my mind on books

Wikipedia on the “conjunction fallacy”:

The conjunction fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.

The most oft-cited example of this fallacy originated with Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more likely?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

85% of those asked chose option 2. However, mathematically, the probability of two events occurring together (in “conjunction”) will always be less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone.

In Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, researcher Gerd Gigerenzer (director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development) criticizes this view of the conjunction fallacy, suggesting that the problem plays on ambiguities in the meaning of probable and and. When rephrased in numerical terms (ie, out of a 100 persons who fit the description above, how many are (a) bank tellers or (b) bank tellers and active in the feminist movement?) the fallacy disappears, as the number assigned to (a) is larger than the number for (b). (p. 93-97)

For further reading, the European Rationalist has posted “Reason and Rationality” an in-depth article by Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich and Luc Faucher that evaluates “the nature and plausibility of the pessimistic view of human rationality often associated with the heuristics and biases tradition.”

“Linda the bank teller” is also discussed at “Overcoming Bias.”

I’m a fan of both TED.com and LibraryThing. Now TEDBlog has just announced that the TED Book Club has been put into LibraryThing, so their picks are available for browsing here, 61 titles so far…

Also on TED, the latest talk posted is Buddhist monk and author Matthieu Ricard speaking about “Habits of happiness.”

books by Matthieu Ricard at Amazon

John Horgan’s critique of Gerald Edelman

More on Edelman, from Conscious Entities…

(John Horgan’s website)

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail (U of California Press, 2007)
From the book description: “Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.”

UC Press book information

I’m nearly through reading Steven Pinker’s Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. So far I’ve especially enjoyed the chapter on names, which includes discussion on sense vs reference in relation to meaning, a good summary of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (see also Wikipedia), new words. and baby names.

Pinker’s discussion of neologisms leads to a reflection on the categories of things we have words for:

‘Words tend to be reserved for whole entities (“rabbit,” not “undetached rabbit parts”), for stable qualities (“green,” not “green until 2020 and blue thereafter”), for natural kinds, for events that are terminated by a single change of state or a single goal, for artifacts with a function, and for actions with a salient cause, effect, means, or manner. And words are given to the players that have roles in the events we make assertions about, not to the assertions themselves. A sentence can be true or false, but a word cannot.

By these lights, interesting neologisms tend to fail precisely because they are interesting … because the coiner is really commenting on something rather than naming something.’ (p. 310-311)

Here are some more links related to Pinker’s discussion of names:

Project Steve from the National Center for Science Education

You can track the popularity of baby names at Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager (Java required). Below is a screenshot of names starting with “Ste,” including Stephen, Steven, Steve (and Stephanie):

A book referred to in the chapter:

A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change by Stanley Lieberson

See also this earlier post: Reading list for Steven Pinker’s ‘Stuff of Thought’