crimson.

Brainy but Weak

Figure shows metabolic difference in various tissue types for 4 species; PFC = Prefrontal Cortex. Human brain function accounts for about 20% of total calorie consumption. See also Cognition über alles and The genetics of humanness.

We're the geeks of the animal kingdom ;-)

Exceptional Evolutionary Divergence of Human Muscle and Brain Metabolomes Parallels Human Cognitive and Physical Uniqueness (PLOS)

Abstract

Metabolite concentrations reflect the physiological states of tissues and cells. However, the role of metabolic changes in species evolution is currently unknown. Here, we present a study of metabolome evolution conducted in three brain regions and two non-neural tissues from humans, chimpanzees, macaque monkeys, and mice based on over 10,000 hydrophilic compounds. While chimpanzee, macaque, and mouse metabolomes diverge following the genetic distances among species, we detect remarkable acceleration of metabolome evolution in human prefrontal cortex and skeletal muscle affecting neural and energy metabolism pathways. These metabolic changes could not be attributed to environmental conditions and were confirmed against the expression of their corresponding enzymes. We further conducted muscle strength tests in humans, chimpanzees, and macaques. The results suggest that, while humans are characterized by superior cognition, their muscular performance might be markedly inferior to that of chimpanzees and macaque monkeys.

Author Summary

Physiological processes that maintain our tissues' functionality involve the generation of multiple products and intermediates known as metabolites—small molecules with a weight of less than 1,500 Daltons. Changes in concentrations of these metabolites are thought to be closely related to changes in phenotype. Here, we assessed concentrations of more than 10,000 metabolites in three brain regions and two non-neural tissues (skeletal muscle and kidney) of humans, chimpanzees, macaque monkeys, and mice using mass spectrometry-based approaches. We found that the evolution of the metabolome largely reflects genetic divergence between species and is not greatly affected by environmental factors. In the human lineage, however, we observed an exceptional acceleration of metabolome evolution in the prefrontal cortical region of the brain and in skeletal muscle. Based on additional behavioral tests, we further show that metabolic changes in human muscle seem to be paralleled by a drastic reduction in muscle strength. The observed rapid metabolic changes in brain and muscle, together with the unique human cognitive skills and low muscle performance, might reflect parallel mechanisms in human evolution.

The Mystery of Go

Nice article on the progress of computer Go.

See also The Laskers and the Go master: "While the baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go." (Edward Lasker, International Master and US Chess champion)

WIRED: ... Even in the West, Go has long been a favorite game of mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists. Einstein played Go during his time at Princeton, as did mathematician John Nash. Seminal computer scientist Alan Turing was a Go aficionado, and while working as a World War II code-breaker, he introduced the game to fellow cryptologist I.J. Good. ... Good gave the game a huge boost in Europe with a 1965 article for New Scientist entitled “The Mystery of Go.”

... Good opens the article by suggesting that Go is inherently superior to all other strategy games, an opinion shared by pretty much every Go player I’ve met. “There is chess in the western world, but Go is incomparably more subtle and intellectual,” says South Korean Lee Sedol, perhaps the greatest living Go player and one of a handful who make over seven figures a year in prize money. Subtlety, of course, is subjective. But the fact is that of all the world’s deterministic perfect information games — tic-tac-toe, chess, checkers, Othello, xiangqi, shogi — Go is the only one in which computers don’t stand a chance against humans.

...

After the match, I ask Coulom when a machine will win without a handicap. “I think maybe ten years,” he says. “But I do not like to make predictions.” His caveat is a wise one. In 2007, Deep Blue’s chief engineer, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, said much the same thing. Hsu also favored alpha-beta search over Monte Carlo techniques in Go programs, speculating that the latter “won’t play a significant role in creating a machine that can top the best human players.”

Even with Monte Carlo, another ten years may prove too optimistic. And while programmers are virtually unanimous in saying computers will eventually top the humans, many in the Go community are skeptical. “The question of whether they’ll get there is an open one,” says Will Lockhart, director of the Go documentary The Surrounding Game. “Those who are familiar with just how strong professionals really are, they’re not so sure.”

According to University of Sydney cognitive scientist and complex systems theorist Michael Harré, professional Go players behave in ways that are incredibly hard to predict. In a recent study, Harré analyzed Go players of various strengths, focusing on the predictability of their moves given a specific local configuration of stones. “The result was totally unexpected,” he says. “Moves became steadily more predictable until players reached near-professional level. But at that point, moves started getting less predictable, and we don’t know why. Our best guess is that information from the rest of the board started influencing decision-making in a unique way.” ...

The current handicap accorded a computer against a professional player is 4 stones. In the story below the world chess champion and his brother are given 9 stones by the Japanese mathematician (shodan = lowest non-beginner or black belt).

Mr. Kitabatake one day told us that a Japanese mathematician was going to pass through Berlin on his way to London, and if we wanted to we could play a game with him at the Japanese Club. Dr. Lasker asked him whether he and I could perhaps play a game with him in consultation, and was wondering whether the master – he was a shodan – would give us a handicap.

“Well, of course,” said Mr. Kitabatake.
“How many stones do you think he would give us?" asked Lasker.
“Nine stones, naturally,” replied Mr. Kitabatake.
“Impossible!” said Lasker. “There isn’t a man in the world who can give me nine stones. I have studied the game for a year, and I know I understood what they were doing.”
Mr. Kitabatake only smiled.
“You will see,” he said.

The great day came when we were invited to the Japanese Club and met the master – I remember to this day how impressed I was by his technique – he actually spotted us nine stones, and we consulted on every move, playing very carefully. We were a little disconcerted by the speed with which the master responded to our deepest combinations. He never took more than a fraction of second. We were beaten so badly at the end, that Emanuel Lasker was quite heartbroken. On the way home he told me we must go to Japan and play with the masters there, then we would quickly improve and be able to play them on even terms. I doubted that very strongly, but I agreed that I was going to try to find a way to make the trip.

Isabel and the dwarf king

This is an old story I told the kids.

One day Max and Isabel were hiking in the mountains and came upon a cave.

Exploring in the gloom, they found a giant cavern, filled by a pile of gold and jewels. Atop the pile was a huge throne. On that throne sat the dwarf king.

Who dares enter my throne room? asked the dwarf king.

My name is Isabel and this is my brother Max.

You sure have a lot of gold, said Max.

Yes, said the dwarf king with a gleam in his eye. I am the richest in the world!

What use are riches in this dark cave? asked Max.

What?!? I am the richest in the world!!

Oh dwarf king, said Isabel, no hoard of gold is worth even a single flower, growing in the summer sun.

Years later, after the dragon came and burned all the king's kinsmen, Isabel wondered what had become of him ...

Bring on Jon Jones

Great interview with former Olympian (freestyle) Dan Cormier after he submitted another Olympian (greco) Dan Henderson at UFC 173 last night. I believe Cormier can beat Jon Jones. Cormier is only about 5"10 whereas Jones is 6"4 (both fighting at 205). Previous fighters have been forced by Jones to play his striking / top control game. But Cormier is smart -- he didn't get into striking exchanges with Henderson, who has a dangerous right hand. He kept the fight on the ground and dominated from the top. He can do the same to Jones. Using this strategy, he can use Jones's length against him -- we'll see Jon Jones fighting off his back for the first time. What I like about Cormier is that he is really developing his jiujitsu. Many wrestlers are unable to capitalize on top position due to lack of high level submission skills.

Hollywood Hills

I'm not a materialistic guy, but I do like modern architecture. My eyes nearly popped out when I saw this photo in Dwell. The house is in the Hollywood Hills and the view is of downtown LA.

Roboscope

This would be pretty deadly mounted on a drone...

Intervention and Replication

This article describes surprisingly effective interventions that improve college success rates for low SES/SAT students. Let's hope they can be broadly replicated.

NYTimes: ... Laude was hopeful that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We weren’t naïve enough to think they were just going to show up and start getting A’s, unless we overwhelmed them with the kind of support that would make it possible for them to be successful,” he said. So he supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.

Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T. average.

... Laude wanted something that would help him predict, for any given incoming freshman, how likely he or she would be to graduate in four years. The Institutional Research team analyzed the performance of tens of thousands of recent U.T. students, and from that analysis they produced a tool they called the Dashboard — an algorithm, in spreadsheet form, that would consider 14 variables, from an incoming student’s family income to his SAT score to his class rank to his parents’ educational background, and then immediately spit out a probability, to the second decimal place, of how likely he was to graduate in four years.

In the spring of 2013, Laude and his staff sat down with the Dashboard to analyze the 7,200 high-school seniors who had just been admitted to the class of 2017. When they ran the students’ data, the Dashboard indicated that 1,200 of them — including Vanessa Brewer — had less than a 40 percent chance of graduation on time. Those were the kids Laude decided to target. He assigned them each to one or more newly created or expanded interventions. The heart of the project is a portfolio of “student success programs,” each one tailored, to a certain extent, for a different college at U.T. — natural sciences, liberal arts, engineering — but all of them following the basic TIP model Laude dreamed up 15 years ago: small classes, peer mentoring, extra tutoring help, engaged faculty advisers and community-building exercises.

... Students were randomly sorted into four categories. A “belonging” treatment group read messages from current students explaining that they felt alone and excluded when they arrived on campus, but then realized that everyone felt that way and eventually began to feel at home. A “mind-set” treatment group read an article about the malleability of the brain and how practice makes it grow new connections, and then read messages from current students stating that when they arrived at U.T., they worried about not being smart enough, but then learned that when they studied they grew smarter. A combination treatment group received a hybrid of the belonging and mind-set presentations. And finally, a control group read fairly banal reflections from current students stating that they were surprised by Austin’s culture and weather when they first arrived, but eventually they got used to them. Students in each group were asked, after clicking through a series of a dozen or so web pages, to write their own reflections on what they’d read in order to help future students. The whole intervention took between 25 and 45 minutes for students to complete, and more than 90 percent of the incoming class completed it.

... In January 2013, when Yeager analyzed the first-semester data, he saw the advantaged students’ results were exactly the same as they were every year. No matter which message they saw in the pre-orientation presentation, 90 percent of that group was on track. Similarly, the disadvantaged students in the control group, who saw the bland message about adjusting to Austin’s culture and weather, did the same as disadvantaged students usually did: 82 percent were on track. But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.

One problem with this type of treatment or intervention is that the selected group should not be stigmatized, or even aware of why they were selected for the special treatment. As awareness grows (e.g., through this high profile article in the NYTimes magazine), it becomes harder and harder to camouflage the criteria used to select students for programs like TIP. Note, in the last intervention described above it appears the entire freshman class (~ 7k students) at UT Austin was used, so sample size was fairly large.

What's New Since Montagu?

I wrote this to help a journalist who is trying to understand the current controversy over A Troubled Inheritance, the new book by NYTimes genetics correspondent Nicholas Wade. (Link above goes to earlier discussion on this blog, with additional useful links and figures.)

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu advanced the idea that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality. For Wade, Montagu is a foil against which to benchmark recent advances in human genomics.

Wade: ... So I decided that I would write a book that explained what we know about race and what the consequences might be, and I think Montagu made a terrible mistake, though I share his motives.

Note the discussion below avoids using the term "race" and focuses instead on groups of humans that share ancestry. The degree of sharing can now be directly measured through genotypes.

What's New Since Montagu?

Two modern humans differ at about 1 in 1000 loci (out of ~ 3 billion in the human genome). There are a few million differences between any two individuals across their entire genome.

A common argument is that 99.9 percent genetic similarity cannot leave room for "consequential" differences. But modern humans and Neanderthals are almost as similar (~ 99.8 percent; we have high accuracy sequences now for Neanderthals), and there are significant differences between us and them: both physical and cognitive. However, because humans and Neanderthals are known to have interbred, we are still part of the same species. (Would it be fair to refer to them as a separate "race"? Is the modern-Neanderthal difference merely a social construct?) Furthermore, this 0.1 percent genetic variation accounts for human diversity encompassing Confucius, Einstein, Shaq and Shakespeare.

Genetic variation is patterned -- two individuals who trace their ancestry to the same geographical region (e.g., two Japanese) will have about 15 percent fewer total differences between them than if we were to compare individuals from widely separated ancestries (e.g., a Nigerian and a Japanese). This means hundreds of thousands of fewer differences between individuals from the same group than for two randomly selected people from different groups. 

Gene variants (alleles) which are common in one population (e.g., 90 percent of Japanese have version A) can be rare in another (e.g., only 20 percent of Nigerians have version A). Differences in allele frequencies are correlated across populations. From these correlations one can easily identify a genome (or even a small chunk of DNA as long as it includes many alleles) as belonging to a particular ancestral group. To oversimplify: just ask whether the DNA chunk in question has mostly the variants that are common in one group as opposed to another. Even if the differences in allele frequency are small -- e.g., allele X is 62 percent likely in Japanese, versus 57 percent likely in Nigerians -- once we consider thousands of such alleles the statistical signal becomes apparent. Each individual (or chunk of DNA) can be associated with a particular ancestral group.

Is this genetic difference consequential? Does it make two Nigerians more similar, on average, to each other than to a random European? Obviously, on some superficial phenotypes such as skin color or nose shape, the answer is yes.

But what about more complicated traits, such as height or cognitive ability or personality? All of these are known to be significantly heritable, through twin and adoption studies, as well as more modern methods.

We can't answer the question without understanding the specific genetic architecture of the trait. For example, are alleles that slightly increase height more common in one group than another? We need to know exactly which alleles affect height... But this is challenging as the traits I listed are almost certainly controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes. Could population averages on these traits differ between groups, due to differences in allele frequencies? I know of no argument, taking into account the information above, showing that they could not.

In fact, in the case of height we are close to answering the question. We have identified hundreds of loci correlated to height. Detailed analysis suggests that the difference in average height between N and S Europeans (about one population SD, or a couple of inches) is partially genetic (N Europeans, on average, have a larger number of height increasing alleles than S Europeans), due to different selection pressures that the populations experienced in the recent past (i.e., past 10k years).

Many who argue on Montagu's side hold the prior belief that the ~ 50k years of isolation between continental populations is not enough time for differential selection to produce group differences, particularly in complex traits governed by many loci. This is of course a quantitative question depending on strength of selection in different environments. The new results on height should cause them to reconsider their priors.

It is fair to say that results on height, as well as on simpler traits such as lactose or altitude tolerance, are consistent with Wade's theme that evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.

Further extrapolation to behavioral and cognitive traits will require more data, but:

1) The question is scientific -- it can be answered with known methods. (I estimate of order millions of genotype-phenotype pairs will allow us to extract the genetic architecture of complex traits like cognitive ability -- perhaps sometime in the coming decade.)

2) There is no a priori argument, given what we currently know, that such differences cannot exist. (Cf. Neanderthals!) Note this is NOT an argument that differences exist -- merely that they might, and that we cannot exclude the possibility.

An honest Ashley Montagu would have to concede points 1 and 2 above.

The second part of A Troublesome Inheritance covers controversial topics such as genetic group differences in behavioral and cognitive predispositions, and their societal implications. Wade is mostly careful to present these as speculative hypotheses, but nevertheless his advocacy leaves him vulnerable to easy attack. What I have summarized above are the incontestable (albeit, in some circles, perhaps still controversial and poorly understood) new results that have accumulated through the last decade of genomic research.

See also Recent human evolution: European height and The Neanderthal Problem.

Note Added: Distinguished evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has written a review in The New York Review of Books which I find quite similar to mine.

There was some back and forth between Razib Khan, Orr and Jerry Coyne. I added the comment below.

My take on the book is similar to that of Orr/Coyne: does a decent job of explaining population structure; too much speculation in the second part.

However, I think Orr/Coyne/Wade all miss the most interesting piece of science regarding strength of recent selection: evidence that the N-S height gradient (about 1 SD of difference between the two regions) in Europeans is due to selection pressure. That would constitute an example of fairly strong (in the context of the debate over group differences in humans) selection pressure acting over relatively short periods of time (~ 10 kya or less). I would think this result, if it holds up, might require significant updating of priors for certain people. It also provides a good example of how science in this area should be done: observed phenotype group difference, large data sets (GIANT) teasing out the genetic architecture, tests for selection on associated genetic variants.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/05/whats-new-since-montagu.html
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/08/recent-human-evolution-european-height.html

Another point, for the cognoscenti: Wade does a good job explaining the difference between soft and hard sweeps. Orr notes that small adjustments of allele frequencies is one of the primary mechanisms for evolutionary change (so nothing new in Wade’s discussion; goes all the way back to Fisher), but many many readers, even biologists who aren’t in population genetics, don’t understand this point very well. So reading that section in the book would increase understanding for a large number of people.

Life impacts of personality and intelligence

Here are two nice figures I came across recently.

The first, based on SMPY data, displays odds ratios for various accomplishments (doctorate degree, STEM publication, patent, high income, tenure) as a function of SAT-M score at age 13. The quartiles correspond roughly to 1 in 200 ability (Q1) to 1 in 10k ability (Q4). This data soundly refutes the "IQ above 120 doesn't matter" Malcolm Gladwell nonsense. See earlier post Horsepower matters; Psychometrics works.

In (imprecise) words: "Profoundly gifted children are 10+ times more likely than merely gifted children to, e.g., earn a patent or gain tenure at a top research university. They are at least several times more likely to earn exceptionally high incomes." (Note "merely gifted" is somewhat below the Q1 SMPY cut -- most school systems use top few percent vs top 0.5 percent.)

The second figure shows regression coefficients of income (at various ages) vs IQ and personality traits (standardized, so returns for each SD of trait). This was originally discussed in Earnings effects of personality, education and IQ for the gifted; see also this paper (Miriam Gensowski, Copenhagen). Note the IQ returns may be underestimated for average individuals since the data source is Terman and there is significant restriction of range (everyone tested at better than 1 in 200 or so on the Stanford-Binet). Nevertheless there are still positive returns to above average IQ within the Terman group (analogous to SMPY results above).

It pays to be Smart, Disciplined/Focused, Extraverted, and Mean! 8-(

Height, Flynn Effect, and shared environment

Some interesting examples of shared environmental effects on height.

Atlantic: ... a database of 2,236 British soldiers who served in World War I, and then they looked up their birth records. The soldiers were relatively representative of the male population as a whole—about two-thirds of the 1890 British male birth cohort enlisted. It turns out that subtle differences in their heights hinted at their origins:

Those from white-collar backgrounds were taller: This follows the theory that wealth buys better food and living conditions, and thus greater height in adulthood. The men who hailed from the top two social classes stood a half-inch taller, on average.

The more kids there were in a household, the shorter they were: Not only because there was less food to go around, but also because it made it more likely that there were more people in each bedroom. “Crowding can help spread respiratory and gastrointestinal infections,” Hatton said. “People sneezing on each other, that sort of thing.” Each additional sibling cost the men an eighth of an inch, and having more than one person per bedroom shaved off a quarter-inch.

Children of literate mothers were taller: When mothers couldn’t read, they were less likely to know about the importance of a balanced diet or clean cutlery. The researchers measured the percentage of women by region who were only able to sign their marriage certificates with an X, rather than their name. People from areas with a high percentage of illiterate mothers were a quarter-inch shorter.

People from industrial districts were shorter than those from agricultural areas: Regardless of income, the Dickensian living conditions of 19th century British cities suppressed height by about nine-tenths of an inch.

Average European male height increased 11 centimeters between 1870 and 1970, about a centimeter per decade, or 1.5 SD in a century. Seems suspiciously similar to the Flynn Effect! In addition, over the same period of time average years of schooling went up significantly: e.g., UK 1870 4 years to 1930 7 years (see Appendix A of this paper). Most individuals born 100 years ago experienced significant deprivation by modern standards.

My own view is that there is nothing particularly mysterious about the Flynn Effect: living conditions, nutrition, and availability of education have all improved drastically in the last 150 years. So g scores should have as well. The Flynn Effect can be consistent with high heritability for non-deprived individuals in modern environments.

See also Swedish height in the 20th century and Flynn on the Flynn Effect.

The north-south gradient in average height found in Europe (see figure) may be a consequence of differential selection pressures that vary by region.