
You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic - jedharris
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-youre-irrational-quantum-probabilistic-human.html
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dekhn
Nothing in the underlying article seems truly quantum in the sense that there
are quantum physical principles contributing to the outcomes of the
experiments. Instead, authors used quantum probabilistic-inspired mathematics
to analyze their results. In that, there isn't really anything truly
interesting; that's just data modelling (and quantum math is structured to
make modelling easier).

~~~
jedharris
Certainly there are no claims of quantum physics being relevant. That would
make me much more suspicious.

There's been a lot of "normal" bayesian modeling in cognitive psych and it has
problems with the examples they address. So the point isn't data modeling per
se, it is _better_ data modeling, which is often worth a look.

~~~
dekhn
Actually, if you read all the author's papers, they are strongly hinting at
the underlying mechanism being quantum. But they never come quite out and say
that.

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foobar2020
Quantum mechanics does not permit parallel states to "communicate" in any way.
The theory is purely linear (i.e. acts somewhat independently on all states),
except for the wavefunction collapse phenomena. Any non-linenarity would, for
instance, immediately imply that we can easily solve NP-complete problems
using quantum computing:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041](http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041)

So QM is probably a poor model for explaining human indecisiveness and
irrationality. Much better is that it is simply the thing that evolution has
come up with that can a) fit in our brains and b) yields proper results.

~~~
jedharris
As far as I can see the question being addressed is which models best explain
experimental results (at equivalent model complexity). If quantum(-like)
probabilities pay off let's use them.

Up to now the models have mostly been a heap of heuristics but those produce
models with lots of degrees of freedom that don't generalize well.

------
jedharris
A good introduction might be this heavily cited paper from 2011 by another
author, Busemeyer: "A quantum theoretical explanation for probability judgment
errors"

([https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=A+quantum+theoretical+e...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=A+quantum+theoretical+explanation+for+probability+judgment+errors.+JR+Busemeyer))

He goes through the application of quantum probability, contrasts it with
Komolgorov probability theory, and then walks through quite a few "anomalies"
in cognitive psychology laying out specific models to deal with them.

The exposition of quantum vs. Komolgorov probability is clear and does not
rely on specialized prior knowledge. The list of anomalies makes apparent the
need for better modeling tools.

------
jedharris
Greatly improved predictions across very diverse cognitive psychology
experiments. For the actual papers see
([http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/](http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/)).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
This sounds less like the mathematics behind quantum mechanics (eg: negative
amplitudes) are themselves relevant, and more like quantum mechanics "bakes
in" the kind of resource-bounded processing and causal structure that we
expect good theories of cognition to have.

Last I've heard, probabilistic modelling of cognition - _with resource-bounded
processing and causal modelling_ in place of "pure" probability theory - has
been a fairly successful research program. What advantage does quantum
"complex" probability have over that, or over some generalizing to a measure
theory with an arbitrary norm?

~~~
jedharris
This may answer your question: Bayesian comparison of a quantum versus a
traditional model of human decision making

[http://www.thedocc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/J24.-BuseW...](http://www.thedocc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/J24.-BuseWangShiffrin2015Bayesian.pdf)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
That mostly doesn't help, due to the fact that, as I understand the term,
standard "decision theories" are intended as _normative_ theories, meaning
that when real behavior deviates, the investigators write the behavior off as
_wrong_ for failing to conform to theory, instead of trying to come up with a
theory that actually describes the behavior.

So if you end up comparing an even-loosely-descriptive theory to a normative
one, the descriptive theory will win, every time, no matter how far it is from
true accuracy. That is, if you line up prospect theory, standard normative
decision theory, and some new descriptive theory, the latter will definitely
win in a model selection. But that doesn't tell us how the _quantum_
descriptive theory compares to, for instance, the _causal-probabilistic_
descriptive theory.

------
wyager
Ugh, what a load of tripe.

First, there's no strong evidence that biological brains make use of quantum
phenomena except insofar as those phenomena drive normal chemistry.

Second, if brains do make use of quantum phenomena in weird ways, the effect
would not be visible at a level as abstract as decision making. Such processes
operate at the level of hundreds of millions of neurons, at which point
classical approximations are quite accurate. Any strange quantum phenomenon
would operate at the level of single neurons, outside of which the quantum
numbers grow so large as to approach classical statistics.

This quantum mysticism needs to stop. There are much better ways to explain
psychological effects like indecision than a (horrifically tenuous) analogy to
quantum physics.

~~~
jedharris
You are pattern matching very loosely. None of the work suggests any quantum
phenomena affecting behavior. The papers go out of their way to reject that
idea in detail.

~~~
wyager
I'm not complaining about the paper; I'm complaining about the article.

~~~
jedharris
The article says Wang "emphasized that her research program neither assumes
nor proposes that our brains are literally quantum computers. Other research
groups are working on that idea; Wang and her collaborators are not focusing
on the physical aspects of the brain, but rather on how abstract mathematical
principles of quantum theory can shed light on human cognition and behaviors."

That does not support your complaint.

