Finding Patterns: Steven Pinker On Human Behaviour
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
- The first episode of my podcast is a trip down memory lane. I cover research and experiments I've conducted in my undergrad that explore behavior, motivation and probability. Is our behavior random? Or is there a pattern? How does this randomness determine larger events in our universe, like lightening bolts and world wars? #pinker #cognitivepsychology #podcast #psychology #science #stevenpinker #motivation #success #mindset
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Professor Pinker never fails to educate, challenge, and inspire. Long may he prosper.
Why is he only a PhD. ? I don' t see M.D. after his name ! He is not a medical doctor ! He is just a Ivory Tower theorist !! To a small brained being, such as yourself, I can understand why you might be impressed .
Very excited by this. Very big fan & cannot thank you enough for your contributions to the science of understanding human nature & introducing so many to profound & interesting concepts!
Fascinating explanation. For me the questions remains what randomness is on a deeper level, fundamentally...
Great informational video. I hope you bring in the near future topics like mental models, cognitive constructivism, perception of time and memory (like dynamic presentism), and many more interesting themes of human cognition.
No me voy a perder ningún episodio. I don´t miss any episode .
Probably the best clear concise and at the same time funny insight into what Behaviorism was/is. Looking forward to more videos!
Sitting in a chair, telling a story...brilliant. You are the reason that a guy with a degree in Geology (the same age as you) decided to get a masters in psychology. The first book I read (How the mind works) did it. I have read all your books, watched almost every youtube vid...thank you for the incredible inspiration.
Blessed to have this. ❤
Thank you Professor for you contribution to the world as well as for your beneficial contribution to my life. Your ability to communicate knowledge and ideas is inspiring. Studying your book "How the mind works" was one of a small number of catalysts that synergized my understandings of the human condition.
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Although I am not an indentured student of the discipline I can follow and understand in depth all that you say and write. I am uncertain who to assign credit to for this, but I do know a significant portion of that credit is owed to your ability.
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What first sparked my interest in patterns and randomness was watching the "Off station" noise on a black and white TV in the late 60s and early 70s as a child. Some part of my child brain new that it was just noise, but then another part felt that there was some underlying pattern to the chaos. I was enthralled in thought as to which was the correct interpretation. Today we know it is the noise from the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Stepping into computer programming at 12 years old I quickly learned that there is no such thing as random on a logical computer device. And even in later years of my life I approach what appears to be random, as well as what appears to be patterns in nature with caution.
I am acutely aware of those day to day moments when my mind transposes order over disorder. After writing a book and going back to proof read, it does not matter how many grammatical errors are plainly in front of me in the text, my mind will automatically correct the mistakes with what is in my minds memory before the texts reach my minds eye.
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Our brain and mind is such a fascinating adventure of discovery.
Thank you sir.
The 'behind the door' behaviorist talk was humorous. The 'technically tomorrow is more likely' was... neat. Really, really neat. Neat is the word, and it's not said sarcastically lol. Then, the domino into wars was.. I don't know the word, but I noticed it and thought about it.
Cool video. Will be back for more.
The way he made randomness sound like was very eye opening to me
Great RUclips channel. I hope it will catch a wide audience.
I'm thrilled that Prof Pinker has risen his own YT channel! :D)
Opening music is a little loud and white backgrounds clash with dark mode.
This was great, thanks!
Steve, agrega subtitulos en ESPAÑOL a tus videos de RUclips!!!. Por favor 🙏. Tienes que dar esa facilidad para que llegar a esta región. Espero que lo consideres. Muchas gracias.
*hushed voices in a laboratory*
"The rat knows..."
"Be quiet! They'll realize we're observing them."
I'm no mathematician (can barely spell it), but I don't think the lightning problem is described exactly right in terms of probabilities. I'm sure he's focusing on human perception of randomness, though, and this does help to illustrate that. I don't mean to nitpick, but I feel like I always struggled with word problems and when I'd ask for clarification from the teacher, I'd be told not to "overthink" it and that always bugged me, so here I am doing it again. I think it's the difference between independent days and probability and sequential days and probability.
The problem comes when you overthink a math problem but don't have good thinking tools to tackle math problems, so you lean on intuition which is very spotty to put it mildly when it comes to understanding math-- let alone probabilities.
(I do understand the inherent difficulty in using imperfect words to describe math problems and that is part of the issue)
In context, remember how Pinker said when you have actual Poisson distributions people see patterns called "clustering illusions" (People listening to the audio bleeps thinking the machine wasn't random), but when they aren't experiencing randomness and are merely trying to think intuitively about how something might work randomly in their armchairs (or in a lecture hall with a questionnaire in front of them) , they mess it up and instead give actual patterns (Pinker talking about people estimating next lightning strike in 15 or so days when they're given the scenario stated).
There's a rich and cool literature out there that talks about intuition, randomness, statistics, skepticism, cognitive biases and the like, you could check out some from Pinker (his book 'Rationality' might deal with stuff like this more directly, especially when he tackles framing problems in terms of frequencies versus probabilities which is related to your last point on independent days versus sequential days, you could perhaps find a good youtube lecture on it, and Better Angels of Our Nature did have an extended discussion on randomness as he alludes to in this video), I don't remember a specific book that talked the best about this, read a lot with a lot of overlap over the decade(s), but some off the top of my head include:
'How We Know What Isn't So' by Gilovich, 'Everything Is Obvious' by Watts, 'Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)' by Tavris & Aronson, 'The Invisible Gorilla' by Chabris & Simons, 'Innumeracy' by Paulos, 'The Drunkard's Walk' by Mlodinow, 'Thinking: Fast & Slow' by Kahneman-- A ton, pretty sure I remember a bunch of other psychology books by Paul Bloom I think having overlapping subjects on stuff like this, even I think Dan Dennett talked a lot about human fallacies and such in 'Consciousness Explained' and other titles of his.
None of those really require a lot of math to truly understand (at least if I remember them right, it has been a while since I've read most of those), but maybe if you haven't been properly exposed to the concepts before then you'll still have that overriding intuition that is trying to pull you the wrong way in thinking about such ultimately counter-intuitive notions. (totally understandable by the way, we are merely human after all)
(P.S. if teachers say don't "overthink" it, yeah I can still totally see that as being really awful for a teacher to say, they need to teach the whys alongside the hows, in this case, why if you in a certain scenario "overthink" something you might end up with the wrong solution, because your thoughts can be deceiving-- as Richard Feynman has said "You must not fool yourself & you are the easiest person to fool."-- Self-deception, there's another topic related to intuitions, biases, Trivers wrote a book on it based on his original foreword to Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a bit garbled though his book on 'Deceit & Self-Deception', but there's also one by Kurzban called I think 'Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite' -- Reminds me, also worth checking out Gazzaniga, bunch of youtube lectures I think on his research on split-brain patients and more)
Sorry for the long rambling comment, hope it was of some use in the end.
Probabilities is a difficult realm to nail down so don't stress over the confusion. It is far more complex than we learn in grade school. It depends a great deal upon context and perspective so there can often be more than one correct answer.
Being skeptical of the truth in something and overthinking something isn't quit the same thing, and it can be difficult to discern between the 2.
I suspect this more likely comes down to needing a better understanding of the different types of thinking. As a short list Critical thinking, Analytical thinking, Creative thinking, Abstract thinking, Concrete thinking etc. Each has it's place and it's pros and cons.
I'm almost certain that Pinker is a bit confused on this. He explained the problem clearly, and he calculated the probabilities correctly, but his explanation to why there are clusters is wrong.
The average time taken for a 'success' (success here being that lightning occurs) for independent events of the same probability can be modeled using a Geometric distribution. You would see that the average wait time is 1/0.03 = 33.33 days. Let's say roughly 33 days. This means that if we repeated this experiment 1000 times (by experiment I mean waiting until a lightning strike occurs again), roughly 500 times we would wait less than 33 days, and the remainder of the time we would wait 33 or more days.
Pinker said that the probability that the next strike occurs tomorrow has a higher probability than any other day in the future. This is correct. As a simplification, imagine you were flipping a coin. What is the probability that the first time you will get Heads is on your first flip? It is 50% of course. What about the probability of getting Heads first on the second flip? Well, in this instance you must get Tails then Heads, so that is 0.5 * 0.5 = 25%. What about on the 10th flip? That is 9 Tails in a row, followed by Heads: (0.5)^9 * 0.5 = 0.1% (roughly).
The thing is, the above logic doesn't explain why there are clusters (as we have already seen, the average wait time is 33 days). What does explain clusters is quite simple actually: the probability of there not being any clusters at all is lower than there being clusters. Again, let us use a simple example, this time with a fair six-sided die. Suppose we are rolling the die 100 times. What is the probability that in 100 rolls of the die NONE of the rolls that resulted in a 6 are consecutive (i.e. that we don't get two sixes in a row ever during the 100 rolls)? It is around 8.71%. It would be even less if we did not allow 6's to occur within two rolls of each other. Simply put, it is quite unlikely that randomness is going to evenly spread all the lightning strikes.
Mj
@@axle.studentyea,it probability entirely and solely depends on all the vectors at our disposal,my teacher always gives the eg to explain what this mean...it goes whats the probability of you getting heads on a coin toss.... obvious ans is 50%, but what if I tell you there is some sort of gravel configuration that allows the coin to he stable at the ridge,your coin spun clockwise if you twisy to your left, and there is an exact wind coming and stabilising the coin such that it perfectly lands on the ridge, technically both are right but the one who predicted the wind force generated and the force applied by you and the right ridge configuration and blah balh blah the kist goes on.....did technically find the mosssssssst probable and right ans
🙏💜
I just learned that I am no more than a pigeon pecking a key inside a box.
What is the probability that I'd like the video at 444? 3% depending on the weather report? Lol 😆. I appreciate the talk on pigeon or rat in a box. I believe an example would be youtubers live streaming. Their reward comes everytime their subscribers donate money. They sure do get excited. If you don't, then they ignore you or just block what you say. For the subscribers, it's that like button. The pattern i see with war is when religious adherence declines. Like today, we are on the brink of war now, and churches are empty. If war does happen, religion will once again flourish. Keeping the lie alive and themselves rich. One historical lesson we just don't seem to learn. That's life in a box for you.
Peace and Ahev
Despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage
Jimmy McMuffin brought me here
His rationalization of the lightening strike is like the executioner’s paradox: he’s describing the situation incorrectly
1st in your first video
Day 5 of helping small RUclipsrs
Yeah I know you will be big in no time 😂
An experiment displaying the abundance of randomness where we chose to see pattern... “an illustration of how one idea can be connected to others in ways you wouldn’t expect “...so...there is a connection...pattern?
I think the most prosaic answer is we're a superorganism. A "we am". We always avoid the implications of this. We seem to do it reflexively. We hide from ourselves awareness of the simple, stupid, cognizable rules by which the games we play are played and that, in turn, seems to be so that we mightn't tamper. Well I've looked around and had a good, long, think about how nature would have us behave and I'm not impressed. Cancer is natural. Acne is natural. Just because something is natural doesn't make it desirable. Yet we jump from theism ( we have a coherent identity in the abstract) to a naturalistic atheism, which ought be the first to posit a theory of our tendency to have a fractal, overlapping, malleable identity. And that ought lead to "slime mold", lol. And where is that theory? Who tells us what is empirically true and tries to explain it? Every domain of knowledge, abstractly. No one sews the button on the thing.
3 quotes:
“Every human being is born a barbarian, and only culture redeems them from the bestial.” ― Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" - Shakespeare
"And as he believed, so it was for him" - Richard Bach
@@axle.student "Isn't it pretty to think so." Nope there are facts. They exist. We're a superorganism. Fact. People don't seem to like it. Rather, it doesn't seem to like people thinking of that.
Bollox
RUclips is guilty sueSusan
Science is about questions, not answers
Is this Steven's official channel?