Undead Astronauts

With all the Occupy protests going around demanding that the 1% pay its “fair share,” it’s reasonable to go back and revisit the reasons for and against raising taxes Wall Street traders. The main reason cited by conservatives and free marketers for not taxing capital gains is that the market will function more efficiently when the rewards go to the individuals who were smart enough to pick winning stocks. Whatever the winners choose to do with the money they earned, so the argument goes, will likely be more efficient use of that money going forward than any other use it’s put to by people with less knowledge of how to make that sum earn more.

But not so fast my friend. Daniel Kahneman studied the investment choices (thanks to Steve Hsu for the link) of 25 wealth advisers for a period of 8 years and found that year to year correlations in how they ranked against each other came out to 0.01, or effectively zero. It means there is no skill differentiation in financial investment decisions made at the highest levels, or in other words, winners lucked out.

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a Texas A&M study found 70% of middle grade students didn’t fully understand the equal sign.

“The equal sign is pervasive and fundamentally linked to mathematics from kindergarten through upper-level calculus,” Robert M. Capraro says. “The idea of symbols that convey relative meaning, such as the equal sign and “less than” and “greater than” signs, is complex and they serve as a precursor to ideas of variables, which also require the same level of abstract thinking.”

The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes.

“Students who have learned to memorize symbols and who have a limited understanding of the equal sign will tend to solve problems such as 4+3+2=( )+2 by adding the numbers on the left, and placing it in the parentheses, then add those terms and create another equal sign with the new answer,” he explains. “So the work would look like 4+3+2=(9)+2=11.

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cultural neuroscience has continued to find differences between eastern and western minds (see previous finding here). a 2006 study found that chinese and whites use different parts of the brain to process arabic numbers. the chinese in the study processed numbers through the visuospatial regions of their brain while the whites used regions involved in language.

it’s beyond strange to me that an entire swath of humanity uses the language pathway to think about mathematical computations rather than visuospatial pathways, but maybe that’s only because i’ve been conditioned to think visuospatial iq is correlated to mathematical ability. it would be interesting to see which pathway was more computationally efficient for the brain.

once the most efficient pathway was determined, researchers could study how to train students to use the best pathway for mathematical problems. another possibility is that there is no universally efficient pathway. perhaps whichever pathway has the highest comparative iq (visuospatial or verbal) is going to be the most efficient. that would take education into experimental science. each student would need a brainscan to see which educational method he needed. if this turns out to be true for math, then what about other subjects?

/. points to a mathematical paper and its updated followup (shorter version that modifies the proof) that proves if human experimenters have free will in a limited case, then the particles they are measuring must have free will also and so must the rest of the universe. i skimmed some of the articles and not surprisingly i don’t understand the parts that consist the actual proof b/c it involves quantum entanglement, relativistic frames of reference, light cones and half-spaces, and the like. but it’s still interesting.

up to this point, i had thought that free will was conceptually only assignable to rational agents, i.e. a person or entity capable of rational thought beyond basic instinct. but apparently you can assign free will as a property of particles. if i’m understanding this correctly (a very big if), this means that no one can predict from the particle’s history what it will do when it is measured in one of several ways by an experimenter. since history has no bearing on the particle, it then has “free will” since the outcome isn’t determined by its past.

the obvious problem with this proof is that it doesn’t mean much if ppl themselves don’t have at least limited free will. the paper, however, says that physicists already commonly assume limited free will. limited in this case means that the experimenter’s choice of positioning of the apparatus that measures the experiment are not determined by the previous history of the universe. up until quantum mechanics came around, most physicists would have deemed that a deterministic event, but b/c QM is at best probabilistic and has succeeded newtonian physics, physicists now assume free will.

and even as i say that, i know that i don’t really understand the reasoning behind it. but it’s still interesting. =P