What you can’t say

Another one of Paul Graham’s essays. A very, very good read, so I’ve quoted extensively from the essay below:

“Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told. [...]

What can’t we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]

Of course, we’re not just looking for things we can’t say. We’re looking for things we can’t say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. [...]

In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. “Blasphemy”, “sacrilege”, and “heresy” were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times “indecent”, “improper”, and “unamerican” have been. [...]

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose “inappropriate” to the dreaded “divisive.” In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as “divisive” or “racially insensitive” instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention. [...]

Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there’s something we can’t say, it’s often because some group doesn’t want us to.

The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. [...] To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. [...]

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

Most struggles, whatever they’re really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

I’m not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. [...]

To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that’s in the habit of going where it’s not supposed to.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It’s so simple. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist. [...]
When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as “yellowist”, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you’ll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you’re mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it’s better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club. [...]

The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know. [...]

Who thinks they’re not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she’s open-minded. Hasn’t she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they’ll say the same thing: they’re pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid “wrong” as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like “negative” or “destructive”.)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. [...]

To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it’s doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is “hate speech?” This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.

Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical. And if it isn’t false, it shouldn’t be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.

Especially if you hear yourself using them. It’s not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That’s not a radical idea, by the way; it’s the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he’s tired, he doesn’t know what’s happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say “never mind, I’m just tired.” I don’t see why one couldn’t, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.

You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it’s harder, because now you’re working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society’s bad moods.

How can you see the wave, when you’re the water? Always be questioning. That’s the only defence. What can’t you say? And why?”

Convenient lies and other stuff most people like to tell themselves

No, they don’t need to be consistent with each other. And no, truth is not a 0-1 variable. Anyway…:

i. I got to where I am now because of my hard work (if you’ve done well). Even if I had worked very hard, it wouldn’t have made any difference (if you have not done well).

ii. People who talk badly about others behind their backs with me never engage with others in the same kinds of conversations about me.

iii. If data do not support my view of the world, it’s completely okay to disregard the data. But it’s not okay for other people to do that, unless they reach the same conclusions I do and/or we disregard the same data.

iv. I don’t care nearly as much about status and related matters as other people do.

v. ‘I don’t much care how she looks, because she’s just a wonderful person’ (male, about his partner). ‘I would love him just the same if his income were half of what it is today’ (female, about her partner).

vi. I’m a good person. What I did was justified. (If morality was based on what people thought about themselves, there’d pretty much be no evil). Most of the time people also hold this belief, at least implicitly: I’m a better/more deserving person than [other people].

vii. When I answer a question related to ethics, political principles and similar matters, I do not base my answer on what people I care about would like me to answer. If the answer is to a political question which relates to distributional tradeoffs, I don’t choose my answer based on what benefits me (rather than society) the most.

viii. Ageing and dying is something that happens to other people. Divorce and cancer as well.

ix. If you don’t know much about another person, you can nevertheless infer a lot of stuff about that person from the things that you do know.

x. I am less judgmental and prejudiced than the people I compare myself with.

xi. If people don’t understand me, they are the ones with a problem – not me.

xii. Admitting your faults is a sign of weakness and should be avoided. If a person does not try to hide one of his/her fault, I am allowed to think that I’m a better person than s/he is.

xiii. ‘My life will be much better/easier/simpler when I [...]‘. [... = am 18. ... finally move away from my parents. ... find a girlfriend/boyfriend. ... get married. ... have a child. ... find a better job. ... retire...] (related link)

xiv. The more time and emotion I have invested in X, the less likely I am to be wrong about X.

Some of them might just be me projecting.

Hidden assumptions

Perhaps some of these already apply to you, but probably not very many of them. I know I’ve mentioned a few of them before, but not too many of them. Try to imagine how your life would be like/-different if you were:

i. A foster child/an orphan.
ii. Unable to read.
iii. Able to read, but had never learned how to use the internet. Perhaps you also don’t know how to speak English.
iv. Of the opposite gender.
v. The child of muslim parents living in the Middle East.
vi. Deaf/blind/dumb (pick one, or any combination…).
vii. (/had been) Sexually abused by your parents when you were a child.
viii. The child of parents with a severe genetic disorder (Fanconi anemia, Huntington’s).
ix. Born somewhere where toilet paper is considered a luxury.
x. The child of multimillionaires living in the United States.
xi. The child of Chinese rice farmers living in the 7th century BC.
xii. Addicted to an illicit substance/alcohol (in some places alcohol is an illicit substance…)/smoking.
xiii. Born with only one arm.
xiv. Living in a country where there had been a civil war within the last couple of decades.
xv. An only child because your big brother/sister committed suicide while you were very young.
xvi. Married to a partner you no longer love.
xvii. Very rich because you’d just won the lottery.
xviii. Recently divorced after 20 years of marriage.
xix. Unemployed.
xx. Living in a country where one-third of all children die before the age of 5.
xxi. 15 centimeters taller/shorter than you are now.
xxii. Travelling around the world, working as a circus artist.
xxiii. 25 years older/younger than you are now.
xxiv. Forced (either by circumstances or the government) to work doing something you hate.
xxv. Sometimes hearing or seeing things which are not real, because of mental illness.
xxvi. A highly social individual who loves to hang out with people all the time and dislikes being alone.
xxvii. Extremely conceited about your own abilities.
xxviii. A homosexual/an asexual/unable to achieve orgasm.
xxix. Able to read the minds of others (/fly/move things with you mind/…).
xxx. Unable to distrust people with whom you’d never interacted in the past.
xxxi. One of those people who’ve never even heard about the concept of ‘cognitive biases’.
xxxii. A sincere believer in God/Yahweh/Allah/…
xxxiii. Unable to see colours (only black/white).
xxxiv. Sitting on death row, about to be executed.
xxxv. A person for whom conventional measures of status (money/power/…) is of the very highest importance.
xxxvi. 15 kilograms leaner/heavier than you are now.
xxxvii. 15 IQ-points smarter/dumber than you are now.
xxxviii. Unable to form new memories/remember anything from your life that happened before some recent traumatic event.

Given some of the scenarios, you have to do that anyway – but for added fun, try to combine some of them (i.e. ‘one-armed, orphan, illiterate, alcoholic, recently divorced, middle-aged, dwarf, circus artist’. It should not be too hard for you to come up with a less depressing combination.)

The planning fallacy

“Abstract

The planning fallacy refers to a prediction phenomenon, all too familiar to many, wherein people underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task, despite knowledge that previous tasks have generally taken longer than planned. In this chapter, we review theory and research on the planning fallacy, with an emphasis on a programmatic series of investigations that we have conducted on this topic. We first outline a definition of the planning fallacy, explicate controversies and complexities surrounding its definition, and summarize empirical research documenting the scope and generality of the phenomenon. We then explore the origins of the planning fallacy, beginning with the classic inside–outside cognitive model developed by Kahneman and Tversky [Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: biases and corrective procedures. TIMS Studies in Management Science, 12, 313–327]. Finally, we develop an extended inside–outside model that integrates empirical research examining cognitive, motivational, social, and behavioral processes underlying the planning fallacy.”

From The Planning Fallacy: Cognitive, Motivational, and Social Origins by Buehler et al. A few snips of interest from the paper:

[...]

“3.1. The inside versus outside view
Given the prevalence of optimistic predictions, and ample empirical evidence of the planning fallacy, we now turn to examining the psychological mechanisms that underlie people’s optimistic forecasts. In particular, how do people segregate their general theories about their predictions (i.e., that they are usually unrealistically optimistic) from their specific expectations for an upcoming task? Kahneman and Tversky (1979) explained the prediction failure of the curriculum development team through the inside versus outside analysis of the planning fallacy. This analysis builds upon a perceptual metaphor of how people view a planned project. In the curriculum development example, the group of authors focused on the specific qualities of the current task, and seemed to look inside their representation of the developing project to assess its difficulty. The group of authors failed, however, to look outside of the specific project to evaluate the relevant distribution of comparable projects. Even when they asked for information about the outside viewpoint, they neglected to incorporate it in their predictions or even to moderate their confidence. An inside or internal view of a task focuses on singular information: specific aspects of the target task that might lead to longer or shorter completion times. An outside or external view of the task focuses on distributional information: how the current task fits into the set of related tasks. Thus, the two general approaches to prediction differ primarily in whether individuals treat the target task as a unique case or as an instance of a category or ensemble of similar problems. [...]

We suggest that people often make attributions that diminish the relevance of past experiences to their current task. People are probably most inclined to deny the significance of their personal history when they dislike its implications (e.g., that a project will take longer than they hope). If they are reminded of a past episode that could challenge their optimistic plans, they may invoke attributions that render the experience uninformative for the present forecast. This analysis is consistent with evidence that individuals are inclined to explain away negative personal outcomes (for reviews, see Miller & Ross, 1975; Taylor & Brown, 1988). People’s use of others’ experiences are presumably restricted by the same two factors: a focus on the future reduces the salience of others’ experiences, and the tendency to attribute others’ outcomes to their dispositions (Gilbert & Malone, 1995) limits the inferential value of others’ experiences. Furthermore, our understanding of other people’s experiences is typically associated with uncertainty about what actually happened; consequently, we can readily cast doubt on the generalizability of those experiences. To quote Douglas Adams, ‘‘Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.’’ (Adams & Carwardine, 1991, p. 116) In sum, we note three particular impediments to using the outside perspective in estimating task completion times: the forward nature of prediction which elicits a focus on future scenarios, the elusive definition of ‘‘similar’’ experiences, and attributional processes that diminish the relevance of the past to the present.

3.3. Optimistic plans

People’s completion estimates are likely to be overly optimistic if their forecasts are based exclusively on plan-based, future scenarios. A problem with the scenario approach is that people generally fail to appreciate the vast number of ways in which the future may unfold (Arkes et al., 1988; Fischhoff et al., 1978; Hoch, 1985; Shaklee & Fischhoff, 1982). For instance, expert auto mechanics typically consider only a small subset of the possible things that can go wrong with a car, and hence underestimate the probability of a breakdown (Fischhoff et al., 1978). Similarly, when individuals imagine the future, they often fail to entertain alternatives to their favored scenario and do not consider the implications of the uncertainty inherent in every detail of a constructed scenario (Griffin et al., 1990; Hoch, 1985). When individuals are asked to predict based on ‘‘best guess’’ scenarios, their forecasts are generally indistinguishable from those generated by ‘‘best-case’’ scenarios (Griffin et al., 1990; Newby-Clark et al., 2000). The act of scenario construction itself may lead people to exaggerate the likelihood of the scenario unfolding as envisioned. Individuals instructed to imagine hypothetical outcomes for events ranging from football games to presidential elections subsequently regard these imagined events as more likely (for reviews, see Gregory & Duran, 2001; Koehler, 1991). Focusing on the target event (the successful completion of a set of plans) may lead a predictor to ignore or underweight the chances that some other event will occur. Even when a particular scenario is relatively probable, a priori, chance will still usually favor the whole set of possible alternative events because there are so many (Dawes, 1988; Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993).”

The paper has a lot more stuff and details.

The Straw Vulcan

Of course I read the tvtropes article a long time ago, but this presentation goes into a lot more detail. Some of you might find it worth watching (/listening to, while you’re doing other stuff..), I did:

I think a lot of people have some incorrect ideas about what ‘rationality’ actually is and what ‘behaving (/more) rationally’ implies in a real-world setting. The above presentation tries to correct some probably quite common misconceptions. Incidentally, I think that the subset of people who would gain the most from watching the presentation is probably the subset of people who are the most skeptical about watching a presentation like this.

Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles?

“Summary — Self-esteem has become a household word. Teachers, parents, therapists, and others have focused efforts on boosting self-esteem, on the assumption that high self-esteem will cause many positive outcomes and benefits — an assumption that is critically evaluated in this review.
Appraisal of the effects of self-esteem is complicated by several factors. Because many people with high self-esteem
exaggerate their successes and good traits, we emphasize objective measures of outcomes. High self-esteem is also a heterogeneous category, encompassing people who frankly accept their good qualities along with narcissistic, defensive, and conceited individuals.
The modest correlations between self-esteem and school performance do not indicate that high self-esteem leads to
good performance. Instead, high self-esteem is partly the result of good school performance. Efforts to boost the self-esteem of pupils have not been shown to improve academic performance and may sometimes be counterproductive. Job performance in adults is sometimes related to self-esteem, although the correlations vary widely, and the direction of causality has not been established. Occupational success may boost self-esteem rather than the reverse. Alternatively, self-esteem may be helpful only in some job contexts. Laboratory studies have generally failed to find that self-esteem causes good task performance, with the important exception that high self-esteem facilitates persistence after failure.
People high in self-esteem claim to be more likable and attractive, to have better relationships, and to make better impressions on others than people with low self-esteem, but objective measures disconfirm most of these beliefs. Narcissists are charming at first but tend to alienate others eventually. Self-esteem has not been shown to predict the quality or duration of relationships.
High self-esteem makes people more willing to speak up in groups and to criticize the group’s approach. Leadership does not stem directly from self-esteem, but self-esteem may have indirect effects. Relative to people with low self-esteem, those with high self-esteem show stronger in-group favoritism, which may increase prejudice and discrimination.
Neither high nor low self-esteem is a direct cause of violence. Narcissism leads to increased aggression in retaliation for wounded pride. Low self-esteem may contribute to externalizing behavior and delinquency, although some studies have found that there are no effects or that the effect of self-esteem vanishes when other variables are controlled. The highest and lowest rates of cheating and bullying are found in different subcategories of high self-esteem.
Self-esteem has a strong relation to happiness. Although the research has not clearly established causation, we are persuaded that high self-esteem does lead to greater happiness. Low self-esteem is more likely than high to lead to depression under some circumstances. Some studies support the buffer hypothesis, which is that high self-esteem mitigates the effects of stress, but other studies come to the opposite conclusion, indicating that the negative effects of low self-esteem are mainly felt in good times. Still others find that high self-esteem leads to happier outcomes regardless of stress or other circumstances.
High self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex. If anything, high self-esteem fosters experimentation, which may increase early sexual activity or drinking, but in general effects of self-esteem are negligible. One important exception is that high self-esteem reduces the chances of bulimia in females.
Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) causes benefits. Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-esteem, indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences. Instead, we recommend using praise to boost self-esteem as a reward for socially desirable behavior and self-improvement.” [my emphasis]

Here’s the link. A bit more from the paper:

“The role of self-esteem in romantic relationships has received fairly little attention. In particular, little is known about whether self-esteem predicts the durability of romantic relationships. One study with a very small sample (N=30) found that couples with low self-esteem were more likely than couples with high self-esteem to break up over a 1-month period (S.S. Hendrick, Hendrick, & Adler, 1988). Data on love styles and self-esteem support this finding, showing that low self-esteem is related to feelings of manic love, which is characterized by extreme feelings of both joy and anguish over the love object (W.K. Campbell, Foster, & Finkel, 2002). High self-esteem is related to passionate, erotic love, which is marked by the escalation of erotic feelings for the love object. These findings are consistent with other studies showing that, compared with people with high self-esteem, those with low self-esteem experience more instances of unrequited love (Dion & Dion, 1975) and more intense feelings of love for others (C. Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986).
Several findings indicate that relationship behavior differs as a function of self-esteem. Murray, Rose, Bellavia, Holmes, and Kusche (2002) found that people low in self-esteem engage in a variety of potentially destructive behaviors. They tend to distrust their partners’ expressions of love and support, and so they act as though they are constantly expecting their partners to reject and abandon them. Thus far, however, these patterns have not translated into any evidence that the relationships are actually more likely to dissolve.
Thus, despite the relationship problems caused by low self-esteem, relationships are no more likely to break up if a partner has low self-esteem than if a partner has high self-esteem. Possibly the reason for this is that high self-esteem leads to relationship problems, too. Rusbult, Morrow, and Johnson (1987) examined four types of responses to problems within close relationships, and found that self-esteem produced the largest difference in the active-destructive (“exit”) category of responses. People with high self-esteem were significantly more likely than others to respond to problems and conflicts by deciding to leave the relationship, seeking other partners, and engaging in other behaviors that would actively contribute to the deterioration of the relationship. These results were based on responses to hypothetical scenarios, which share many of the drawbacks of self-report measures. However, as the authors noted, it seems unlikely that their findings can be attributed to a simple response bias because people with high self-esteem were admitting to more undesirable, rather than desirable, behaviors.
Shackelford (2001) found that self-esteem was intertwined with a variety of patterns in marriage, although he did not provide evidence as to whether high self-esteem affects the durability of marriages. Spouses showed similar levels of self-esteem, with global self-esteem of spouses correlating at .23 and physical self-esteem (including self-rated attractiveness) correlating fairly strongly at .53. Significantly, Shackelford regarded self-esteem as an outcome rather than a cause of marital interactions, although his data were correlational. Wives’ fidelity was the strongest predictor of husbands’ self-esteem. This might indicate that men with high self-esteem cause their wives to remain faithful, or—as Shackelford speculated—that cuckolded husbands experience a loss of self-esteem.
Most important, women complained more about husbands with low than with high self-esteem. Low self-esteem men were derided by their wives as jealous, possessive, inconsiderate, moody, prone to abuse alcohol, and emotionally constricted. Again, the direction of causality is difficult to determine. Possibly, husbands’ low self-esteem elicits negative perceptions among wives. Conversely, being disrespected or despised by his wife may lower a man’s self-esteem. Yet another possibility is that having a variety of bad traits leads both to low self-esteem and to being disrespected by one’s wife. Meanwhile, the self-esteem of wives was unrelated to their husbands’ complaints about them, except that husbands who criticized or insulted their wives’ appearance were generally married to wives with low self-esteem, and indeed Shackelford (2001) found that this was the most consistent predictor of low self-esteem among wives.” (pp.18-19)

This is interesting stuff, worth pondering. Incidentally, my level of self-esteem is higher than it has been for a long time. That’s not saying much, but even so…

‘Why Nerds are Unpopular’ (some comments)

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short (Pascal)

…

I read Paul Graham’s essay some time ago, but I don’t think I’ve ever linked to it here. Since I recently had an excuse to read it again, I figured I might as well put up a link. It’s a very US-centric piece, but worth reading. A few passages from the post:

“And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school. [...]

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don’t consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids’ opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things “right” is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don’t realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties.

…

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it’s part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It’s much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn’t a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups.”

…

I think he overstates the case here:

“In almost any group of people you’ll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it’s generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that’s exactly what happens in most American schools.”

However I couldn’t really say for sure because I’ve never set foot in an American high school. I don’t think this is the case in Denmark.

A funny thing about reading the essay was that while it would be easy for me to use my own experiences to affirm the theory of the ‘unpopular nerd’ in the 7-8th grade, a period where I was periodically bullied in school, I find that it does not very well match the (Danish) high-school experience. I btw. didn’t much think of myself as a nerd before the age of, what, 20? Nerds were other people, people much more strange than me – in my self-narrative, I didn’t get bullied because I was a nerd but because those other kids were jerks. I wasn’t really all that different from anyone else (so I told myself). I was told sometimes that I was a nerd in high school, but I shrugged it off because it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t. I didn’t have much clue when it came to the social dynamics of the high school environment, but I don’t think I was ever unpopular. I don’t think I was all that popular either – if so I didn’t notice – it was just that I didn’t pay much attention to that kind of stuff (about this part Graham is right). But an important observation here is that I was allowed not to care by the others.

Graham’s treatment of status as a unidimensional variable is of course a gross simplification of the actual dynamics. One thing I’d add related to the ‘important observation’ above is that whereas status might not be too complex to be semi-reliably measured on a unidimensional scale, it should indeed surprise us a great deal if people who did not do all that well on such a scale would care much about their ordering on such a scale, at least if given any choice in the matter. Any sort of aggregate popularity function would have to be constructed by aggregating stuff that in many cases has little to nothing to do with each other and we should expect people, especially people at the lower ends of the status spectrum, to actually only really care much about the status markers on which they do well. Everyone wants be think that s/he is better than other people, more deserving, so most people just pick a narrative that makes this (…idea? …delusion?) come true, which is one major reason why most people care about but a few dimensions of the social hierarchy. The flip side of the ‘nerds don’t care about being (conventionally) popular’ is that ‘there’s a lot of stuff non-nerds also don’t care about which makes them less popular among nerds’ (and/or other sub-groups) – so why do you care so much about the popularity functions of non-nerds?

Graham spends some time on that one, on why nerds care about the opinions of non-nerds. You have a real problem when you can find no dimensions where you do better than others, or at least no dimensions that many other people care about in the status game. One thing Graham isn’t explicit about though (have thought about?) is that status – like safety (…and money, and…) – is something that people will very often start to care a lot about when they don’t really have much of it. This angle is not really explored in his piece and I find it quite important: A very unpopular nerd probably is more status-conscious than the higher-status bully who makes his life miserable, because he’s forced to confront this aspect of his existence all the time; the bully isn’t. As a general rule, bullied people spend orders of magnitude more time thinking about bullying and related status-stuff than do bullies. I think Graham is missing that part of the equation – being unpopular makes you status-conscious, just like being poor makes you care more about money (maybe I should write a post about that one too? It seems to me that a lot of people with abundant resources are unaware of the fact that part of the reason why they don’t much ‘care about money’ is due to the fact that they have a lot of it, which is precisely what enables them to not care). Anyway, moving along that diagonal; perhaps the people who are (conventionally) popular in the eyes of people who are not don’t really know that they are popular? Perhaps it doesn’t even necessarily take a lot of work to become (conventionally) popular? That would be unfair, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Perhaps some popular high schoolers are just likeable people who do not need to actually do much to stay popular? Perhaps some of them – many of them? – are quite smart and could have become ‘nerds’ but instead decided not to?

Update: I decided to just get rid of four paragraphs because I didn’t much like how they turned out. If you were wondering about that Pascal quote in the beginning, the post used to be a lot longer. It turned out I did have the time to use the mouse to select those passages and delete them.

Random thoughts on dating

In general, it is “the act of meeting and engaging in some mutually agreed upon social activity in public, together, as a couple.” I’ll limit the following to the ‘go have something to eat together’-variation, but many of these considerations are general enough to be applied in other contexts as well. I’ve been thinking a bit about this stuff now, and I thought it’d be a good idea to just write down some of the ideas I’ve had. This is not well-known territory to me, so I’d not be surprised if most of it is stuff you guys have already internalized.

So anyway: The basic idea is that you meet, you go have a meal together (or do some other activity, but let’s stick with the meal for now). While you’re having the meal you talk, and after you’re done you either go someplace else to talk some more or you go your separate ways right away. I know that some dates end differently, but let’s disregard those here. It should be easy, right? Not too complicated. Then you start to think about it.

It’s very easy to forget how complex human social interaction is.

Before the date ever starts X [...one of the daters; Y denotes the other dater - the terms are not gender-specific] needs to think about a few things. The good old: What to wear? Clothes are signalling devices, whether used consciously that way or not. Worth remembering here is that signals can be misinterpreted, so the concept of risk and how an individual deals with it enters the equation long before the date actually starts. The weights of many of the relevant variables here are somewhat gender-specific – it seems that women spend more time getting ready than do men on average. Clothes is but one element: A male will for instance be likely to ask himself whether he should shave, or whether to put on a deodorant or aftershave; females will on the other hand often think about whether to put on make-up, how much -ll-, how to set their hair, whether to use nail-polish or not, which earrings, if any, to wear – and lots of other things I haven’t thought about. Note that not taking a conscious decision about these variables is itself a decision, a signal. There is no way to opt out of the signalling game even though perhaps you’d like to do that.

There are a few other considerations which are of relevance to the date but enter the equation before the date ever takes place: Where and when to meet, who gets to decide that/-what, which mode of transport to use to get there? There’s hidden complexity behind all these variables: The decisions about where to meet and who decides confer information about the price of the date, which can be thought of as both a signal related to willingness to spend and income. Willingness to spend can easily be interpreted as a signal of the commitment level from the outset. This pre-date variable can also confer information about traits like aggressiveness and dominance (if one partner really wants to go somewhere specific or refuses to go to one specific restaurant), which again relates to status (an individual that considers him/herself lower status than the other is ceteris paribus less likely to make demands). Willingness- and ability to compromise, variables which tend to be quite important when it comes to long-term relationship success, also indirectly enter the equation at this point. Mode of transport relates to distance, which again might in some cases relate to commitment, but it also relates to the risk profile; how much trouble does/did an individual go through to avoid being late? Which again can, but needn’t necessarily, be interpreted as a signal regarding the initial commitment level. Note here that a signal conferring a high initial commitment level need not necessarily be interpreted by the other party in a positive way: If X puts a lot of time/effort into a date, X might do it because X really likes Y or want to get to know Y – but perhaps it might also be the case that X has limited options, a factor which most often will impact Y’s evaluation of X negatively.

Having all that stuff out of the way: So now you meet, you sit down somewhere, you order food and you start to talk. Before getting to the whole interaction part it’s worth noting that this social exchange does not take place in a vacuum. There are other people around, perhaps many people. How close do you sit to the next table, how often will a waiter or owner intrude upon your conversation, what’s the noise level, is it at an ‘exposed’ location or somewhat private? In cases where the venue was decided upon by one party and the other party did not know anything about the venue, what the place is like both relates to what will be going on during the date (some subjects will probably not come up during the discussion if there are 10 other strangers sitting within 20 feet..) and it also enters the equation in relation to which variables the deciding party might have emphasized in the pre-date phase, and what this tells the other party. Some people don’t handle lots of people very well and others do, some people perhaps don’t handle background noise (like music playing in the background) very well. There can be multiple reasons for such differences in the ability to deal with the environment and they need not all relate to innate personality traits; perhaps the difference is rather due to a factor like hearing impairment. It’s actually quite easy for a deciding party to send a signal he or she is not even remotely aware of, especially on a first date where neither party will have an extensive knowledge about the other party’s preferences. Which sort of venue is chosen will probably generally depend on the number of dates; if it’s a first date, the most convenient place to meet for most people will be somewhere very public, close to a lot of people and a place where it is easy to get away quite fast. Females in particular will focus on these aspects to have easy exit routes in case it turns out the guy is a creep; other steps to minimize risk that might deserve consideration, particularly for a female on her way to a first date with a stranger, would be to share information like time and place about the date with a friend or family member and/or have someone call during or after the date to make sure nothing bad has happened. On subsequent dates such considerations will of course carry less weight. Note that past experiences can have a significant impact on the evaluation of the date, especially if the other party has had a bad experience in the past.

When evaluating the course of the date it is important to note that there are many things besides external environmental factors that potentially need to be taken into account; multiple other factors more or less completely outside the control of an individual can impact the experience positively or negatively: X might be stressed from work, X might be tired because s/he didn’t sleep well the day before, X might have a cold. Biological factors which neither individual perhaps knows about can even impact behaviour during the date: Female ovulation impacts both the behaviour of the female herself and the behaviour of nearby males.

Next, the interaction part. Before going into the verbal exchanges that take place during such an encounter, remember that a lot of human communication is non-verbal. Does the other person initiate eye contact, and if not what does this mean – does it mean that the person in front of you is a convicted serial killer on the run from the law, or is the explanation perhaps that the person is just insecure? Recall here that there can be many reasons for insecurity, and that not all of them are equally impermissible in the status game. Recall also that there is a double standard at work here, because female insecurity is less likely to have a negative impact on (/potential) partner evaluation than is male insecurity. A few other examples of body language that might be important to pick up on: Does Y tilt the head while X is talking, and does X pick up on it? What does head tilting mean – that Y is bored, that Y is interested or that Y did not have a lot of sleep last night? Does X slouch and if so, what does that mean? When Y frequently looks at his or her watch, that’s probably most often a bad sign indicating boredom. Body language is usually very dynamic and it conveys important information, but when you don’t know the other party very well, it can be hard to interpret. Sometimes commenting on body language can be risky, especially if it indicates that the date is perhaps not going very well; in those cases, it will sometimes be preferable to make a mental note of the non-verbal signal and try to change the subject or in some other way engage the problem. Some people have a harder time interpreting body language than others, something one might wish to take into account when evaluating later on – social skills will often be important when evaluating partner potential, but trouble with body language need not equate or indicate lack of interest.

When it comes to verbal interaction, there are a few key variables here. One is the total information supplied during the date. Another is the total time spent talking. A third is communication efficiency (information/unit of time spent talking). Some people are more efficient communicators than others and in some cases this variable will be of interest to the other dater. If a person talks a lot but doesn’t say much, it can be an indicator of insecurity, it can be an indicator of below-average communication skills or perhaps it can be an indicator of egocentrism and/or inconsideration. It is possible to interpret behaviour like that in a positive light (‘he’s already falling in love with me and that’s why he behaves like a third-grader!), but most often such behaviour will probably be considered a liability rather than an asset. If X spends a lot of time talking about himself, something most people love to do if given the chance, it might indicate that he doesn’t have a great deal of interest in Y (or he would ask questions about Y). If Y keeps asking X questions and seems unwilling to share much information about him-/herself, that might also be a signal of insecurity. Or it might be a signal that X is very interested in Y. Or it might be a signal that Y considers him/herself higher status than X, and is entitled to more information than X. Having the evolutionary context of human mating behaviour in mind, it’s probably the case that females will on average share less information about themselves and demand more information about the other than will males, especially over the course of the first dates. If the male is low-quality, the female will want to know as soon as possible and screening requires information.

What to talk about? That question is opening up a whole can of worms and I will not go into much detail here. It will generally depend on the education level of the parties present, the (/shared?) interests, the feedback supplied over the course of the date (including non-verbal cues), the age, etc. Path dependence can turn out to be important, which is another way of saying that people should be careful about what to share and what to ask about, perhaps particularly when on a first date with a person one doesn’t know. This brings me to another key variable: What not to say. This one is very context-dependent, but in general a male is probably required to share a bit more information than is a female and thus he is less likely to ‘get a free pass’ on a particular question. Even though the information requirements are not symmetric, there are still some norms regarding what constitutes a ‘proper ratio’ of information exchange. Diverging from the norms and the proper information exchange ratios can be risky, as I alluded to earlier. In a similar vein, it’s important to give some thought as to how to deal with a refusal to answer a specific question. It might be a red flag. It might be nothing. Perhaps it’s something, but something Y is not comfortable talking about. If Y says that talking about a particular subject makes him/her uncomfortable, in my mind it would be beyond inconsiderate for X to refuse to change the subject. Some people however would consider the efficiency argument more important; they’d weigh the value of getting a dealbreaking red flag out into the open right away, regardless of the feelings of the other party, higher than the risk that the other partner would lose interest because of bad manners. Either way, naturally it’s impossible to avoid all ‘unpleasant questions’, as many implicit screening questions will necessarily be somewhat unpleasant to answer for people who do not meet the criteria required (and an important part of the dating process is precisely to weed out the incompatible matches).

When dating, there’s always stuff you don’t want the other party to know (/now, /yet, /ever?). There’s stuff you want to emphasize and stuff you don’t want to talk about. People who date are never fully committed to the ‘just be yourself’-advice. At best, people commit to a ‘be who I think I am’ or a ‘be who I’d like to be’-strategy. Sometimes people lie more or less openly when they are dating. This is a risky strategy which probably decreases the likelihood of a successful long-term relationship but might be an effective strategy when it comes to increasing the potential for short-term success. But nobody is completely honest during a date – either with themselves or with the partner – and that’s worth remembering when you find out something about the other person that makes the other individual look less trustworthy. The funny thing is that most people who lie to themselves about who they are before they meet the partner and then act in a deceitful manner while they are dating because of the lies they’ve told themselves, probably most often think that they are behaving in a perfectly honest manner. Some people are better liars than others and the best lie is the lie that you yourself believe to be true.

If you wanted a conclusion of some sort, I know very well that the above considerations amount to little more than just saying that ‘dating is complex’. That was part of the whole point. Here’s xkcd on related matters. If you haven’t already read it, I also encourage you to read this previous post on ‘Rational romantic relationships‘.

Mistakes were made (but not by me)

Here’s the link, you should go order the book. I’ve been thinking about what it had to say on and off for the last few days, and I’m reasonably certain this is now a book which is on my mental ‘you-must-read-this’ list (another book on that list is Rochefoucould). Some chapters are better than others, but I’d say chapter 7 alone should probably increase your likelihood of getting to live in a happy marriage/relationship by more than enough to justify the costs in expected value terms, if you internalize the stuff that’s in there (/and you can find someone in the first place!).

Some quotes and comments below:

“Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.”

“You can see one immediate benefit of understanding how dissonance works: Don’t listen to Nick. [Nick's a hypothetical guy who's just bought a flashy car he couldn't really afford] The more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater is the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made. Therefore, when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision [...] don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.”

“one of the most entrenched convictions in our culture [is] that expressing anger or behaving aggressively gets rid of anger. [...] decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: that when people vent their feelings aggressively they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.”

“Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstance, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened – typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves. [...] Because most people have a reasonably positive self-concept, believing themselves to be competent, moral, and smart, their efforts at reducing dissonance will be designed to preserve their positive self-images.[21]“

Much of the book is about how this happens in more detail; how people justify themselves and their actions, how it works. Most people do bad things now and then, and most people who do bad things think that they are deep down good people, which means that the bad behaviour causes dissonance. So people try to reduce it by justifying themselves and their bad behaviours in all kinds of ways; like denying they did what they did, downplaying the consequences, tell themselves that the other guy deserved it, ect.
A very important part of human behaviour is the path-dependence aspects to it, and the book spends quite a bit of time on this one. They introduce a kind of pyramid-model of decision-making; you start out at the top when you take some decision or another, there are a lot of places you can end up, and gradually you’ll move down the pyramid while you justify your choice and perhaps make new choices which have been impacted by the way you started out your descent. When people have made up their mind about some subject or another, it’s very hard to change it; and the longer time passes by, the more a person will invest in the idea and justify his or her stance (and perhaps …the more additional ‘ex ante questionable actions’ will have been undertaken along the way). The intensity and the commitment increase as we keep defending ourselves and strengthening our position. As the book put it: “How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.” Of course stuff like confirmation bias ‘helps out’ along the way too. Interestingly, decisions taken relatively recently can even change the past – our memories are an important part of ourselves, and they are much more malleable than people perhaps tend to think. So people also tend to ‘rewrite the past’ to better deal with the present. Humans are not above selectively remembering and focusing on some things from the past which aid the narrative we’ve constructed about ourselves nor are we above forgetting other things. We will go through a lot of trouble to defend our narrative, our persona. From the book:

“When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event, observers usually assume that one of them is lying. [...] But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying. All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin; that spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment; we justify that little white lie as making the story better and clearer – until what we remember may not have happened that way, or even may not have happened at all. [...] History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we do so just as the conquerors of nations do: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or what we failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders. [...] We remember the central events of our life stories. But when we do misremember, our mistakes aren’t random. The everyday, dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the world and our place in it, protecting our decisions and beliefs. The distortion is even more powerful when it is motivated by the need to keep our self-concept consistent; by the wish to be right; by the need to preserve self-esteem; by the need to excuse failures or bad decisions; or by the need to find an explanation, preferably one safely in the past [...like parent-blaming, one they take up later on - US], of current problems. [...] memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory yields.”

I could write a lot more, but I’ll cut it short. As I said in the beginning, this is one of those books you should read.

Stuff

i. “Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” (Luke 17, quote found here).

…

ii. Dimetrodon. Image from the article:

“a predatory synapsid genus that flourished during the Permian period, living between 280–265 million years ago (during the Artinskian to Capitanian stages).

As a synapsid it was more closely related to mammals than to true reptiles such as lizards and snakes. It is classified as a pelycosaur. Fossils of Dimetrodon have been found in North America and Europe. Dimetrodon had a sail on its back, which is known to have been used for regulating body temperature. [...]

Dimetrodon has two types of teeth, shearing teeth and sharp canine teeth. Its name, in fact, means “two-measures of teeth”. Dimetrodon was one of the first animals with differentiated teeth and the teeth were suitable for killing animals then tearing them to pieces. [...]

The spines of Dimetrodon have grooves on the base that were presumably ingested by blood vessels and thus ensured good bloodflow through the skin of the sail. The theory is that Dimetrodon was active in the early morning when the sun rose. The sail would be pointed towards the sun and would absorb heat allowing rapid warming. This allowed Dimetrodon to hunt at a time when other animals were not sufficiently warmed up and were slow. The sail increased body surface area by 50%. According to calculations by Bramwell Fellgett, it took a 200 kg (440 lb) Dimetrodon approximately one and a half hours for its body temperature to go from 26 to 32 °C (79 to 90 °F) [13] A study by Haack concluded that warming was slower than previously thought and that the process probably took four hours.[14] In order to cool its body in the hot midday sun, Dimetrodon turned its sail away from the sun, causing the heat to drain. The rapid warming using the sail give Dimetrodon an edge over larger animals, weighing over 55 kg. Smaller animals had higher body surface-to-mass ratio, making them hotter than Dimetrodon. The prey of Dimetrodon would therefore have been mostly large animals like Diadectes, Eryops and Ophiacodon. The changing climate during the Permian period, when the temperature increased, is a possible reason for the extinction of Dimetrodon since the sail meant no benefit over other animals and was rather a disadvantage due to its fragility.”

Even though in most Western cultures there seem to be quite a bit of focus on dinosaurs and the Mesozoic and a lot less focus on what came before that, it’s worth remembering that there was a lot of stuff going on before life ever got to the dinosaurs.

…

iii. A quote:

“My model of this situation is less sanguine than others here, though Yvain and Tetronian hinted at it: it’s identity politics. Humans very naturally associate themselves with many different groups, some of them arbitrarily defined, and often without any conscious thought. Religion, favorite sports teams, the street/neighborhood/city/state/country you live in, and many other things can be the focal point of these groups. The more you associate with one of these groups, the more its part of your identity – i.e. how you see yourself. If you associate with one of these groups particularly strongly, any action which appears to make a rival group look better will personally offend you and elicit a response.”

In general, on a related note I think that the likelihood that an argument will escalate (conflict level will increase) is increasing in n in most naturally occuring settings. When two people argue nobody else is watching – which means that there are nobody else there to impress/defend. The more people are watching, the more people will witness a status loss or a status gain resulting from the argument. Also, once several people are involved coalitions will start to form naturally and you’ll start to not only be defending yourself but also feel that you have a duty (due to implicit community norms ect.) to defend the tribe. Gender also matters; in my (admittedly limited) experience, a male with a female partner arguing with another male will argue ‘more strongly’ for X if the partner is present than if she is not (unless the female makes clear that she considers the argument irrelevant; if she does and the male picks up on that signal, he’ll be likely to ‘fold’ whether or not he ‘was winning’ (…which of course he was)). Also, males are probably likely to a) be more aggresive (conflict-prone) if there are women present, and b) be more -ll- if the gender ratio is skewed ‘against them’ (# males >> # females) and less likely to be -ll- if the gender ratio is skewed ‘in their favour’ (# males << # females).

…

iv. Square/Cube Law. (see also wikipedia)

“When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier.

For example, if you double the size (measured by edge length) of a cube, its surface area is quadrupled, and its volume is increased by eight times.

The point of this law is that with living beings, muscle strength is (more or less) a function of surface area, but weight is a function of volume. And Newton’s famous Second Law (the “force = mass * acceleration” one) means that if you double a critter’s size, you end up with four times the muscle power moving eight times the mass, so instead of having the same relative agility as the original, the double-sized creature actually has only half.

This applies to flyers as well: Double the size, and you get four times the wingpower attempting to keep eight times the weight airborne, so the creature’s ability to fly has actually been cut by half.”

Part of why dung beetles can roll up to 50 times their own weight (/and why we can’t).

…

v. “The ancient Greeks and Romans used torture for interrogation. Until the 2nd century AD, torture was used only on slaves (with a few exceptions). After this point it began to be extended to all members of the lower classes. A slave’s testimony was admissible only if extracted by torture, on the assumption that slaves could not be trusted to reveal the truth voluntarily.[12]” (wikipedia)

…

vi. Swaziland

“Swaziland, officially the Kingdom of Swaziland (Umbuso weSwatini), and sometimes called Ngwane or Swatini, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa, bordered to the north, south and west by South Africa, and to the east by Mozambique. The nation, as well as its people, are named after the 19th century king Mswati II.

Swaziland is a small country, no more than 200 kilometres (120 mi) north to south and 130 kilometres (81 mi) east to west. [...]

Some 75% of the population are employed in subsistence farming, and 60% of the population live on less than the equivalent of US$1.25 per day. [...]

Swaziland’s economic growth and societal integrity is highly endangered by its disastrous HIV epidemic, to an extent where the United Nations Development Program has written that if it continues unabated, the “longer term existence of Swaziland as a country will be seriously threatened.”[5] The infection rate in the country is unprecedented and the highest in the world at 26.1% of adults[6] and over 50% of adults in their 20s.[5] [...]

…Swaziland has the highest HIV infection rate in the world [...] and also the lowest life expectancy at 32 years, which is 6 years lower than the next lowest average of Angola. From another perspective, the last available World Health Organization data in 2002 shows that 64% of all deaths in the country were caused by HIV/AIDS.[11] [...]

In 2004, Swaziland acknowledged for the first time that it suffered an AIDS crisis, with 38.8% of tested pregnant women infected with HIV [...] Life expectancy has fallen from 61 years in 2000 to 32 years in 2009.[15]“

Everyone has a price, but there’s a limit? What will people (not) do for money?

“Questions: Would most people you know kill their favorite pet for $1 million? What about you?
Answers: Most people: Yes (23%) No (72%);
Yourself: Yes (11%) No (83%).”

A recent Vanity Fair poll, via Robin Hanson (whom I no longer read on a regular basis, but still visit once in a while). Hanson claims that you’d take the million. The survey and the responses made me start thinking about what people will actually do for money, what they won’t and which variables impact that decision process. Some general remarks:

i. Financial vulnerability/poverty lowers ‘your price’ and increases the choice set of stuff you’d do to get money.

ii. ‘Status effects’ matter – Hanson of course covers this. A few remarks: People usually know what ‘the right answer’ to these types of questions is supposed to be, and the more costly it seems to ‘do the right thing’, the higher the status value of professing that specific belief. It’s a bit like when dealing with religious tribes; the more crazy the idea is, the more credible the signal. This observation also in my mind leads to a related hypothesis: To make it more costly (in terms of time, effort, money) to ‘do the right thing’ in the hypothetical does not necessarily make it any less likely that people will ‘take the money’ – actually it can have the opposite effect, because the value of the signal goes up as well; perhaps the value of the signal increases even faster than the hypothetical costs, especially above a certain threshold where people decide that their choices will have no real-world consequenses. Paradoxically, by making one of the options so attractive as to be borderline absurd you can end up making sure that a lot of people will give you the opposite answer – i.e. ‘the perceived right answer’.

iii. Framing effects matter. Framing effects persist when people deal with real money in real-world settings, rather than hypothetical questions with no real-world consequences, but people usually act more rationally when they have more ‘skin in the game’. This, I think, lends support to the hypotheses that people will both a) treat the two scenarios – i. the hypothetical case, ii. the actual situation – as completely different in their minds given aforementioned threshold effects, and b) be more subject to framing effects (i.e. be less ‘rational’) in the hypothetical case. Unless you show up with a million dollars and an axe to kill the dog, the people you ask will only ever deal with the first scenario and those answers will not give much insight into what people would actually do if you came around with a check and an axe.

iv. Related to i., but still worth mentioning: There are likely threshold effects at work when dealing with choice set limitation. Poor people will be more likely to do some act X for a given amount of money Y than rich people will – but maybe it’s also the case that given some income level Z, some options simply go off the table altogether, given any price. Would a parent of three kill all their children for X dollars? This is probably where stuff like Maslow’s hierachy of needs and similar stuff from psychology come into play. Money is a claim on ressources. Still, people probably underestimate how important such claims on ressources can become.

v. Related to the last part of iv. above, correspondence bias probably play a role here when it comes to how people answer and how the hypothetical choice set limitation looks like. If correspondence bias is important, it’s probably safe to say that people who’ve answered the question as if they considered it (subconsciously, perhaps) a test of their support of the tribe/allegiance/trust will be unlikely to accept the idea that they’d act perhaps even radically differently in the real-world-scenario.

vi. “The report titled “The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings” [...] reveals that over an adult’s working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor’s degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master’s degree, $2.5 million.

Persons with doctoral degrees earn an average of $3.4 million during their working life, while those with professional degrees do best at $4.4 million.” (link)

A third way to frame the question: You’re an average Joe with a master’s degree. You’re 25 and currently expect to work another 40 years on the labour market before you retire. If you choose to kill your dog today, you get 16 years of income tomorrow. You’d be able to retire at the age of 49, instead of at the age of 65 (this is disregarding discounting, compounded interest ect.; so the ‘subjective true value’ of that money will likely be even higher than that). Next, repeat the question using the high school grad numbers. A million dollars is a lot of money and it can buy you a lot of stuff.

I assume most readers of this blog would assume that they’d take the money in a real-world setting (though it’s impossible to be sure ‘unless [someone] show[s] up with a million dollars and an axe to kill the dog…’). If you think you wouldn’t take the money in the real-world scenario, please comment below!

…

Appendix (added after swissecon’s comment):

A factor I didn’t include above is the ‘love of the pet’ variable. This one is a double-edged sword as well because there are relevant tradeoffs here too: The longer you’ve had the pet, the greater attachment you’ll feel towards it (ceteris paribus), but also the less time the pet has left of its life. All pets die, and if you’ve had your dog for a decade even though you love it very much you’ll know that it probably doesn’t have a lot of years left. The pet’s life has to end in a few years anyway. Lots of people who have pets that they love end the life of the pet before nature would by paying a vet to kill the pet, to ease the suffering of the pet. I’m not saying it’s an easy decision to make, I know it’s not, but lots of people do it all the time. How hard would it be to push that decision, say, 2 years ahead and get paid a million dollars to do it? 3 years? These aren’t questions I just bring up to make people uncomfortable – the point is that questions like these will be perfectly natural to ask yourself if the guy was actually standing in your yard with that 1 million dollar check and an axe. And it’s because of questions like those that I think people are lying to themselves if they claim that they’re relatively certain they would never kill the pet.

There are cases where the love will be very strong, like an 80-year-old with a 13 year old cat. But the combination of advanced age of both the pet and the pet-owner is not exactly the default situation when dealing with pets and pet-owners. Another important factor at play in that situation is also that an 80-year-old will have a lot less use of the money, because a lot of spending options available to young people are no longer available to her or him.

Random stuff from the net, links, wikipedia…

1. RAND: Living Well at the End of Life (via Razib Khan). Here’s a link to one of the sources, a book which deals with some of the same questions: Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. Looks interesting, don’t have time to read it at the moment.

2. Fatal familial insomnia. “Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) is a very rare autosomal dominant inherited prion disease of the brain. It is almost always caused by a mutation to the protein PrPC, but can also develop spontaneously in patients with a non-inherited mutation variant called sporadic Fatal Insomnia (sFI). FFI is an incurable disease, involving progressively worsening insomnia, which leads to hallucinations, delirium, and confusional states like that of dementia.[1] The average survival span for patients diagnosed with FFI after the onset of symptoms is 18 months.”

Sleep’s important.

3. False consensus effect.

“In psychology, the false consensus effect is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate how much other people agree with him or her. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values and habits are ‘normal’ and that others also think the same way that they do.[1] This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a ‘false consensus’. This false consensus is significant because it increases self-esteem. The need to be “normal” and fit in with other people is underlined by a desire to conform and be liked by others in a social environment.

Within the realm of personality psychology, the false consensus effect does not have significant effects. This is because the false consensus effect relies heavily on the social environment and how a person interprets this environment. Instead of looking at situational attributions, personality psychology evaluates a person with dispositional attributions, making the false consensus effect relatively irrelevant in that domain. Therefore, a person’s personality potentially could affect the degree that the person relies on false consensus effect, but not the existence of such a trait.

The false consensus effect is not necessarily restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority. The false consensus effect is also evidenced when people overestimate the extent of their particular belief is correlated with the belief of others. Thus, fundamentalists do not necessarily believe that the majority of people share their views, but their estimates of the number of people who share their point of view will tend to exceed the actual number.

This bias is especially prevalent in group settings where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

Additionally, when confronted with evidence that a consensus does not exist, people often assume that those who do not agree with them are defective in some way.[2] There is no single cause for this cognitive bias; the availability heuristic and self-serving bias have been suggested as at least partial underlying factors.

The false consensus effect can be contrasted with pluralistic ignorance, an error in which people privately disapprove but publicly support what seems to be the majority view (regarding a norm or belief), when the majority in fact shares their (private) disapproval. While the false consensus effect leads people to wrongly believe that they agree with the majority (when the majority, in fact, openly disagrees with them), the pluralistic ignorance effect leads people to wrongly believe that they disagree with the majority (when the majority, in fact, covertly agrees with them).”

4. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Salman Khan recently made a video on the subject, here’s wikipedia.

5. Marital Rape License (warning, tvtropes link).

“Only a few decades ago, it was legal for a man to rape his wife. Sweden was the first country to explicitly criminalize it in 1965, and it has only been illegal in all fifty US states since 1993. Fifty-three countries around the world still don’t consider it a crime.

In some old patriarchal systems, a woman belonged first to her father (or closest living male relative if the father was dead) and then to her husband. Once married — and in some systems she could be married off without her consent to some old man she despised or had never met — her husband had a legal and “moral” right to her body whether she liked it or not. It gets even creepier when the bride is underage.”

We tend to take a lot of stuff for granted. Another reason why you should read Nothing To Envy.

6. Schema (psychology)

“A schema (pl. schemata or schemas), in psychology and cognitive science, describes any of several concepts including:

*An organized pattern of thought or behavior.
*A structured cluster of pre-conceived ideas.
*A mental structure that represents some aspect of the world.
*A specific knowledge structure or cognitive representation of the self.
*A mental framework centering on a specific theme, that helps us to organize social information.
*Structures that organize our knowledge and assumptions about something and are used for interpreting and processing information.

A schema for oneself is called a “self schema”. Schemata for other people are called “person schemata”. Schemata for roles or occupations are called “role schemata”, and schemata for events or situations are called “event schemata” (or scripts).

Schemata influence our attention, as we are more likely to notice things that fit into our schema. If something contradicts our schema, it may be encoded or interpreted as an exception or as unique. Thus, schemata are prone to distortion. They influence what we look for in a situation. They have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information. We are inclined to place people who do not fit our schema in a “special” or “different” category, rather than to consider the possibility that our schema may be faulty. As a result of schemata, we might act in such a way that actually causes our expectations to come true.”

7. Koch Snowflake Fractal (a structure with infinite perimeter but a finite area). Couldn’t remember if I’ve already blogged this at one point, but no harm done in case I have:

Random stuff

i. Perhaps most ‘imposter-syndrome’ sufferers are really imposters who do not suffer from imposter-syndrome. Convoluted? Well:

“Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents.

Their findings have veered well away from the original conception of impostorism as a reflection of an anxious personality or a cultural stereotype. Feelings of phoniness appear to alter people’s goals in unexpected ways and may also protect them against subconscious self-delusions.

Questionnaires measuring impostor fears ask people how much they agree with statements like these: “At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck.” “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.” “If I’m to receive a promotion of some kind, I hesitate to tell others until it’s an accomplished fact.”

Researchers have found, as expected, that people who score highly on such scales tend to be less confident, more moody and rattled by performance anxieties than those who score lower. [...]

In short, the researchers concluded, many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.

“Particularly when people think that they might not be able to live up to others’ views of them, they may maintain that they are not as good as other people think,” Dr. Mark Leary, the lead author, wrote in an e-mail message. “In this way, they lower others’ expectations — and get credit for being humble.”

In a study published in September, Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.”

…

My emphasis, and here’s the link. The interesting thing to me is why exceeding expectations for a given accomplishment level is status-enhancing compared to doing worse than expected. Anyway, this is one of the many ways that people who pretend to be humble brag – by downplaying expectations they increase the status level associated with any given accomplishment-level. Very few people would consider employing a strategy aimed at improving expectations-forming mechanisms to better match reality in the long run a status-enhancing move.

…

ii.

Calvin: “I say it’s a fallacy that kids need 12 years of school! Three months is plenty!”
Calvin: “Look at me. I’m smart! I don’t need 11½ more years of school! It’s a complete waste of my time!”
Hobbes: “How on Earth did you get all the way to the bus stop with both feet through one pant leg?”
Calvin: “I fell down a lot.”
Calvin: “…Why? What’s your point?”
Hobbes: “Nothing. I was just curious.”

…

Calvin: “Look at all these ants.”
Calvin: “They’re all running like mad, working tirelessly all day, never stopping, never resting.”
Calvin: “And for what? To build a tiny little hill of sand that could be wiped out at any moment! All their work could be for nothing, and yet they keep on building. They never give up!”
Hobbes: “I suppose there’s a lesson in that.”
Calvin: “Yeah … Ants are morons. Let’s see what’s on TV.”

…

Calvin: “Tigers don’t worry about much, do they?”
Hobbes: “Nope.”
Hobbes: “That’s one of the perks of being feral.”
Calvin: “I’m not having enough fun right now.”
Hobbes: “You’re not?”
Calvin: “I’m just having a little bit of fun. I should be having lots of fun.”
Calvin: “It’s Sunday. I’ve just got a few precious hours of freedom left before I have to go to school tomorrow.”
Calvin: “Between now and bedtime, I have to squeeze all the fun possible out of every minute! I don’t want to waste a second of liberty!”
Calvin: “Each moment I should be able to say, “I’m having the time of my life right now!’”
Calvin: “But here I am, and I’m not having the time of my life! Valuable minutes are disappearing forever, even as we speak! We’ve got to have more fun! C’mon!”
[Calvin and Hobbes start running away]
Hobbes: “I didn’t realize fun was so much work.”
Calvin: “Sure! When you’re serious about having fun, it’s not much fun at all.”

When I was a child, I sometimes felt like Calvin did in that last comic. I never do anymore. I guess it’s part of growing up. Reading a strip like this once you have is a good way to make you remember that here is something you’ve probably lost for ever. I have read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes over the last couple of days. I really love that comic but sometimes reading it really hurts. Some of it is a lot deeper than it lets on.

…

iii.

I tweeted this, but in case you missed it: Khan Academy have now added Art History to the list of subjects covered. 300 videos of it. I don’t know how many of my readers have an interest in that stuff (I don’t), but if you do – go knock yourself out! They write in the blogpost that: “we are incredibly excited to push the frontier on freely available content in the Arts and Humanities.” And I’m excited about that too. People really shold not be paying a lot of money for this kind of stuff. Maybe if it’s available for free online – and presented at a site including other stuff as well, such as mathematics, physics ect., more young people will start to realize that…

Deceit

“For nearly the last twenty years, Young has wined and dined his way through the Bay Area by posing as a variety of musical celebrities and convincing the starstruck to pick up the tab for lavish meals, designer clothing, luxury cars, booze, limousine rides, and stays in elite hotels. According to police and court records stretching back eighteen years, before he engineered last winter’s pass through the Bay Area as Cornelius Grant, Young had also passed himself off as one-time Temptations lead singer Ali “Ollie” Woodson, jazz bassist Marcus Miller, and vocalist James Alexander of funk group the Bar-Kays. Even under his own name, Young has played the celebrity con game claiming — sometimes simultaneously — to be the son of jazz drummer Lester Young, a musical affiliate and close friend of R&B crooner Luther Vandross, an arranger for jazz singer Nancy Wilson, an associate of Miles Davis, and the head of a fictitious production company that always seemed to be on the verge of cutting a deal with someone willing to give Young the star treatment.” [...]

“He generally approaches his marks in a bar, or else drops in on them in the office and gets himself invited for drinks. He’s also often in the company of an attractive, although not flashy, young woman. This woman is usually someone he’d recently picked up by impressing her with his star status. She’d unknowingly act as Young’s foil, vouching for his identity and assuaging the victim’s suspicions. She would often become the victim herself, with Young hitting her up for cash and hotel rooms, promising to reimburse her.

Young would essentially play one victim off another, getting socially prominent businesspeople to trust him simply because others were doing likewise. He’d often target people who worked within the same industry — architects or accountants, for example — and as he moved from one mark to another, he’d amass insider terminology, a list of names to drop, even business cards, which he would allegedly take from one person’s office to pass out at the next. Since part of the classic Alan Young scam often included making hollow bids on million-dollar homes, luxury cars, and boats, he’d also gain credibility because he’d constantly be getting the five-star treatment from salespeople eager to make commission. His best trick, says Hare, was getting all of these people to vie for his attention by creating an “auction atmosphere.” They’d set aside their inhibitions in order to ensure that they got involved in Young’s deal before he left town. And Young’s private plane was always about to spirit him away.

Scams of this type generally work for two reasons: embarrassed victims don’t always report their losses, and police officers don’t always identify such complaints as crimes, because they usually appear to be a simple business deals gone awry, according to Sgt. Peter Lau, an expert on identity fraud for the Oakland Police Department.” [...]

“While Young’s scams certainly have gained finesse over the years, police and court records show they almost always adhere to the same template. Young blows into town posing as the musical celebrity du jour, impresses his marks with name-dropping and insider knowledge, then wows them with promises of hefty investments or donations. Young invariably discovers that his briefcase, along with his wallet, credit cards, and identification, is missing. He usually claims they have been accidentally shipped down to Los Angeles with his band’s equipment. Young then throws himself on the good graces of his host, promising to reimburse him promptly. The host generally pulls out all the stops to offer his newfound friend Hollywood-style hospitality. Some of Young’s marks have paid off hookers, monstrous bar tabs, or bills for unauthorized limousine rides, according to police records. As soon as the victim catches on, Young simply slips away. Within a few days, Young has usually locked onto a new target, and the whole charade repeats itself.” [...]

“SFPD Inspector Wismer was the man who put the case together after realizing that Young’s most recent victims had all been pulled in by a “Temptations” hook. According to Wismer, Young’s latest pass through the Bay Area began last July when, under the guise of Temptation Ali “Ollie” Woodson, he convinced a San Francisco art dealer he planned to invest $160,000 in sculptures. By the time the dealer figured out something was amiss, a week had gone by and he was out $4,000 in hotel bills and clothing. Officers picked up Young on a parole violation the following week, and he went to San Quentin for that offense. But by November he was out again, and he managed to squeeze $1,300 in hotel bills out of an attorney by pretending he had $15 million to invest in real estate.

Wismer believes that Young’s December scam, during which he switched over to the pseudonym Cornelius Grant, actually started in Hayward, where he pledged a $2.5 million donation to the choir at the Glad Tidings Church and convinced a choir member to foot his hotel bill. Then he apparently moved on to Stein. According to an incident report filed with the San Francisco police, within a few days of the Stein swindle Young had convinced a San Francisco accountant to put him up at the Argent Hotel, where he ran up an extraordinary $13,000 bill. He later got an Oakland woman to foot a $1,200 bill at the Holiday Inn on Van Ness. She called the police when he refused to reimburse her as promised. A prostitute police found in Young’s room — along with Young himself — admitted that not only had she agreed to pretend to be Cornelius Grant’s daughter in exchange for a promised Cadillac SUV, but that Young had finagled $80 out of her.” [...]

“If the mechanics of how Young’s con works can be elucidated through his police records, it’s harder to explain why it works. People who have not been subject to Young’s charms often wonder why anyone falls for his extravagant claims. There are probably as many answers as there are victims, but perhaps part of the answer is that he has expertly played on the spend-money-to-make-money business culture, whose members consider buying big lunches and drinks part of the cost of doing business. Or perhaps he owes part of his success, particularly in more recent years, to the gullibility of upper-class whites embarrassed by the idea that they haven’t recognized a African-American musical legend. The East Bay is in fact a touring destination for many of the celebrities Young impersonated — the Temptations, Nancy Wilson, and Marcus Miller have all performed here within the last four months. [...]

Simply put, people want to go along with the crowd, especially one following a charismatic superstar with money to burn. “When people start to get suspicious, some of their suspicions are allayed by his obvious success with astute businessmen, luxury car dealerships, yacht dealerships, real-estate people,” says Tony Hare. “They see him being wined and dined by players at least as big or bigger than they are, with all of the trappings of wealth. That’s tough to argue with. They see that A) they’re not alone and B) they don’t want to embarrass themselves by being the cheap, penurious little fish who’s swimming with the sharks.”

And when logical questions arise, people who want to play enough will invent their own answers. “He gives you enough information to allow you to fill in the gaps,” says Oakland attorney Harvey Stein. “It doesn’t all add up, but enough of it adds up that you’re ready to say, ‘Okay, how did he get on the plane?’ Or you go to Yoshi’s and he gets comped and everybody falls all over him, you say ‘Okay, how do I know they don’t know who he is?’ And of course when he shows up at the restaurant with a beautiful woman who’s a foot taller than he is and gorgeous and fifteen years younger, you think, how does an ugly short guy like this have a beautiful woman like that? So you fill in that kind of stuff.”"

Here’s the link. Here are 4 more stories about imposters – I’ve read The Chameleon and An IM Infatuation Turned to Romance. Then the Truth Came Out. Both are insane stories, but the latter… I believe one commenter expressed it like this: ‘my brain just vomited’ – my reaction was similar.

Human ability to spot liars and falsehoods

“We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. Relative to cross-judge differences in accuracy, mean lie-truth discrimination abilities are nontrivial, with a mean accuracy d of roughly .40. This produces an effect that is at roughly the 60th percentile in size, relative to others that have been meta-analyzed by social psychologists. Alternative indexes of lie-truth discrimination accuracy correlate highly with percentage correct, and rates of lie detection vary little from study to study. Our meta-analyses reveal that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies, that people appear deceptive when motivated to be believed, and that individuals regard their interaction partners as honest. We propose that people judge others’deceptions more harshly than their own and that this double standard in evaluating deceit can explain much of the accumulated literature.”

I have been unable to find a non-gated version of this study by Bond and DePaulo. What the main result above (’54 %’) means is that people are hardly better than chance at identifying deception on average. This is the result of an analysis of 206 studies which have looked at this, with almost 25.000 ‘participants’ – it’s not just a fluke, we really are that bad at telling whether people tell us the truth or not. This link has more:

“There are a number of reasons for this poor ability; among them poor feedback in daily life (i.e. a person only knows about the lies they have caught); the general tendency among people to believe others until proven otherwise (i.e. a “truth bias”; [32]), and especially a faulty understanding of what liars actually look like (i.e. the difference between people’s perceived clues to lying, compared to the actual clues; [26]). [...]

Most of the studies reviewed were laboratory based and involved observers judging strangers. But similar results are found even when the liars and truth tellers are known to the observers (also reviewed by [31]. If the lies being told are low stakes, so that little emotion is aroused and the lie can be told without much extra cognitive effort, there may be few clues available on which to base a judgment. But even studies of high stakes lies, in which both liars and truth tellers are highly motivated to be successful, suggest an accuracy level that is not much different from chance.”

All of this is of course complicated greatly by the problem that the truth/lie-variable often isn’t binary in our everyday lives – another way to think about it is to think of any statement* as having a truth component, a continuous variable going from 0 to 1 and spanning the entire range in between. Also, I’m not sure if adding confounding stuff that’s actually true to a non-obvious lie isn’t one of several common strategies employed in order to make lies harder to spot.

*if we use Popperian terminology and add ‘basic’ in front of ‘statement’, we also take care of the problem that some statements, e.g. value judgments, have an undefined truth component. But most statements aren’t basic statements, so anyway…

Youare(still)notsosmart

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – Kurt Vonnegut

A nice quote. Here’s a lot more. Some excerpts:

“That’s the cycle of cognitive dissonance, a painful confusion about who you are gets resolved by seeing the world in a more satisfying way. As Festinger said, you make “your view of the world fit with how you feel or what you’ve done.” When you feel anxiety over your actions, you will seek to lower the anxiety by creating a fantasy world in which your anxiety can’t exist, and then you come to believe the fantasy is reality just as Benjamin Franklin’s rival did. He couldn’t possibly have lent a rare book to a guy he didn’t like, so he must actually like him. Problem solved.”

[...]

“You tend to like the people to whom you are kind and dislike the people to whom you are rude. From the Stanford Prison Experiment to Abu Ghraib, to concentration camps and the attitudes of soldiers spilling blood, mountains of evidence suggest behaviors create attitudes when harming just as they do when helping. Jailers come to look down on inmates; camp guards come to dehumanize their captives; soldiers create derogatory terms for their enemies. It’s difficult to hurt someone you admire. It’s even more difficult to kill a fellow human being. Seeing the casualties you create as something less than you, something deserving of damage, makes it possible to continue seeing yourself as a good and honest person, to continue being sane.” [...]

“Every person develops a persona, and that persona persists because inconsistencies in your personal narrative get rewritten, redacted and misinterpreted. If you are like most people, you have high self-esteem and tend to believe you are above average in just about every way. It keeps you going, keeps your head above water, so when the source of your own behavior is mysterious you will confabulate a story which paints you in a positive light. If you are on the other end of the self-esteem spectrum and tend to see yourself as undeserving and unworthy, you will rewrite nebulous behavior as the result of attitudes consistent with the persona of an incompetent person, deviant, or whatever flavor of loser you believe yourself to be. Successes will make you uncomfortable so you will dismiss them as flukes. If people are nice to you, you will assume they have ulterior motives or are mistaken. Whether you love or hate your persona, you protect the self with which you’ve become comfortable. When you observe your own behavior, or feel the gaze of an outsider, you manipulate the facts so they match your expectations.”

Forer (people are gullible)

“Personality evaluations can be, and often are, couched in such general terms that they are meaningless in terms of denotability in behavior. Or they may have “universal validity” and apply to everyone. [...]

Thus the individual is a unique configuration of characteristics each of which can be found in everyone, but in varying degrees. A universally valid statement, then, is one which applies equally well to the majority or the totality of the population. The universally valid statement is true for the individual, but it lacks the quantitative specification and the proper focus which are necessary for differential diagnosis. In a sense a universally valid personality description is of the type most likely to be accepted by a client as a truth about himself, a truth which he considers unique in him. Many, if not most, individuals are able to recognize the characteristics in themselves – when it is not to their disadvantage – while oblivious to their presence in others. [...]

Allport (1, p. 476) states that “one way in which character analysts secure a reputation for success is through the employment of ambiguous terms that may apply to any mortal person”. A naïve person who receives superficial diagnostic information, especially when the social situation is prestige-laden, tends to accept such information.1 He is impressed by the obvious truths and may be oblivious to the discrepancies. But he does more than this. He also validates the instrument and the diagnostician. [...]

The following experiment was performed in the writer’s class in introductory psychology to demonstrate the ease with which clients may be misled by a general personality description into unwarranted approval of a diagnostic tool. The writer had discussed his Diagnostic Interest Blank (5)[2] (hereafter referred to as DIB) in connection with the role of personal motivational factors in perceptual selectivity. Class members requested that they be given the test and a personality evaluation. The writer acquiesced. At the next meeting the 39 students were given DIB’s to fill out, and were told that they would be given a brief personality vignette as soon as the writer had time to examine their test papers. One week later each student was given a typed personality sketch with his name written on it. The writer encouraged the expressed desire of the class for secrecy regarding the content of the sketches. Fortunately, this was the day on which a quiz was scheduled; hence it was possible to ensure their sitting two seats apart without arousing suspicion. From the experimenter’s point of view it was essential that no student see the sketch received by any other student because all sketches were identical. The students were unsuspecting.

The personality sketch contains some material which overlaps with that of Paterson, but consists of 13 statements rather than a narrative description. A further difference lies in the fact that this sketch was designed for more nearly universal validity than Paterson’s appears to have been. The sketch consists of the following items.

1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. [Hahaha! Salt in the wound..., US]
10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
11. At times, you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life.

[The statements came largely from a newsstand astrology book]

Before the sketches were passed to the students, instructions were given first to read the sketches and then to turn the papers over and make the following ratings:

A. Rate on a scale of zero (poor) to five (perfect) how effective the DIB is in revealing personality.
B. Rate on a scale of zero to five the degree to which the personality description reveals basic characteristics of your personality.
C. Then turn the paper again and check each statement as true or false about yourself or use a question mark if you cannot tell.

In answer to their requests students were informed that the writer had another copy of their sketch and would give it to them after the data were collected. After the papers had been returned to the writer students were asked to raise their hands if they felt the test had done a good job. Virtually all hands went up and the students noticed this. Then the first sketch item was read and students were asked to indicate by hands whether they had found anything similar in their sketches. As all hands rose, the class burst into laughter. [...]

The data show clearly that the group had been gulled. Ratings of adequacy of the DIB included only one rating below 4.”

…

From The fallacy of personal validation; a classroom demonstration of gullibility. That thing was written in 1949.

From Wikipedia I also learn that the statements which ‘may have “universal validity” and apply to everyone’ later became known as Barnum statements. Also:

“Later studies have found that subjects give higher accuracy ratings if the following are true:

*the subject believes that the analysis applies only to him or her
*the subject believes in the authority of the evaluator
*the analysis lists mainly positive traits”

Insane (..!/..?)

“A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were “anxiety disorders,” including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); “mood disorders,” including major depression and bipolar disorders; “impulse-control disorders,” including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and “substance use disorders,” including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment—up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.”

Here’s another interesting bit:

“Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999— Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. This was a better data set than the one used in his previous study, not only because it included negative studies but because the FDA sets uniform quality standards for the trials it reviews and not all of the published research in Kirsch’s earlier study had been submitted to the FDA as part of a drug approval application.

Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants.”

Here’s the rest, via MR. There’s a lot of related stuff here.

A useful study

“Neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait in the study of psychology. It is an enduring tendency to experience negative emotional states. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than the average to experience such feelings as anxiety, anger, guilt, and depressed mood.[1] They respond more poorly to environmental stress, and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening, and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. They are often self-conscious and shy, and they may have trouble controlling urges and delaying gratification. Neuroticism is associated with low emotional intelligence, which involves emotional regulation, motivation, and interpersonal skills.”

Wikipedia. Yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

Here’s the study (abstract only, apparently there’s no full version available online at the moment for free). The abstract:

“A robust literature indicates that neuroticism has numerous negative implications for romantic relationships. But are there factors that can protect intimates from such implications? Given that negative affect accounts for part of the association between neuroticism and relationship distress, and given that the positive affect associated with sex may negate that negative affect, the authors predicted that sexual frequency would moderate the association between neuroticism and relationship satisfaction. A total of 72 newlywed couples reported their marital satisfaction and sexual frequency up to seven times over the first 4 years of marriage. Consistent with predictions, a lagged multilevel analysis revealed that although neuroticism was negatively associated with marital satisfaction on average, it was unrelated to marital satisfaction when couples had engaged in relatively frequent sex over the past 6 months. These findings join others in highlighting the importance of attending to the broader context of the relationship to developing a complete understanding of relationships.”

I am so saving that study for when/if I find a girlfriend!

Income and happiness

“Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences
of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ∼$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”

Here’s the paper, called: ‘High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being’, by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton.

Income != Wealth. In general I’d argue that the income coefficient will underestimate the utility of money because of this in analyses like these, as the low income group both contains people who have significant assets and relatively low income (retirees) and people with similar incomes but no assets and/or significant debt; the latter group is more vulnerable than the former and estimating something like self-reported anxiety while completely disregarding savings in the money part of the equation is perhaps not exactly optimal (I’m almost certain it’s a data problem here, not an oversight by the authors, I’m just saying that it’s likely a problem).

You should read all of it, it’s not a long paper but it’s quite good. Here’s another sequence I found interesting:

“Although concavity is entailed by the psychophysics of quantitative dimensions, it often has been cited as evidence that people derive little or no psychological benefit from income beyond some threshold. Although this conclusion has been widely accepted in discussions of the relationship between life evaluation and gross domestic product (GDP) across nations (11–14), it is false, at least for this aspect of subjective well-being. In accordance with Weber’s Law, average national life evaluation is linear when appropriately plotted against log GDP (15); a doubling of income provides similar increments of life evaluation for countries rich and poor.” [my emphasis, US]