Robots and Personality

My sense of humor is bizarre. I just laughed out loud for several minutes after reading this:

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
This test, he charged, was inhumane.

I think I found this story so funny because I can see the conflict between two personality types: the engineer who happily watches his machine perform its intended function, and the leader who identifies emotionally with the people and tools under his command. I was laughing at the confusion of the engineer who made a flawless machine but failed to consider the human factors in the design.

The article is interesting throughout, as is the one that pointed me to it:

They're designed to do a job, and they're designed to be able to interact with people to the extent that it facilitates their ability to do that job, but service robots are really not programmed to be your pet, your best friend, or a member of your family.
Whether it's in their programming or not is, to some extent, beside the point, since it happens anyway. And when it happens, it dramatically changes the way that people interact with what on a primary level is intended to be little more than a tool. Realizing this, a team from Delft University of Technology and Philips Research in the Netherlands decided to take a look at how people actually want their robot vacuums to behave, and what kinds of personalities they'd like them to display.

 

Psychiatric Drugs Continued

More scary stuff:

What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects.

I believe that people should have the right to take drugs that the FDA has not approved. However, they should only do so with full knowledge of the risks, and knowledge of the fact that the government does not think it is safe. The existence of regulatory agencies often gives people a false sense of security. They assume that things are safe, instead of asking the questions they should.

But then, maybe they are making a rational calculation:

As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, "This has become the new welfare." Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.
Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs. According to a New York Times story, a Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.

That first sentence is nonsense. People could survive without this government program, and the assertion that they cannot is incredibly insulting and misleading. But it is true that without these kinds of programs, people would have to reduce or alter their consumption and/or learn new skills and work harder. Nobody wants to do that, so they do what it takes to get the diagnosis. 

One of the mantras of public choice economics is "If you subsidize something, you get more of it." That is what we are seeing here. The government gives you money if your kids are on psychoactive drugs, so more people put their kids on psychoactive drugs.

Read the whole thing

Misc

One of my favourite lines – and I haven't been able to find out who came up with it – is that "There's an age when boys read one of two books. Either they read Ayn Rand or they read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. One of these books leaves you with no grasp on reality and a deeply warped sense of fantasy in place of real life. The other one is about hobbits and orcs."

Source

I read Lord of the Rings, thankfully.

 

Then I read Hume's Enquiry, this wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. What we know is what we have evidence for. We do the best we can, but anybody who claims to be able to deduce or have revelation about The Truth – with both Ts capitalised – is wrong. It doesn't work that way. The only reasonable way to approach life is with an attitude of humane scepticism. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read that book. 

I have never gotten around to reading Hume, but I know the general idea of his works and I definitely approve. I rarely have the patience for reading the full text of philosophers write. They are far too verbose. It is much more efficient to read summaries.

Residents of the Austrian mountain town of Hallstatt, population 800, are scandalized. A Chinese firm has plans to replicate the village — including its famous lake — in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Austrian media reported this week.

Source

The Chinese possess a fascinating combination of initiative and shamelessness. They decide that they want something, and then they do it. Their entrepreneurs will gladly make copies of anything and everything, and their consumers will gladly buy it. The concept of 'authenticity' seems completely foreign to them.

Ayn Rand would be proud of them.

Depressing Health Facts

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.

emphasis mine

Source (You may not be able to read the paper without access from a university library.)

So basically, this study says that being locked in a cage with people selected for their violent and antisocial tendencies is a healthier environment than black men normally live in, and that remains true even if you ignore deaths from cars and guns. I have skimmed the paper and it looks like they used decent methodology.

There are a lot of ways you could spin this. It could be due to a better diet and increased access to health care, or it could be due to controlling dangerous actions and habits, or maybe a combination of both. Nobody is going to claim that quality of life is higher in prison, but it is kind of disheartening to see data showing that, for a segment of the population, having the government lock you in a cage and manage your life (badly) results in less mortality than living on your own in our society. No matter if you blame society or the individuals involved, something is seriously wrong here.

The second link is a newspaper article about life expectancy: 

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health
...
In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.
...
Communities with large immigrant populations — Southern California, for example — fared considerably better than average despite relatively high poverty rates. The worst-performing counties were clustered primarily in Appalachia, the Deep South and the lower Midwest. In those places, women died as much as a year younger in 2007 than women did a decade earlier. Life expectancy for women slipped 2 1/2 years in Madison County, Miss., which recorded the biggest regression.

Again, you have the same debate over social causes versus individual responsibility, but it is clear that something is very wrong. There are pockets of people in our country that are regressing in the most basic measures of well-being.

Just like with prison, there is a lot more to your overall quality of life than your mortality rate. Most people would probably think that living in the modern world and dying at 70 is better than living a hundred years ago and dying at 75, just like they would prefer to not be in prison. But mortality is related to health, and your health has a huge impact on your quality of life.

This is a big problem. Something is missing. When analyzing problems like this, the key is to try to find the relevant scarcity, to figure out what is lacking so you can provide it.  

Living a healthy life requires both knowledge and willpower. The two are substitutes. For example, the more you know about cooking, the less willpower you need to eat healthy, because you know how to cook healthy food that tastes really good. Giving people more knowledge is something most people agree on, but the problem is that it is often hard and expensive to do so.

One thing that might help is to provide people with 'artificial willpower' by making systems that allow you to make and enforce commitments. People should be able to tell their credit card companies and grocery stores to refuse to process any transaction involving junk food. I have talked about this before. 

Hopefully in the future we will all have robot butlers to do our shopping for us. They can be our commitment mechanisms; we can tell them to get healthy food and not buy bad things, and we will not go in stores and be confronted with impulse purchases.

Shoes

I just spent $160 for two pairs of Vibram Fivefingers shoes, one pair of Komodos and one pair of Classics. The Komodos are designed for sports, including parkour, that involve lateral motion  and balancing on the forefoot. I liked the way they felt. Even though the soles were a bit thicker and more padded, I still had plenty of freedom of movement in my feet. I will see how they do in the next parkour session. They are also supposed to be more rugged; hopefully they can handle the abuse that I inflict on my shoes.

The classics were on sale for $50. They will not be able to handle any serious activity, but they will be good for everyday use, and should be fine for light jogging. I had a ratty old pair of sandals that I wore when I did not feel like putting on my KSO's, but the classics are so easy to put on that I will not need to wear them anymore.

I am very frugal; I live more cheaply than anyone I know. I hate wasting money. But when it comes to shoes, I will gladly pay for quality. Your footwear has a huge impact on your quality of life. You will spend at least half of your life in your shoes, and with every step you take, they will do either good or bad things to your feet, ankles, knees, legs, and even your hips and spine.  If people put more thought into choosing the shoes that are right for them, and were willing to spend the money, they would have a better lifestyle and fewer health problems.

My mom's mother is 93 now, and still active and moving around. One of the reasons for this is that she refuses to buy 'little old lady' shoes. She goes to the kid's section of the shoe store and buys sneakers made for little boys. They are bright and colorful and comfortable and meant for moving around and have convenient velcro straps rather than laces.

My dad's mother, by contrast, is much younger but seems to have more trouble moving around. The main reason for this is that she will often wear horrible flip-flops that make it impossible to move well. Some of her family were considering getting her a scooter. My family did our best to convince them that this would be a terrible idea and that getting better shoes so she could actually walk around would be much better.

Part of the effect of shoes is psychological. Putting on little kid's shoes makes my grandmother feel younger.  Studies have shown that this makes a difference; if you surround old people with things that remind them of their youth, their health actually improves. Of course, when my grandmother was young, running around being a tomboy and playing sandlot baseball, nobody had shoes like that. But in her mind, those shoes equal youth, and so she is healthier and acts younger.

I freely admit that part of the effect of my Vibrams may be psychological. They press all the right buttons: they are new, well-engineered, and high-tech, but not associated with a traditional shoe company and all of their annoying celebrity endorsements and manipulative ads. They are affiliated with the outdoor sports and natural fitness movement. 

In a way, I like the attention they bring. I like signaling that I am the kind of person who tries new things, is willing to push social boundaries, and wants and needs shoes designed for an active and unconventional lifestyle. From a standpoint of practicality and biomechanics, this is irrelevant rubbish, but I have a primate subconscious like everyone else, and these social things matter to it. The feeling I get from wearing my Vibrams is probably the feeling that most people get when they wear designer clothing or other status symbols, and for the same reason.

In a few years, there will probably be a cheaper brand that works just as well. The popularity of Fivefingers is bringing lots of competitors. This can only be a good thing; being the only provider of these kinds of shoes allows the Vibram company to extract monopoly profits from me. We will only see the full potential of minimalist shoes when we have a competitive market with lots of options, and lots of companies trying to outdo each other to deliver better value.

But if Vibram manages things well, they will retain their cachet and all of the benefits it brings them. It will be interesting to see if I stick with that company or switch to a different brand.

RIP Fivefingers KSO

My 21-month-old pair of Vibram Fivefingers finally died yesterday in the line of duty, during a two-hour parkour session:

As you can see, I had completely worn out the treading on the sole; it was bald in several places, and very thin.

They actually lasted longer than I thought they would. My shoes usually fall apart in a couple years, and I used these for running and hiking and parkour and climbing and normal everyday wear. Ever since I got them, I have not worn anything else aside from dress shoes, sandals, and winter boots.

I got a second pair last summer, and that pair is already looking rough. This pair looked like it was falling apart after about six months, but after I superglued them back together they held up well and did not need any more fixing. I have not had to glue my second pair, but the soles of those are also looking ragged.

I am not sure what I will get to replace this pair. Black KSO's are known for having the most quality problems of any of the Fivefinger family, as my experience demonstrates. Hopefully they have gotten that under control in the last year, but they may have been too busy making new models. I tried the one meant for hiking, and did not like it. I may try the one meant for running, which has a thicker sole. Some fivefinger enthusiasts do not like the feel of that either, but a thick sole may make them last longer. They also have a few more advancements, like a plastic coating on the tops of the toes to prevent them from getting holes. I'll just have to try the different types on.

Drug Testing

Despite the fact that I support full drug legalization, I have absolutely no problem with the recent Florida law to test welfare recipients for drugs and remove benefits from those who are using them. There is a huge difference between using punishing something with state-sanctioned violence and punishing it by the removal of state assistance. Access to taxpayer money should be a privilege, not a right, and you should lose that privilege if you are spending the money on recreational chemicals.

I mentioned in my last post that we need ways to make strong social statements against drugs without making them illegal and instigating violence against people who use them. This is an excellent way to do it. If you spend your own money on drugs and your habit does not cause any problems for anyone else, you should be free to do as you like. But if you have demonstrated an inability to support yourself without taxpayer money, you should have your behavior monitored and controlled by the state. Ideally this should be done in the spirit of medical care and self-improvement rather than punishment. But the simple fact is that if you have money to spend on drugs, you are clearly getting too much money from the state.