Steven Pinker's Rationality

[Dina Adel]

While reading Steven Pinker's latest book, Rationality, I came across a problematic paragraph in chapter 3 which is supposed to be about probability and randomness. He begins by noting Einstein and his famous saying about God playing dice with the world, and he mentions the importance of not mistaking nonrandom pattern for nonrandom process. Then he gets to the paragraph below:

All this raises the question of what kinds of physical mechanism can generate random events. Einstein notwithstanding, most physicists believe there is irreducible randomness in the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, like the decay of an atomic nucleus or the emission of a photon when an electron jumps from one energy state to another. It’s possible for this quantum uncertainty to be amplified to scales that impinge on our lives. When I was a research assistant in an animal behavior lab, the refrigerator-sized minicomputers of the day were too slow to generate random-looking numbers in real time, and my supervisor had invented a gadget with a capsule filled with a radioactive isotope and a teensy-weensy Geiger counter that detected the intermittent particle spray and tripped a switch that fed the pigeon.

 

Now, I can't get the idea of the last sentence altogether. what does an animal behavior lab have to do with Geiger counter and feeding pigeons, and with randomness to begin with!

 

[swansont]

Because decay is  probabilistic, it’s related to the chance of recording a decay in some time interval.

http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/unbiasing/

place a Geiger counter close to a radioactive source, and the "clicks" are randomly distributed. If the source is large enough and has a long enough half life, we can ignore its slow decay, and treat each "click" as an independent event - the probability of a click in the next millisecond is the same no matter what the history is

(there are many sites explaining how to build such a device using a Geiger counter)

[StringJunky]

The pigeon angle looks like to me as  a way of demonstrating a quantum effect having a macro consequence i.e. the pigeon only gets fed when a quantum event occurs.

[exchemist]

4 hours ago, Dina Adel said:

While reading Steven Pinker's latest book, Rationality, I came across a problematic paragraph in chapter 3 which is supposed to be about probability and randomness. He begins by noting Einstein and his famous saying about God playing dice with the world, and he mentions the importance of not mistaking nonrandom pattern for nonrandom process. Then he gets to the paragraph below:

All this raises the question of what kinds of physical mechanism can generate random events. Einstein notwithstanding, most physicists believe there is irreducible randomness in the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, like the decay of an atomic nucleus or the emission of a photon when an electron jumps from one energy state to another. It’s possible for this quantum uncertainty to be amplified to scales that impinge on our lives. When I was a research assistant in an animal behavior lab, the refrigerator-sized minicomputers of the day were too slow to generate random-looking numbers in real time, and my supervisor had invented a gadget with a capsule filled with a radioactive isotope and a teensy-weensy Geiger counter that detected the intermittent particle spray and tripped a switch that fed the pigeon.

 

Now, I can't get the idea of the last sentence altogether. what does an animal behavior lab have to do with Geiger counter and feeding pigeons, and with randomness to begin with!

 

It must have been some sort of trial of behaviour in which it was important that the feeding intervals were truly randomised, to exclude the possibility that the pigeon could be acting in response to some other, time-related, factor, or something. 

[swansont]

9 minutes ago, exchemist said:

It must have been some sort of trial of behaviour in which it was important that the feeding intervals were truly randomised, to exclude the possibility that the pigeon could be acting in response to some other, time-related, factor, or something. 

Makes sense if they were doing some kind of "response to being fed" experiment

 

Since it's a book on rationality, I'm guessing explanations of probability and randomness have to do with how humans are generally bad at determining randomness and doing risk assessment

[studiot]

8 hours ago, Dina Adel said:

While reading Steven Pinker's latest book, Rationality, I came across a problematic paragraph in chapter 3 which is supposed to be about probability and randomness. He begins by noting Einstein and his famous saying about God playing dice with the world, and he mentions the importance of not mistaking nonrandom pattern for nonrandom process. Then he gets to the paragraph below:

All this raises the question of what kinds of physical mechanism can generate random events. Einstein notwithstanding, most physicists believe there is irreducible randomness in the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, like the decay of an atomic nucleus or the emission of a photon when an electron jumps from one energy state to another. It’s possible for this quantum uncertainty to be amplified to scales that impinge on our lives. When I was a research assistant in an animal behavior lab, the refrigerator-sized minicomputers of the day were too slow to generate random-looking numbers in real time, and my supervisor had invented a gadget with a capsule filled with a radioactive isotope and a teensy-weensy Geiger counter that detected the intermittent particle spray and tripped a switch that fed the pigeon.

 

Now, I can't get the idea of the last sentence altogether. what does an animal behavior lab have to do with Geiger counter and feeding pigeons, and with randomness to begin with!

 

 

Well I know nothing (except the little Wikipedia tells me) about Stephen Pinker so it is not clear to me who the 'I' person is in your second paragraph.

Who was the research assistant of yore, yourself or Pinker ?

 

Now your actual question, and therefore the topic of this thread, asks about randomness and feeding pigeons.

There are several statistical techniques for measuring things by using what is known as 'random sampling'.
Say you wanted to measure the 'average' size of stones in a pile in a quarry.
You could measure every stone and calculate a very accurate average.
Or you could take a shovel here and a shovel there and just measure these as 'representative'.

Statistical techniques exist to take the shovelsfull in an orderly fashion to best represent the pile.
These are based on random numbers being used to identify where to dig the shovel in.
Experience has found this to be far superior to allowing the operator his or her own choice.

I don't know what experiment was being conducted with the pigeons, but I would guess it was similar to what are known as Latin Squares.
If you want to test and compare various varieties of seed, you cant plant them all in the same place, so you divide the field into small square and use random numbers to identify which square each variety seed will be planted, using several for each variety. This takes out (statistically) any fertility and other differences in the planting for proper comparison.

So I would guess something of this sort went on in the pigeon loft with perhaps trials of different feeds.

 

OK that begs the question how to get random numbers ?

Well there are lots of ways, some to do with calculations on paper or by computer and some to do with observing naturally random phenomena.

The thing about 'random numbers' is that in the real world numbers are only truly random over a particular range of interest. Obviously we want that range to coincide with out problem.

Around the time in question another form of physical random generator was also popular. This is called a white noise generator. A white noise generator provides electrical or sound that contains, on average, all frequencies equally in a particular range. It was so important that special electronic components called 'noise generators' have been developed for this purpose.

So there you have it, my guesswork from the sparse information you have provided.

Nevertheless a good topic for discussion. +1

[joigus]

Yes, Pinker's quote is what's in boldface. Pinker's adjectivation is unmistakable. 

They used atomic randomness as a random-number generator. You read the numbers of decay times and use those numbers as input for another variable that has biological relevance by setting this other variable to take those values. That's what I understand.

I hope that helps answer the question, but some feedback would be very useful.