Entries for May 2005
Why are we falling for the 747-by-random-search fallacy?
The fallacy to which I refer is a favourite argument of intelligent design advocates. Its basic structure starts with pointing out that the odds against a 747 being spontaneously assembled by a chance alignment of components (let alone atoms) are so immense that it's obvious the thing was designed, and then making the false leap to claiming that therefore the equivalent is true of a human being. It's a fallacy because evolution is actually an ordered, structured process rather than simply a random sampling of all possible permutations.
In the light of this, it's disappointing to see quite how much evolutionary robotics work seems to be basically trying to evolve 747s from scratch.
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About me
I realise this is not the usual or sensible order of doing things, but now that I've been using this blog for a couple of months I'm finally writing an introductory post.
Ways to organise references
I'm actively looking for better tools to use to organise my reading. I'm trying to solve three problems:
- Too often I remember reading something somewhere but can't find the reference to go back to that paper.
- Compiling the bibliography for a paper is laborious, and it seems to me that there ought to be a way of automatic all that categorising of information into 'author', 'title', 'date', etc.
- I'm really bad at keeping track of papers I haven't yet read but am interested to sooner or later.
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The trouble with science journalism
The trouble with science journalism is that for various reasons—including, but not restricted to laziness—it tends to uncritically accept the claims made in a paper. A case in point was an article that I picked up on recently because it's about work in my field, and I remembered the research in question from a conference last year.
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Protesting a protest
Update on the 26th of May: the boycott I describe below has been overturned
I don't know how big an issue this has been in the news outside the UK, but the AUT (a big university teachers' union) recently passed a motion approving a boycott of two Israeli Universities. The most comprehensive, even-handed article I've seen about this appeared recently in the Christian Science Monitor, and it's worth a read.
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How to classify different types of learning experiment
I realise that I have as yet to write the introducing myself
or introducing my work
posts, which means that for some people this is going to be missing some context, but I'll get to those soon. Meanwhile I've been doing some brainstorming about what exactly to put in the research proposal that I'm hoping to write and defend in the next 4-6 weeks. The act of writing it all down has in itself helped me clarify a few ideas, but there are also plenty of blanks that still need filling in, and inadequately thought out parts that need to be refined. So here, with the caveat that it's really sub-draft quality, is the beginning of a description of what I'm working on:
evolution of learning brainstorm
If you're wondering what I actually do, this might explain things somewhat, and if you can give me any feedback on this (especially on section 4) I'd be very grateful indeed. It's not worth giving me feedback on the writing itself, as it's not at all edited and this document isn't something I anticipate turning into a paper, but any thoughts about the content would be helpful.
Update: Erin McMullen pointed out in an email that my characterisation of condition in this document was completely wrong. Both things that I described are instances of operant conditioning, whereas classical conditioning involves setting up stimulus -> response associations.