The Human Mind is a Bayes Logic Machine

lexxyz writes "Apparently the human mind can predict the distribution type for a given sample of results. A study found in The Economist has shown that a group of minds working on single pieces of data, can together generate the statistical model used to represent a given sample. Note that it takes a group of people to be able to accurately predict the behaviour of something, not a single individual"

Comments

something-sample-what?!

[thhamm]

A study found in The Economist has shown that a group of minds working on single pieces of data, can together generate the statistical model used to represent a given sample. Note that it takes a group of people to be able to accurately predict the behaviour of something, not a single individual.

hugh?

As Einstein once said...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Bayesian logic has strictures and inferences.....

[postbigbang]

It's not all about data and results. It's also about pre-formed boundaries, or domains within which answers usually (and some might say 'logically') fall.

This is one of those elementary, goosey sorts of tomes (if you RTFA) where a bunch of nerds go around with a bad hypthosis and come to an 'enlightened' conclusion.

Consider the techniques that surround Wolfram's expostuations-- that the world is algorhmic, and language ill-describes these algorithms, loosely defining them as processes. These setup boundaries within which we derive domains where answers must lay.

Proving that with just a few data points within a tight algorithm that you'll get the right answer is just hilarious-- of course you will. The domain fits, and so the answer must. The domain gets defined by a number of experience points as hidden references that allow the frequentists to get magic (e.g. hidden and historical) inferences to the answer. This is where the phenomenon of the trick question makes us all so frustrated.

My point? Inference has predefined boundaries, and so of course Bayesian logic doesn't require a bunch of data to lead to a correct conclusion because the boundaries are already so tightened that only those that randomly guess, and don't use historical data points (e.g. their freaking memories) are going to blow the answers.

Sigh.

Overhyped

[Anonymous Coward]

The headline claims that "The Human Mind is a Bayes Logic Machine"

While the article concludes:

How the priors are themselves constructed in the mind has yet to be investigated in detail. Obviously they are learned by experience, but the exact process is not properly understood. Indeed, some people suspect that the parsimony of Bayesian reasoning leads occasionally to it going spectacularly awry, with whatever process it is that forms the priors getting further and further off-track rather than converging on the correct distribution.

Which is not really the same. To say that our minds *are* this type of logic machine indicates that we have no features *except* those of a Bayes logic machine, something that is hardly supported by the evidence that the predictions of *many* people (not just one) fall along the proper probability distributions for those frequencies they tested. I.E. that we apparently assume a poisson distribution for some things that have a poisson distribution, whether or not we know what that is, etc.

In other words, while we might have the *capability* of a Bayes logic machine, there is no indication that we are *limited* to only the realizations such a machine can provide.

Mod article (-1, Typical Slashdot Hype)

Re:Working "together"?

[Mysteray]

"If you don't settle your statistical methods before starting to analyze the data, then it ain't science."

You misunderstand the nature of Bayesian statistics. The data and the initial prior determine the analysis, the analysis generates a prediction, which becomes the new prior. It not only tests hypotheses but generates new hypotheses. You can construct an accurate Bayesian model from nearly any initial prior given sufficient data.

Actually, I don't know anything about Bayesian statistics. However, from TFA:

Dr Griffiths and Dr Tenenbaum conducted their experiment by giving individual nuggets of information to each of the participants in their study (of which they had, in an ironically frequentist way of doing things, a total of 350), and asking them to draw a general conclusion.

The Scientific Method requires that the hypothesis makes the predictions before they are tested. This is an essential requirement regardless the actual statistical methods used. For example, consider that an arbitrary amount of completely random data of just 6 variables is likely to yield at least one "statistically significant" correlation for the determined data-miner to write his paper about.

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with what the authors did (except maybe being in the popular press before publication) it's just not the kind of thing that the FDA would let you go to market with.

In most situations communications would improve the estimates.

I dunno, I'd guess any kind of "consensusing" would destroy this magic distribution-detecting ability. Anecdotally, the one time I was on a jury this one young male juror worked hard to score the phone number of a young female juror, who's ex was a cop, etc..

Original paper here

[SiliconEntity]

Here is the paper:

http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/prediction10.pdf

It begins:

If you were assessing the prospects of a 60-year-old man, how much longer would
you expect him to live? If you were an executive evaluating the performance of a movie
that had made 40 million dollars at the box office so far, what would you estimate for its
total gross?

These questions have specific "right" answers, which can be achieved based on having the proper mental model for how lifespans and movie grosses are distributed. See how good a job you could do, without peeking, just based on your prior knowledge about the world.

Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy

[rvqbl]

I have thought about this as well. One conclusion with which I am very uncomfortable is that the democracy IS correct. But then I remember that money, media and deception can cause problems in democracy. It would be interesting to see how more "noise" and an inaccurate representation of the situation affects these types of solutions.

Re:Prediction

[hobbit]

Of course the future does not exist. It will exist though, just like the past existed.

Re:So,,,

[theStorminMormon]

If you have an IQ of 200 and SAT, etc scores in the 90th percentile there's something seriously wrong with your test taking abilities considering any IQ above 150 puts you above the 99.96 percentile for IQ. But then, scores vary pretty widely depending on which testing methodology you use. By contrast I'm pretty sure my IQ isn't nearly that high and I've scored consistently in the 99th percentile since I took my first standardized tests in elementary school.

But then - you probably knew that.