Category: human nature

Myopia Increases Innovation

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Big public works projects inevitably cost far more than the original budget. I heard a talk about this a few years ago. The speaker gave many examples, including Boston’s Big Dig. His explanation was that these projects would not be approved if voters were told the truth. The German newspaper magazine Der Spiegel has just published an interview with several architects responsible for recent German projects with especially large discrepancies between what people were told at the beginning and the unfolding reality — Berlin’s new airport, for example. The article’s headline calls them “debacles”. One architect gives the same explanation as the speaker I heard: “The pure truth doesn’t get you far in this business. The opera house in Sydney would never have been approved if they had known how much it would cost from the start.”

I disagree. I see the same massive underestimation of time and effort in projects that I do and that my colleagues and friends do, projects we do for ourselves that require no one’s approval. I think something will take an hour. It takes five hours. Plainly the world is more complicated than our mental model of it, sure, but there is more to it than that. Someone did a survey of people in Maryland who had been in a car accident so bad they had had to go to the hospital. Within only a year, a large fraction of them (half?) had forgotten about it. When asked if within the last year they had had an accident so bad they were hospitalized, they said no. Apparently we forget difficulties, even extreme ones, really fast. If you forget difficulties, you will underestimate them.

If I had realized how difficult everything would be, I couldn’t have done any of it is one explanation, which I’ve heard attributed to Gregory Bateson. From Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent review in this week’s New Yorker of a biography of Albert Hirschman, the economist, I learned that Hirschman — had he realized that this was human nature — would have had a different evolutionary explanation: We underestimate difficulties because this way of thinking increases innovation. Debacle . . . or opportunity? Difficulty is the mother of invention.

 

 

 

Occupational Specialization as Far Back as the Bronze Age

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Linear B is an ancient form of Greek, used around 1500 BC (the Bronze Age) in Mycenean Greece. Stuff written in Linear B gives us one of our oldest views of human life and can reveal things that other ways of looking at the past (e.g., bones, genes, tools, pottery) cannot. At the end of The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013) by Margalit Fox, a book about how Linear B was deciphered, is a section about what the deciphered tablets turned out to say.

One thing they revealed is considerable occupational specialization. According to Fox (pp. 273-5),

Mycenaeans plied a range of trades. Many tablets reveal the names of occupations . . . metalsmiths . . . textile work . . . tanners . . . leatherworkers . . . priests and priestesses . . . soldiers, rowers, and archers . . . swordmakers and bowmakers, chariot makers and chariot-wheel repairmen . . . goldsmiths and perfumers . . . woodcutters, carpenters, shipbuilders and net makers; fire kindlers and bath attendants; heralds, hunters, herdsmen, and beekeepers. . . . bronzesmiths.

Occupational specialization is at the center of my theory of human evolution. The decipherment of Linear B showed that it has existed as far back as we can see. Today there is an enormous amount of occupational specialization, but it also flourished when accumulated knowledge was much less.

The more you see the centrality of occupational specialization to human nature, the more you will see how modern schooling malnourishes almost everyone who undergoes it — which is almost everyone. Human nature takes people at one place and time — such as Mycenaean Greece — and pushes them to become adults who do all sorts of different things (woodcutter, herald, beekeeper . . . ). It takes people who start off the same or almost the same — same place, same food, same weather, similar genes — and creates diversity among them. Modern education tries to do the opposite: Take a diverse set of students and make them the same. One example is No Child Left Behind. Another is that in almost every college class, all students are given the same material, the same assignments, and graded on the same one-dimensional scale. We don’t need everyone to be the same; in fact, we need exactly the opposite. The more diverse we are, the sooner we will find solutions to pressing problems, because they will be attacked in many different ways.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to David Cramer and Nadalal.

This American Life Retracts Daisey Show

Seth Roberts1 Comment

This American Life has retracted the Mike Daisey show it did a few months ago because it turns out several details — not trivial ones — were wrong. Daisey knew this, and kept the TAL producers from finding out by concealing the cellphone number of his translator. He told them it no longer worked. TAL producers didn’t ask for her email address, apparently. It is a lot like Gleickgate — Daisey/Gleick believing it was okay to stretch the truth in pursuit of some greater good (better Foxconn working conditions/less global warming). At least, I would like to think that is why Daisey did it. I hate to think he needed the money.

The position of This American Life is more complicated than their press release reveals. A few years ago Alex Heard revealed that parts of David Sedaris stories were made up. Sedaris is one of TAL’s biggest contributors. He is also their most famous. He probably owes his success to TAL. Did TAL retract his stories? Did it even mention the new information? Uh, no. But TAL remains a great show. These are missteps.

A few weeks ago I complained about Sedaris in a comment on the New Yorker website: Why does The New Yorker publish his stuff as memoir rather than fiction? What exactly is funny about making up derogatory stuff about living people (e.g., Sedaris’s guitar teacher) and spreading the false info far and wide?

 

 

 

 

 

Danny Kahneman’s Decision Making

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A lovely article by Michael Lewis about Daniel (“Danny”) Kahneman, my former Berkeley colleague, emphasizes his indecision whether to write a popular book about his work. Should I or shouldn’t I? He doesn’t like what he’s written so far. Finally he decides to pay some experts for their opinion:

He called a young psychologist he knew well and asked him to find four experts in the field of judgment and decision-making, and offer them $2,000 each to read his book and tell him if he should quit writing it. “I wanted to know, basically, whether it would destroy my reputation,” he says. He wanted his reviewers to remain anonymous, so they might trash his book without fear of retribution. The endlessly self-questioning author was now paying people to write nasty reviews of his work. The reviews came in, but they were glowing.

Uh, why would anonymous experts trash his book? They gain in two ways from having it published: 1. It draws attention to their field, making them more important. 2. They can use it as a textbook. I love that Michael Bailey wrote The Man Who Would Be Queen (pdf). It allows me to assign my students a book I admire.

I think Danny has raised two great questions here:

  1. How can we set up a situation so that others will tell us the truth (= what they actually think)?
  2. How can we tell if we’ve succeeded — if they’ve told the truth?

The answers aren’t obvious, at least to me. The best answer I can give to Question 1 (what situation?) is write a blog. I take positive and negative comments to be what their authors actually think. Variations on Question 1 are common. Robin Hanson’s blog is about how bias distorts what we say and do. Hot or Not provides truthful answers to how attractive you are. CureTogether tries to get truthful answers about health care. The best answer I can give to Question 2 (how to assess) is do a test. Wear something ugly. Do your friends say you look great in it? Why do I think the comments on my blog are truthful? Well, my recent post about E-Cat was poorly-informed (unintentionally). The comments quickly and overwhelmingly said so. That supports my belief. In contrast to Question 1, Question 2 is rare.

The last time I talked to Danny was in the 90s. I was thinking of writing a book based on my introductory psychology lectures. I wrote a sample chapter based on my possessiveness lecture. The center of that lecture was the endowment effect (we value what we possess much more than the same thing when we do not possess it). Danny had written about it and loss aversion is part of prospect theory. By then Danny was at Princeton. I spoke to him on the phone. Does the endowment effect affect your everyday life? Does it affect what you do? I asked. He thought about it. No, he said. Or at least he couldn’t think of examples. In contrast, Richard Thaler chatted happily about the everyday implications.

One everyday sign of the endowment effect is a car in front of a big garage. The car isn’t in the garage because the garage is full of “junk”. Another is garage sales (also called yard sales). Such sales are held when the clutter becomes unbearable. They illustrate the everyday relevance of the effect. My point isn’t that Danny was unobservant, it’s the difference between his answer and Thaler’s. There is definitely room for two answers to my question. Humans are traders. We specialize and trade. This is central to economic life. Early papers about the endowment effect (I haven’t looked at recent papers) didn’t notice the problem/puzzle. How can we both (a) hold on to stuff tightly (= the endowment effect, loss aversion) and (b) trade easily? John List noticed.

My friend Michel Cabanac, whose research was behind the Shangri-La Diet, has criticized Danny. In a book (p. 140), Michel wrote:

At a lecture in Jerusalem on January 19, 2001, he [Danny] was kind enough to inform the audience that the recent reorientation of his research toward what he calls “experienced utility,” which he acknowledged to be a synonym of pleasure, had been inspired by my 1993 lecture at Princeton University and by previous readings of my publications on pleasure.

In an email he elaborated:

However the “lecture” [at Princeton] was a only an invited seminar in his laboratory with an audience limited to him and his team. If I remember well, he reimbursed my travel and housing expenses. Yet, the Jerusalem mentioning of my contributions was only verbal [i.e., spoken], as I failed and still fail to find reference to Cabanac in his publications.

Michel’s whole research career has centered on the idea that pleasure guides our actions, including “cognitive” ones. Faced with an arithmetic problem (2 + 7 = ?), for example, some answers will seem more pleasant than others. (2 + 7 = 9 is more pleasant than 2 + 7 = 10, not just more familiar.) He has especially stressed that changes in pleasure — the same events become more or less pleasant — help us self-regulate. We stop eating when food becomes unpleasant, for example. The food stays the same, we change. No one has understood the role of pleasure — which is at the center of all human decision making — better than Michel.

When I get a copy of Danny’s new book, Thinking Fast and Slow, I will be curious to see what he says about the endowment effect, loss aversion, and Michel Cabanac.

More Via scrbd, I have found that Danny’s new book does reference Michel — see p. 488. And, in a chapter about the endowment effect, I found this: “Knetsch, Thaler, and I set out to design an experiment that would highlight the contrast between goods that are held for use and for exchange.” He goes on to discuss List’s research. I am unable to find anything like the phrase “the contrast between goods that are held for use and for exchange” in the paper that the three of them wrote about the effect. Jack Knetsch began to study the effect because different ways of trying to establish the value of the environment (e.g., clean water) produced enormously different answers. The endowment-effect chapter is weak on everyday examples — nothing about garage sales — but does include an unsourced quote: “She didn’t care which of the two offices she would get, but a day after the announcement was made, she was no longer willing to trade. Endowment effect!”

Thanks to Dave Lull, who suggested online searching.

“We are Heroes, They are Villains”: My Brilliant Students

Seth Roberts10 Comments

At Tsinghua University, which is like a Chinese MIT, I am teaching a small class (25 students) called Frontiers of Psychology. It is required of freshmen psychology majors. There are a few students from other majors. So many of my students do brilliant work that it is hard to keep track. For example, two classes ago I started having presentations (short talks related to the reading). In the very first one, a student talked about her dysmenorrhea and self-experimentation to stop it. Later, during a discussion of how to give a talk, another (female) student said, “I could not have given such a talk.” “That’s a compliment, right?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. Which is only to say what a radical and stunning talk it was.

For this week’s class I assigned several readings, from which students chose one. The shortest and most popular paper, by Joshua Knobe, a Yale professor of philosophy, was about judgments of intentionality. Knobe showed subjects various scenarios and asked them whether the side effects of a action described in the scenario should be considered intentional or not. Changing one word had a big effect. Knobe concluded that we tend to see bad side effects as intentional, good side effects as unintentional. I assigned it because the effect of changing one word was large and I liked the source of data (“Subjects were 78 people spending time in a Manhattan public park”).

Here is one student’s comment:

When I was in primary school, we had a very kind English teacher who was quite close to me. After she left school, she sent some photos to me and I found it a great honor to deliver them to my classmates. Later on, a math teacher got married and she gave another pupil some sweets to deliver the class. I felt unpleasant since not every student could get a sweet. I thought it unjust.

However, in both cases, photos and sweets, there weren’t enough for the whole class. The only difference was who passed them out. When I did, the main issue I cared about was “I’m the one to deliver them”; in the other case, “Why can’t everyone get one?”

She titled her comment “We are the Heroes, They are the Villains”. Her point was that Knobe’s results could be explained by the idea that we slant our judgments of others and ourselves to make them look worse and us look better — an explanation that Knobe didn’t consider.

Knobe isn’t the only one who didn’t think of it. Other students proposed other plausible explanations. But I think the “we are heroes” explanation is quite plausible because three other students made the same point in other ways. One of them repeated a story from a test preparation book:

A teacher had a student do ten math problems on the board. Then she asked another student to describe what he saw. “Two of the answers are wrong,” he said. “What about the eight correct answers?” said the teacher.

Not a true story but surely based on actual events. Another student told of the time her teacher had made her push her fellow students to exercise for an half-hour per day. The students complained to her about their loss of time. Later, however, her class had finished first in a physical competition — much better than usual. Her classmates did not give her any credit for this.

To emphasize how unobvious this idea is, here is what two professors make of Knobe’s results:

This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere. ‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe.

My students disagree. Their proposed explanations, such as the “we are heroes” idea, were not “much more complex”.

I believe they have noticed a broad truth about human nature that has escaped many psychologists, not just Knobe. In this excerpt from his new book, my former colleague Danny Kahneman describes what he calls “the illusion of validity”: personality judgments were considered more predictive than they actually were by the people who made them. Could this be another example of “we are heroes”? The “we are heroes” idea also explains the Lake Wobegone Effect: Most people consider themselves above average. The technical name for this is illusory superiority. The Wikipedia article about illusory superiority does not mention the Knobe Effect and vice-versa. In this important aspect of human nature, professors (including me) have had trouble seeing that the trees make a forest.

Willat Effect Experiments With Tea

Seth Roberts39 Comments

The Willat Effect is the hedonic change caused by side-by-side comparison of similar things. Your hedonic response to the things compared (e.g., two or more dark chocolates) expands in both directions. The “better” things become more pleasant and the “worse” things become less pleasant. In my experience, it’s a big change, easy to notice.

I discovered the Willat Effect when my friend Carl Willat offered me five different limoncellos side by side. Knowing that he likes it, his friends had given them to him. Perhaps three were homemade, two store-bought. I’d had plenty of limoncello before that, but always one version at a time. Within seconds of tasting the five versions side by side, I came to like two of them (with more complex flavors) more than the rest. One or two of them I started to dislike. When you put two similar things next to each other, of course you see their differences more clearly. What’s impressive is the hedonic change.

The Willat Effect supports my ideas about human evolution because it pushes people toward connoisseurship. (I predict it won’t occur with animals.) The fact that repeating elements are found in so many decorating schemes and patterns meant to be pretty (e.g., wallpapers, textile patterns, rugs, choreography) suggests that we get pleasure from putting similar things side by side — the very state that produces the Willat Effect. According to my theory of human evolution, connoisseurship evolved because it created demand for hard-to-make goods, which helped the most skilled artisans make a living. Carl’s limoncello tasting made me a mini-connoisseur of limoncello. I started buying it much more often and bought more expensive brands, thus helping the best limoncello makers make a living. Connoisseurs turn surplus into innovation by giving the most skilled artisans more time and freedom to innovate.

Does the Willat Effect have practical value? Could it improve my life? Recently I decided to see if it could make me a green tea connoisseur. Ever since I discovered the Shangri-La Diet (calories without smell), I’d been drinking tea (smell without calories) almost daily but I was no connoisseur. Nor had I done many side-by-side comparisons. At home, I had always made one cup at a time.

In Beijing, where I am now, I can easily buy many green teas. I got three identical tea pots (SAMA SAG-08) and three cheap green teas. I drink tea every morning. Instead of brewing one pot, I started making two or three pots at the same time and comparing the results. I compared different teas and the same tea brewed different lengths of time (Carl’s idea).

I’ve been doing this about two weeks. The results so far:

1. The cheapest tea became undrinkable. I decided to never buy it again and not to drink the rest of my purchase. I will use it for kombucha. Two of the three teas cost about twice the cheapest one. After a few side by side comparisons I liked the more expensive ones considerably more than the cheaper one. The two more expensive ones cost about the same but, weirdly, I liked the one that cost (slightly) more a little better than the one that cost less. (Tea is sold in bulk with no packaging or branding so the price I pay is closely related to what the grower was paid. The buyers taste it and decide what it’s worth.)

2. I decided to infuse the tea leaves only once. (Usual practice is to infuse green tea two or more times.) The quality of later infusions was too low, I decided. Before this, I had found second and later infusions had been acceptable.

The Willat Effect is working, in other words. After a decade of drinking tea, my practices suddenly changed. I will buy different teas and brew them differently. I will spend a lot more per cup since (a) each cup will require fresh tea, (b) I won’t buy the cheapest tea, and (c) I have become far more interested in green tea, partly because each cup tastes better, partly because I am curious if more expensive varieties taste better. When I bought the three varieties I have now I didn’t bother to learn their names; I identified them by price. In the future I will learn the names.

To get the Willat Effect, the things being compared must be quite similar. For example, comparing green tea with black tea does nothing. I have learned a methodological lesson: That tea is a great medium for studying this not only because it’s cheap but also because you can easily get similar tasting teas by brewing the same tea different lengths of time. I haven’t yet tried different water temperatures but that too might work.

I have done similar things before. I bought several versions of orange marmalade, did side-by-side tastings, and indeed became an orange marmalade connoisseur. After that I bought only expensive versions. After a few side-by-side comparisons of cheese that included expensive cheeses, I stopped buying cheap cheese. You could say I am still an orange marmalade and cheese connoisseur but this has no effect on my current life. Because I avoid sugar, I don’t eat orange marmalade. Because of all the butter I eat, I rarely eat cheese. My budding green tea connoisseurship, however, is making a difference because I drink tea every day.

My posts about human evolution.

The Value of a Diagnosis of Asperger’s

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a recent post I said Marcia Angell was too hard on psychiatric diagnosis. Long before perfection, diagnoses can be useful. For example, Alexandra Carmichael recently found out she has something close to Asperger’s Syndrome (note that she has not been diagnosed by a doctor). She explained why:

I feel like at least I’m on the *path* to a much smoother life now – whether I’m there or not can be debated. :) Learning about Asperger’s has illuminated sensory and social sensitivities that I didn’t realize other people *didn’t* have. It was understandably confusing to live in a world where I thought I was defective because I couldn’t do what other people were doing as easily. Knowing that there is a subset of people who experience the world the way I do has been liberating, and seeing how other “aspies” modify their lives and routines to suffer less has helped me make helpful structural changes in my life, too.
For example, right now I am wearing my Bose QC 15 headphones on a flight from Boston to San Francisco, because I know that too much sound in a day can make me incredibly weak the next day. I’ve arranged to do 90% of my work by email and chat these days, with the occasional in-person meeting, because I know that my auditory processing is not great for phone calls, and it takes me days to prepare for and recover from a social meeting/event. I say no to most things I get invited to (conferences, dinners, etc), because I prefer to contribute my thinking/organizing/connecting talents online and reserve social energy for one-on-one time with close friends. I’ve also become aware that my ability to listen and empathize with people is powerful and something I enjoy, maybe in part because I build such intricate models of everyone I meet, so my purpose in life has become to listen and help where I can. I only wear comfortable clothes, because my mood will suffer terribly if I have jeans or high heels on. I give and receive lots of hugs, because these are very calming for me. I have a very detailed daily routine that I follow, which reduces cognitive load used to consider options every day and feels comfortable for me. I’m much more aware of my weaknesses, especially regarding relationships, and am very careful about communicating clearly and non-violently, making sure I have a good understanding of both my needs and the needs of people around me – so that I can help, or at least not harm them.
So things like this have all come about because of trying on the Asperger’s hat for a while, and the increased self-awareness that came with it. After a certain point, you can drop the label and integrate what you’ve learned into your identity. But for me, having the label for a while was a guide and a relief, helping me realize that it’s really ok to be myself.

Health Care Stagnation

Seth Roberts38 Comments

In December, the Los Angeles Times reported — very briefly — that from 2007 to 2008, life expectancy in the United States declined by 0.1 year. It should have been the lead story of every newspaper in the country with the largest possible headlines (“ LESS LIFE“). Did 9/11 reduce life expectancy this much? Of course not. Did World War II? Not in a visible way — American life expectancy rose during World War II. I can’t think any event in the last 100 years that made such a difference to Americans. The decline is even more newsworthy when you realize: 1. It is the continuation of trends. The yearly increase in life expectancy has been dropping for about the last 40 years. 2. Americans spend far more on health care than any other country. Meaning vast resources have been available to translate new discoveries into practice. 3. Americans spend far more on health research than any other country and should be the first to benefit from new discoveries.

Maybe I’m biased (because my research is health-related) but I think this is the biggest event of our time. It is the Industrial Revolution in reverse — progress grinding to a halt. For no obvious reason, just as the Industrial Revolution had no obvious reason. Health researchers have been given billions of dollars to improve our health, the whole system has been given tens of billions of dollars, and the result is … nothing. Worse than nothing.

No journalist, with the exception of Gary Taubes, seems the least bit aware of this. It is a difficult story to cover, true. But several journalists, such as health writers for The New Yorker (Atul Gawande, Michael Specter, and Jerome Groopman) are perfectly capable of covering it. They haven’t. With a few exceptions, they write about progress (e.g., Peter Provonost’s checklists). It is like only reporting instances when Dirk Nowitzki missed a free throw. Each instance is true but the big picture they create — he misses all free throws — is profoundly false.

Among academics, the stagnation has received a tiny amount of attention. In a recent paper (gated), two University of Southern California professors, considering a wider time period, point out that there has been some improvement in how long you live after you get sick, but no improvement in how long you live before getting sick. Here is how the discussion section of their article begins:

There is substantial evidence that we have done little to date [meaning: from the 1960s to the 1990s] to eliminate or delay disease or the physiological changes that are linked to age. For example, the incidence of a first heart attack has remained relatively stable between the 1960s and 1990s and the incidence of some of the most important cancers has been increasing until very recently. Similarly, there have been substantial increases in the incidence of diabetes in the last decades.

Here is my explanation of the paradox of: 1. Enormous and increasing health care costs. 2. Vast amounts spent on research. 3. No better health. Health researchers, such as medical school professors, shape their research to favor expensive treatments, such as expensive drugs. In fact, the best treatments would cost nothing (e.g., the Shangri-La Diet). To make the expensive treatments seem worth studying, they invent utterly false theories and claim to believe them. For an example (research about depression), see The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch. Because health researchers are forced to worship absurd theories, they are incapable of good research. Absence of good research is why there is no progress. The health care supply chain — everyone between you and the research, such as doctors, nurses, drug company employees, hospital employees, alternative medicine practitioners, medical device makers, and so on — is happy with the situation (useless research) because it ensures that little will change and they will continue to get paid. They are the supposed experts — and remain silent.

It is human nature that everyone in the supply chain remains silent. They are protecting their jobs. But the silence of the journalists is The Emperor’s New Clothes writ large. To explain why smart journalists fail to notice the stagnation, I think you have to go back to studies of conformity. When everyone you talk to — people in the supply chain — says black = white (i.e., that progress is being made), you say the same thing.

Why is personal science, the main subject of this blog, important? Because it is a way out of this stagnation.

“That’s Why You’re So Easy to Hate”

Seth Roberts6 Comments

This is what one bloggingheads commentator said to the other. Was the speaker-listener combo (a) man to man, (b) man to woman, (c) woman to man, or (d) woman to woman?

As you can guess, woman to woman. After I wrote this post, I listened to the rest of the dialog. The phrase was repeated several times.

It’s a standard compliment, yes. Sure, women compliment each other like this and men don’t. But I think it is an example of another underlying rule that I can’t figure out.

More I hadn’t noticed that the title of the conversation is “We’re All So Easy to Hate”.