Glitch

Even if we could make purely rational decisions, what would that even mean? Not everything can be counted and quantified. This is the challenge. With pure rationality, there are rules of logic. Rules like prioritising and comparing. Creating relative preference. If I prefer apples to oranges, and I prefer oranges to pears, then I can infer that I prefer apples to pears. If you remember your preferences and they are consistent. Our memory is glitchy. Which is useful. It is useful to be able to forget things. To change the story. It is one of the ways we cope. If something is not working for us, we get to rewrite the story. If we could never forget and things were purely factual, that would be a debilitating glitch. So somehow we need to establish how well we want to understand ourselves. Do you want to do the work? It is hard to be honest. It is emotionally challenging. You need to build up the necessary skills to self-reflect. It is not simply allowing harsh internal voices. You need to feel that you are on your own team, in the same way as when we work with other people.

Glitches can be useful

What Is Best?

We don't always do what we think is best. Other things matter. Behavioural Economists have devised various games to try understand how real people deviate from purely rational behaviour. One of those experiments is called the 'Ultimatum Game'. Two people play. One (The Proposer) is given some money, say $100, and told to offer some of it to the other player (The Responder). The Responder can either accept or reject the offer. Rejection means neither player gets anything. In a purely rational world, if the Proposer offered $1, the Responder would be better off accepting the arrangement. In experiments, offers of less than 30% are often rejected.

Concepts of fairness, justice, altruism, vengeance, and our spice rack of emotions get involved in most decisions that we make. Most of these more fuzzy, juicy concepts don't have the benefit of quantitative answers. There is no way of counting them. Of comparing them. Of ranking them. I think this is part of intelligence. It is why people are still (for now) so much smarter than computers. Computers think in Ones and Zeroes. Black and White. Right and Wrong. This is limiting. The fun stuff, the painful stuff, the stuff with meaning... happens between the facts. It happens in the gaps. In the spaces. In the relationships.

Understanding is a dance of that which we can count and that which we can't. The beauty of the dance lies in the stories fact and fiction create together.

Time and Space

I like myself least when I am in a corner. When I feel like I am forced to make a decision where I don't like any of the alternatives. Many of the social graces you can have when there is space to breathe fall away. A lack of time or energy to take into consideration feelings forces someone, whoever it is, to impose themselves on others. Most of history seems to be the story of who gets to impose themselves. Whether it's hereditary monarchy, democracy (the majority imposing themselves) or meritocracy (those with skills), at some point someone takes a decision and gets things done through force. If there is one thing that really messes with most people's mojo - it is being forced to do something.

A lack of time can force Zero One Thinking. The idea that that things exist in opposites. It stops the ability to understand, protect and empower the subtleties of all the interests involved. Time solves lots of problems. Marginal tweaks can have a huge impact when you throw 100,000 years at the problem. But we think in much shorter periods and in much bigger jumps. We don't live very long and we want to experience the change for ourselves. Big jumps have both consequences and unintended consequences. Understanding consequences is time consuming, and perhaps impossible.

In 'Ex Machina', there is a scene where the two characters are discussing a Jackson Pollock painting. Pollock is my all time favourite. My art teacher at school effectively (lovingly) bullied me into putting my rational thinking aside and tapping into something else when I was painting. My first few paintings were full of emotional, naive, teenaged angst. I would construct the painting in my head first. I would plan what the painting meant and what it would be trying to say. The composition and the colours would be carefully selected. Pollock did something different. He pushed into 'automatic thinking'. In a scene in the movie 'Pollock' (starring Ed Harris), they show him sitting for hours just staring at a blank canvas. Not planning. Waiting. For a feeling. Then he got stuck in and connected with the paint, the canvas and the elements. He painted. If he had tried to plan the painting, he wouldn't have made a single mark.

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist

The Ex Machina discussion is on the balance between rational thought, the type computers are good at, and emotional thought. Rational thought is about algorithms, rules, logic, problems and solutions. Emotional thought starts somewhere else. It starts with connections. It starts with the way we see, smell, hear, and feel the world. It isn't hardware or software. It is wetware. It makes mistakes, but not in a right or wrong way. Since every single moment matters, a mistake is in fact the reason for many of our best subsequent moments. If we hadn't had that trauma... If we hadn't failed at that task... If we hadn't stumbled... Then we wouldn't have met/started/found/seen the thing that led to where we are now.

Decisions matter. But corners are creations of the mind. There is always time. There is always a solution that takes people into account. There is never a need to impose ourselves. We don't need to work for people. We don't need people to work for us. We can work with each other as Partners. 

If we rethink time. If we add space.

What do you Feel?

It is harder to answer the question 'What do you think?' than the question 'What do you feel?'. It may be harder to put feelings into words, but that may not be necessary. All that may be needed is a Good/Bad or Yes/No response. We can have visceral emotional reactions to issues and questions we have little knowledge about. Intuition is always on. Thought has to be turned on. We may not have the tools required to think about the issue. Thinking may require hard work. Most of our beliefs and opinions are based on how we feel.

I am busy reading 'Thinking Fast & Slow' by Daniel Kahnemann

Silencing Your Perspective

You can never see something from someone else's perspective. You can never have the experiences and context that colour their world. Thomas Nagel wrote the essay 'What is it like to be a bat' (quoted below) where he explains the challenge. Practising empathy is like practising meditation. It is in the process of bringing thoughts back to a point of focus - whether your breath, a candle, a sound or a thought - that exercises your ability to calm the craziness in your head. While we can't actually empathise fully, we can try.

'Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the world around by a system of reflected high-frequency sounds; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in the attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far) it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.'

Thomas Nagel

 Giant Golden Crowned Flying Fox

Source: Wikipedia

There are clearly differences between the level of empathy you can have for a bat and for a person. Within that the bigger the overlap in experiences and the more context is shared, the closer you can come to giving it a real shot. There are however limits. A man trying to think 'like a woman' is thinking 'like a man trying to think like a woman'. An adult child trying to imagine the world of his parents and the reason for the choices they made has decades of a fast changing world which they will never completely understand. If they did, they still can't strip away the context they have. They can't unexperience their experience.

One of the biggest obstacles to happiness I have come across is simply a complete befuddlement as to why other people don't think the way we do on the big stuff. We try understand their experiences but just can't understand why they can't 'see the light'. Deep down I am a sceptical, suspicious, evidence based person who prefers rational, logical, consistent explanations for things. I am starting to feel that this is not enough. Once you have enough of a foundation, perhaps you have to have 'faith' in your own ability to lean into other peoples worlds. You have to be okay with letting go of your own experiences and your own context to catch a glimpse. Clearly you need to have a strong BS detector, but in order to get to the juice of what others have seen, you don't want your BS detector flashing red and distracting you before they have exceeded their bull quota. Friends can provide this lifeline. Particularly really good friends who have known you for years. They can allow you to wander off and wonder off (I get those two mixed up - this time I want to use both). They can point out if you start losing yourself too much. They can bring you back having caught a glimpse and deepened your empathy.

Empathy isn't just about seeing from others perspective - it is about practising silencing yours.

Fighting Feedback

In general feedback sucks. We want to be the bigger person but normally despite our best intentions our elephant** will go on the rampage. Clearly you need feedback to learn. It is much easier for other people to see what you are doing wrong then for you to be able to evaluate yourself.  It is however much easier to correct mistakes you see yourself than when others see them. At school it was much easier to get feedback from my Maths teacher than from my Art teacher. The worst criticism I could get from my Maths teacher was that I sometimes tended to 'go via Cape Town' in solving my geometry problems. Cape Town is a long way from Durban where I was at school. I was fine with that. I was still right. If I was wrong, there was a clear, unemotional mistake that had been made that could be fixed next time.

When my long socked, gecko-decorated-labcoated, purple-shorted, crazy haired, arm-punching, guttral-sounding art teacher used to criticize me it was a completely different story. Now it was personal. There was no right or wrong. It used to drive me nuts. Tears would well behind my eyes. The steam from my blood would rise from every pore in my body. It was war. The core struggle between my art teacher and me was to stop trying to be so clever. The painting below was my first. It was a self-portrait and like lots of teenagers I was struggling with the various sides of my personality. The introvert. The extrovert. The academic. The artist. Religion. Friendships. Family. I tried to capture this with various forms of symbolism.

My first oil painting - A self portrait aged 15 (1995)

Mr Lichkus wanted me to relax and explore art. To take a break from my head, but every piece of criticism felt like an attack. We persevered in our war and two years later I ended up doing the piece below and diving far more into abstract work and falling in love with colour and texture (and in the painting below fire as well). For the next two decades, art has been an escape for me. My happy place where I can go looking for beauty instead of trying to solve problems.

Earth (1997)

Feedback, even well intentioned and correct, even when it is worth the fight, is much harder to deliver when it isn't objective and when it is in any way related to an individual and their elephant. 

It is interesting looking at the approaches of Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) and Nassim Taleb (@nntaleb) in pushing public debate forward. They appeal directly to the Rider*. They don't play nice and certainly are likely to be low down on the list of people's most desired dinner guests unless they speak and then leave quickly. Taleb takes the approach of directly insulting his readers and pointing out that they are chuckling and thinking he is insulting someone else when he is insulting them.  I think you can take this approach once who have already won someone over. Once they already know you like and respect them or have some reason you will stick around. You can tell your buddy he is looking chubby and should hit the gym, because he knows he is your buddy. A professor can mock a students line of logic because they wouldn't even bother tutoring them if they thought they didn't have the intelligence to correct their mistakes. I suspect there isn't a lot of space for feedback when the elephant is suspicious. Feedback is most effective when the elephant feels safe and the problem is being looked at in a detached/solvable way. That is why I think Jonathan Haidt is onto something when he talks about us needing to get better at talking to the Elephant first when trying to solve some of our bigger problems. The Riders are making reasons up, and unless there is common ground or some sort of good will - get ready for a fight.

 

 *Rider: Rational-side. Explains and justifies behaviour and attempts to direct it. Trains the elephant.

**Elephant: Decision-making, action taking emotional and automatic side. Listens to Rider when it wants to.

Acting Despite Confusion

If we were to wait to understand how things worked, we wouldn't do anything. People are blessed with wonderful imaginations, the ability to forget, and incredible confidence relative to what we actually know. Before we have an answer, we make one up and we live according to that. Fortunately (if closer to the truth), once the evidence is overwhelming or someone has a better story (or someone has a sword/gun/bomb) we have the ability to change our minds and actions. The evidence points to us improving - see Our World in Data - even though it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel that way for the same reason we can act in a world we don't understand. We don't step back and analyse everything. We are very good at responding to thin slices of reality.

Whether it is understanding the world, or just managing our daily lives and what to do, technology can help. With the Big Picture, it can help Steven Pinker and Max Roser (from Our World in Data) provide evidence for new stories which are closer to the truth, and Here & Now it can help people like Dan Ariely, author of 'Predictably Irrational' to have a stab at creating an app to sort through the madness:

Because of the ways calendars are created, people actually take more meetings than they should. Why? Because meetings are incredibly easy to represent on the calendar. Two weeks from now, you see that Wednesday is open. But it’s not really open. It’s just that the things you need to do aren’t represented, and you don’t remember them.

 With our creativity and a little help, we can understand and act better.

Anger, Insults and Mockery

I have yet to see an argument or discussion conceded by someone whose adversary approaches them with anger, insults and mockery. So why is it used? And often. I am fairly new to Twitter. Despite having had an account since April 2009, I never really got it. I have recently really started enjoying it. It is a treasure trove of interesting people and ideas. It has real potential to break down barriers and expose inconsistencies. I particular enjoy a list I have that puts the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Peter Singer, Justin Welby, Louis Farrakhan and a few personal additions together (it would be difficult to actually get them in a room together!). Seeing their different approaches to discussing the why and how of life in one stream is fascinating. But others... particularly when it comes to the big ticket items - Religion, Politics, Economics - get nasty. Jonathan Haidt has written a wonderful book on why good people are divided. The gist of it is that our conversations start from the wrong point. We don't pay enough attention to emotional reasons. Our rational arguments aren't the basis of our beliefs. I think reading the book is a good way to start the process of making progress... but when people defer to anger, insults and mockery - I don't think they are actually interested in solving anything. I think they are just playing to their Tribe and smirking at funny tweet insults. It is all more self-congratulatory than constructive. Fortunately there are far more constructive conversations going on... and the world is moving forward.

Freedom to Explore

I find the interaction between rational and emotional thought fascinating. I have long pushed myself towards trying to think more rationally. As an investment professional, it is the common goal to step above emotions and be able to 'think clearly', benefiting from the tendency of others to over and under-react. Nothing should be based on gut instinct. Every decision based on cold hard research and fact.

More and more though, you realise just how complex the world is. How many problems seem unanalysable. How reliant we are on our emotional responses to make decisions where we have incomplete information. Making decisions in a fuzzy world is what gives human decision making its edge - and why computers still have some catching up to do. Is automatic decision making rational or emotional? Some gut feelings are recognised patterns, some are just hopeful leaps. How do you know which is which? How do you know when to slow decision making down, and when to trust in the impressive ability of almost magical muscle memory.

What also amazes me is the progress we make despite even Nobel winning specialists being in strong disagreement. A great example is Shiller and Fama sharing an Economics Nobel despite having very contradictory theories.

There is a lot we don't understand. There is a lot we can't  understand. Even about how we understand. But despite this we move forward. Perhaps the trick is just making sure you have a safety net, and room for error, then being brave. Like a kid with a Mom to run back to but freedom to explore.

Exciting times.

Fallen Heroes and Banter

I am busy reading 'Contrarian Investment Strategies', by David Dreman. While I normally avoid talking shop in this blog, I did think there was something worth smiling at and commenting on.

Growing up, you see the 'Adult World' as this place that makes sense. Teachers and Grown-ups know stuff. Kids are learning. As time ticks by you start realising that this isn't quite the case. Dreman takes Professors Banz and Reinganum to task on the theses that gave them their Phds. Effectively what he is saying is that what they said was wrong. In the book he even taunts them, and suggests they take up various challenges to prove him wrong.

My point is that you can often find Nobel Prize winners on both sides of an argument, and elaborate theories that seem to hold for years and then fall flat.

The great part about it is that it matters not one little bit if you turn out to be wrong - since that pushes you closer to being right. The scary part is if you get so attached to what you thought was right, that even if someone turns up with great evidence that you are wrong - you just close your eyes.

Orange Juice and Doubt

Richard Feynman was a rather amusing guy, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. I am busy reading his book called 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'.

In it he both underplays his intelligence in areas other than his area of core competence, but also says you should be too reverent for the opinions of others if they don't make sense.

It is a bit of a balancing act. There is absolutely no way we can be competent in all areas, and we need to rely on experts. There just isn't enough time to fully understand everything. We can't trust blindly though.

A further problem is that so many people have very strong views on things outside there area of competence. They may very well be experts in some areas, but you can't assume that they have put as much thought into other areas they may well speak very confidently about.

At the end of the day though, we can't be paralyzed because we don't have the time (or ability) to find out everything for ourselves and we can't trust everything experts say. We have to muddle on. So perhaps (in addition to an inquisitive mind)... the best thing Feynman's life suggests is a bit of a sense of humour.

Give the man some orange juice.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Paul Bloom's third lecture in the series is on Freud.

An interesting point is on a concept ellaborated on by Karl Popper of 'Falsifiability'. He asserts that 'a hypothesis, proposition, or theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable'.

Readers of Muttblog will know this as something Stuart often moans about. People make a claim that can't be proved wrong. In fact, they often make a claim and then no matter what happens claim that the outcome proves that they are right.

Eliezer Yudkowsky links to a site that attempts to correct this (called 'Wrong Tomorrow', ) by collecting 'experts' predictions which can at a later stage be verified or proved wrong. In this way you build a track record up. It also means that in formulating your opinion, you have to say... if X then I am wrong. Then if X happens, you are forced to change your mind.

So, the stimulus plan will be a success if X. Jacob Zuma will be a good president of South Africa if Y. I will have succeeded in this project if Q.

Making something falsifiable makes it interesting, because it opens the possiblity up of actually adding to knowledge. So... All swans are white. One black swan proves you wrong.

Another bit reiterated Dan Gilbert's argument in 'Stumbling on Happiness'. Often we don't actually know why we do what we do, or what the real reason is we believe what we believe. We create reasons to support our gut responses that we don't even understand.

That doesn't make your gut response right any more than it makes your rationalisation just a mask, but it does open the question up to really get to understand your emotional responses to things and your rational reasoning for them.

I imagine the truth requires both.