I ran across a headline recently “Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women” that I realized provides a nice example of a few points we’ve been discussing in the lab. First, I have found myself describing on a few recent occasions that it is reasonable to think of implicit learning (IL) […]

It’s tempting to call this kind of thing ‘stupid human tricks’ but it’s really awesome human tricks.  I’m regularly fascinated by people who have pushed themselves to achieve extremely high levels of skill in offbeat areas.  The skill performance her is amazing, clearly thousands of hours of practice.   With a lot of the more […]

I mentioned the Dan Plan awhile ago as a fascinating real-world self experiment on the acquisition of expertise.  Dan, the eponyous experimenter and experimentee, quit his job to try to spend 10,000 hours playing golf to see if he could meet a standard of ‘internationally competitive’ defined by winning a PGA tour card — starting […]

Courtesy of Jerry (ChessNetwork), I found out today about Leela and the LCzero chess project (http://lczero.org/). This appears to be a replication of the Google DeepMind AlphaZero project with open source and distributed computing contributing to the pattern learner. Among the cool aspects of the project is that you can play against the engine after […]

If you happen to be a fan of data-driven political analysis, you are probably also well aware of the ongoing challenge of how to effectively and accurately visualize maps that show US voting patterns.  The debate over how to do this has been going on for decades but was nicely summarized in a 2016 article […]

Google’s DeepMind group updated their game learning algorithm, now called AlphaZero, and mastered chess.  I’ve seen the game play and it elegantly destroyed the previous top computer chess-playing algorithm (the computers have been better than humans for about a decade now), Stockfish.  Part of what is intriguing about their claim is that the new algorithm […]

A chain of speculative scientific reasoning from our work into really big social/society questions: Skill learning is a thing. If we practice something we get better at it and the learning curve goes on for a long time, 10,000 hours or more.  Because we can keep getting better for so many hours, nobody can really […]

I think this should be the last note on this topic for awhile, but since it’s topical a new piece of data popped up related to possible sources of gender outcome differences in STEM-related fields.   The new piece of data was reported in the NY Time Upshot section, titled “Evidence of a Toxic Environment […]

The entirely predictable backlash against Google for firing the sexist manifesto author has begun.  Among the notable contributors is the NY Time Editorial page in the form of David Brooks.  In support of his position that the Google CEO should resign, he’s even gone so far as to dig up some evolutionary psych types to […]

Somebody at Google wrote a memo/manifesto arguing against diversity (mainly gender), caused something of a ruckus and got himself fired.  The author was clearly either trying to get terminated (as a martyr) or simply not very bright.  A particularly articulate explanation of why it is necessary to fire somebody who did what he did is […]