Psychology on Patrick Stevens

The use of jargon

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Why jargon is a really useful thing to have and use.

What maths does to the brain

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In my activities on The Student Room, a student forum, someone (let’s call em Entity, because I like that word) recently asked me about the following question.

Isaac places some counters onto the squares of an 8 by 8 chessboard so that there is at most one counter in each of the 64 squares. Determine, with justiﬁcation, the maximum number that he can place without having ﬁve or more counters in the same row, or in the same column, or on either of the two long diagonals.

Training away mental bias

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In which I recount an experiment I have been performing. Please be aware that in this article I am in “[meaning what I say][1]” mode.

For the past year or so, I have been consciously trying to identify and counteract places in the “natural”, everyday use of language in which gender bias is implicitly assumed to be correct. The kind of thing I mean is:

A: I called the plumber.

My experiences with flow

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in the middle of reading Flow, by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, and so far, I love it. It describes the “flow state” of consciousness, that state of “everything is irrelevant except for the task at hand” in which time flies past without your noticing, and you don’t notice hunger or thirst or people moving around you. Flow can be induced when performing a difficult task which lies within your abilities, where immediate feedback is provided. I, at least, feel characteristically exhausted after coming out of a long period of flow - but it’s a good kind of mental exhaustion, much as the tiredness after a long swim is a good kind of physical exhaustion (in contrast to tiredness-after-a-long-day-of-doing-nothing, which feels sort of lazier and unwholesome). The Wikipedia page is a good enough explanation of flow that I will not describe it further here.

Thinking styles

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

All the way back into primary school (ages 4 to 11 years old, in case a non-Brit is reading this), we have been told repeatedly that “people learn things in different ways”. There were two years in primary school when I had a teacher who was very into Six Thinking Hats (leading to the worst outbreak of headlice I’ve ever encountered) and mind maps. I never understood mind maps, and whenever we were told to create a mind map, I’d make mine as linear and boxy as possible, out of simple frustration with the pointless task of making a picture of something that I already had perfectly well-set-out in my mind. I quickly learnt to correlate “making a mind map” with “being slow and inefficient at thinking”. (This was back when my memory was still exceptionally good, so I wasn’t really learning much at school - having read, and therefore memorised, a good children’s encyclopaedia was enough for me - and hence relative to me, pretty much everyone else was slow and inefficient, because I’d already learnt the material.)

Metathought

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently discovered the game of Agricola, a board game involving using resources (family members, stone, etc) to build a thriving farm. The game is turn-based, with the possible actions each turn being severely limited. This makes the game be in large part about optimising under constraint (the foundation of any good game). However, during gameplay I also detected a certain resonance between Agricola and the game of Magic: The Gathering, beyond the usual “constrained optimisation” theme. While I was playing Agricola, there was a kind of niggle in the back of my mind, telling me that “ooh, this is like Magic”.

My objection to the One Logical Leap view

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A large chunk of the reason why changing someone’s mind is so difficult is the fact that our deeply-held beliefs seem so obviously true to us, and we find it hard to understand why those beliefs aren’t obvious to others. Example:

A: A god exists - look around you; everything you see is so obviously created, not stumbled upon! B: No, that’s rubbish - look around you, everything you see is easily explained by understood processes!

Prerequisites for hypothetical situations

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Usually when I discover (or, more rarely, think up) a thought experiment about a moral point, and discuss it with an arbitrary person whom I will (for convenience) call Kim, the conversation usually goes like this:

Me: {Interesting scenario} - what do you think?

Kim: I would just {avoids point of scenario by nitpicking}

Me: You know what I meant. {applies easy fix to scenario to prevent nitpick}

Kim: Well then, I’d {avoids point of scenario by raising unrelated moral issue}

The Multiple Drafts view of consciousness

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading one of Daniel Dennett’s books, Consciousness Explained. Aside from the fact that the author has an incredible beard and is therefore correct on all matters, he can also write a very cogent book. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett outlines what he calls the Multiple Drafts approach to explaining consciousness; this blog post is my attempt to summarise that view in a couple of short analogies.

Dennett starts off by providing evidence that our time-perception is somewhat malleable: we can interpret two dots of different colours (appearing separated by a short distance in time and space) as a single moving dot that changes colour abruptly at some point. The key puzzle here is that we perceive the colour to have changed before seeing the second coloured dot. Dennett then outlines what seem to be the two mainstream points of view on how this happens.

Mundane magics

Sun, 07 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have stumbled across a LessWrong post on the importance of seeing what is real for just how cool it is. It lists such examples as:

Vibratory Telepathy. By transmitting invisible vibrations through the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts. As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much deeper than those possible to other primates.
Psychometric Tracery. By tracing small fine lines on a surface, the Psychometric Tracer can leave impressions of emotions, history, knowledge, even the structure of other spells. This is a higher level than Vibratory Telepathy as a Psychometric Tracer can share the thoughts of long-dead Tracers who lived thousands of years earlier. By reading one Tracery and inscribing another simultaneously, Tracers can duplicate Tracings; and these replicated Tracings can even contain the detailed pattern of other spells and magics. Thus, the Tracers wield almost unimaginable power as magicians; but Tracers can get in trouble trying to use complicated Traceries that they could not have Traced themselves.

I thought I would give a few more. First, I hereby rename The Eye (as that post’s author names this ability) to Force Perception, and I dub a user of any of these magics a Mage.