Unstrapped

21 Aug

When strapped for time, some resort to wishful thinking, others to lashing out. Both are illogical. If you are strapped for time, it is either because you scheduled poorly or because you were a victim of unanticipated obligations. Both are understandable, but neither justify ‘acting out.’ So don’t.

Whatever the reason, being strapped for time means either that some things won’t get done on time, or that you will have to work harder, or that you will need more resources (yours or someone else’s), or all three. And the only things to do are:

  1. Triage,
  2. Ask for help, and
  3. Communicate effectively to those affected

If you have landed in soup because of poor scheduling, for instance, by not budgeting any time to deal with things you haven’t scheduled, make a note. And improve.

And since it is never rational to worry—it is at best unproductive, and at worst corrosive—avoid it like plague.

Motivated Citations

13 Jan

The best kind of insight is the ‘duh’ insight—catching something that is exceedingly common, almost routine, but something that no one talks about. I believe this is one such insight.

The standards for citing congenial research (that supports the hypothesis of choice) are considerably lower than the standards for citing uncongenial research. It is an important kind of academic corruption. And it means that the prospects of teleological progress toward truth in science, as currently practiced, are bleak. An alternate ecosystem that provides objective ratings for each piece of research is likely to be more successful. (As opposed to the ‘echo-system’—here are the people who find stuff that ‘agrees’ with what I find—in place today.)

An empirical implication of the point is that the average ranking of journals in which congenial research that is cited is published is likely to be lower than in which uncongenial research is published. Though, for many of the ‘conflicts’ in science, all sides of the conflict will have top-tier publications—-which is to say that the measure is somewhat crude.

The deeper point is that readers generally do not judge the quality of the work cited for support of specific arguments, taking many of the arguments at face value. This, in turn, means that the role of journal rankings is somewhat limited. Or more provocatively, to improve science, we need to make sure that even research published in low ranked journals is of sufficient quality.

Stereotypical Understanding

11 Jul

The paucity of women in Computer Science, Math and Engineering in the US is justly widely lamented. Sometimes, the imbalance is attributed to gender stereotypes. But only a small fraction of men study these fields. And in absolute terms, the proportion of women in these fields is not a great deal lower than the proportion of men. So in some ways, the assertion that these fields are stereotypically male is in itself a misunderstanding.

For greater clarity, a contrived example: Say that the population is split between two similar sized groups, A and B. Say only 1% of Group A members study X, while the proportion of Group B members studying X is 1.5%. This means that 60% of those to study X belong to Group B. Or in more dramatic terms: activity X is stereotypically Group B. However, 98.5% of Group B doesn’t study X. And that number is not a whole lot different from 99%, the percentage of Group A that doesn’t study X.

When people say activity X is stereotypically Group B, many interpret it as ‘activity X is quite popular among X.’ (That is one big stereotype about stereotypes.) That clearly isn’t so. In fact, the difference between the preferences for studying X between Group A and B — as inferred from choices (assuming same choices, utility) — is likely pretty small.

Obliviousness to the point is quite common. For instance, it is behind arguments linking terrorism to Muslims. And Muslims typically respond with a version of the argument laid out above—they note that an overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful.

One straightforward conclusion from this exercise is that we may be able to make headway in tackling disciplinary stereotypes by elucidating the point in terms of the difference between p(X|Group A) and p(X| Group B) rather than in terms of p(Group A | X).

Congenial Invention and the Economy of Everyday (Political) Conversation

31 Dec

Communication comes from the Latin word communicare, which means `to make common.’ We communicate not only to transfer information, but also to establish and reaffirm identities, mores, and meanings. (From my earlier note on a somewhat different aspect of the economy of everyday conversation.) Hence, there is often a large incentive for loyalty. More generally, there are three salient aspects to most private interpersonal communication about politics — shared ideological (or partisan) loyalties, little knowledge of, and prior thinking about political issues, and a premium for cynicism. The second of these points — ignorance — cuts both ways. It allows for the possibility of getting away with saying something that doesn’t make sense (or isn’t true). And it also means that people need to invent stuff if they want to sound smart etc. (Looking stuff up is often still too hard. I am often puzzled by that.)

But don’t people know that they are making stuff up? And doesn’t that stop them? A defining feature of humans is overconfidence. And people often times aren’t aware of the depth of the wells of their own ignorance. And if it sounds right, well it is right, they reason. The act of speaking is many a time an act of invention (or discovery). And we aren’t sure and don’t actively control how we create. (Underlying mechanisms behind how we create — use of ‘gut’ are well-known.) Unless we are very deliberate in speech. Most people aren’t. (There generally aren’t incentives to be.) And find it hard to vet the veracity of the invention (or discovery) in the short time that passes between invention and vocalization.

That’s Smart! What We Mean by Smartness and What We Should

16 Aug

Many people conceive of intelligence as a CPU. To them, being more intelligent means having a faster CPU. And this is despairing as the clock speed is largely fixed. (Prenatal and childhood nutrition can make a sizable difference, however. For instance, iodine deficiency in children causes mental retardation.)

But people misconceive intelligence. Intelligence is not just the clock speed of the CPU. It is also the short-term cache and the OS.

Clock speed doesn’t matter much if there isn’t a good-sized cache. The size of short-term memory matters enormously. And the good news is that we can expand it with effort.

A super fast CPU with a large cache is still only as good as the operating system. If people know little or don’t know how to reason well, they generally won’t be smart. Think of the billions of people who came before we knew how to know (science). Some of those people had really fast CPUs. But many of them weren’t able to make much progress on anything.

The chances an ignoramus who doesn’t know correlation isn’t causation will come across as stupid are also high. In fact, we often mistake being knowledgeable and possessing rules of how to reason well for being intelligent. Though it goes without saying, it is good to say it: how much we know and knowledge of how to reason better is in our control.

Lastly, people despair because they mistake skew for the variance. People believe there is a lot of variance in processing capacity. My sense is that variance in the processing capacity is low, and the skew high. In layman’s terms, most people are as smart as the other with very few very bright people. None of this is to say that the little variance that exists is not consequential.

Toward a Better OS

Ignorance of relevant facts limits how well we can reason. Thus, increasing the repository of relevant facts at hand will help you reason smarter. If you don’t know about something, that is ok. Today, the world’s information is at your fingertips. It will take you some time to go through things but you can become informed about more things than you think possible.

Besides knowledge, there are some ‘frameworks’ of how to approach a problem. For instance, management consultants have something called MECE. This ‘framework’ can help you reason better about a whole slew of problems. There are likely others.

Besides reasoning frameworks, there are simple rules that can help you reason better. You can look up books devoted to common errors in thinking, and use those to derive the rules. The rules can look as follows:

  1. Correlation is not the same as causation
  2. Don’t select on the dependent variable. What I call the ‘7 Habits of Successful People’ rule.
  3. Replace categorical thinking with continuous where possible, and be precise. For e.g., rather than claim that ‘there is a risk’, quantify the risk. Or replace the word possibility with probability where applicable.
  4. Have a better grasp of your own ignorance using some of the tricks described here.
  5. The tree of inference starts with the question. Think hard about what data you would need to answer the question well. And then what data you have. And then calibrate your assessments about the answer based on the difference between the data you would have liked to have and the data you have.

Some Hard Feelings: Feelings Towards Some Racial and Ethnic Groups in 4 Countries

8 Aug

According to YouGov surveys in Switzerland, Netherlands and Canada, and the 2008 ANES in the US, Whites, on average, in each of the four countries feel fairly coldly — giving an average thermometer rating of less than 50 on a 0 to 100 scale — toward Muslims, and people from Muslim-majority regions (Feelings towards different ethnic, racial, and religious groups). However, in Europe, Whites’ feelings toward Romanians, Poles, and Serbs and Kosovars are scarcely any warmer, and sometimes cooler. Meanwhile, Whites feel relatively warmly towards East Asians.

Capuchin Monkeys and Fairness: I Want At Least As Much As The Other

1 Dec

In a much heralded experiment, we see that a Capuchin monkey rejects a reward (food) for doing a task after seeing another monkey being rewarded with something more appetizing for doing the same task. It has been interpreted as evidence for our ‘instinct for fairness’. But there is more to the evidence. The fact that the monkey that gets the heftier reward doesn’t protest the more meager reward for the other monkey is not commented upon though highly informative. Ideally, any weakly reasoned deviation from equality should provoke a negative reaction. Monkeys who get the longer end of the stick, even when aware that others are getting the shorter end of the stick, don’t complain. Primates are peeved only when they are made aware that they are getting the short end of the stick. Not so much if someone else gets it. My sense is that it is true for most humans as well – people care far more about them holding the short end of the stick than others. It is thus incorrect to attribute such behavior to an ‘instinct for fairness’. A better attribution may be to the following rule: I want at least as much as the others are getting.

Raising Money for Causes

10 Nov

Four teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, and eminently well to do, were out on the pavement raising money for children struck with cancer. They had been out raising money for a couple of hours, and from a glance at their tin pot, I estimated that they had raised about $30 odd dollars, likely less. Assuming donation rate stays below $30/hr, or more than what they would earn if they were all working minimum wage jobs, I couldn’t help but wonder if their way of raising money for charity was rational; they could have easily raised more by donating their earnings from doing minimum wage job. Of course, these teenagers aren’t alone. Think of the people out in the cold raising money for the poor on New York pavements. My sense is that many people do not think as often about raising money by working at a “regular job”, even when it is more efficient (money/hour) (and perhaps even more pleasant). It is not clear why.

The same argument applies to those who run in marathons etc. to raise money. Preparing and running in marathon generally costs at least hundreds of dollars for an average ‘Joe’ (think about the sneakers, the personal trainers that people hire, the amount of time they `donate’ to train, which could have been spent working and donating that money to charity etc.). Ostensibly, as I conclude in an earlier piece, they must have motives beyond charity. These latter non-charitable considerations, at least at first glance, do not seem to apply to the case of teenagers, or to those raising money out in the cold in New York.

Representativeness Heuristic, Base Rates, and Bayes

23 Apr

From the Introduction of their edited volume:
Tversky and Kahneman used the following experiment for testing ‘representativeness heuristic’ –

Subjects are shown a brief personality description of several individuals, sampled at random from 100 professionals – engineers and lawyers.
Subjects are asked to assess whether the description is of an engineer or a lawyer.
In one condition, subjects are told group = 70 engineers/30 lawyers. Another the reverse = 70 lawyers/30 engineers.

Results –
Both conditions produced same mean probability judgments.

Discussion:
Tversky and Kahneman call this result a ‘sharp violation’ of Bayes Rule.

Counterpoint:
I am not sure the experiment shows any such thing. Mathematical formulation of the objection is simple and boring so an example. Imagine, there are red and black balls in an urn. Subjects are asked if the ball is black or red under two alternate descriptions of the urn composition. When people are completely sure of the color, the urn composition obviously should have no effect. Just because there is one black ball in the urn (out of say a 100), it doesn’t mean that the person will start thinking that the black ball in her hand is actually red. So on and so forth. One wants to apply Bayes by accounting for uncertainty. People are typically more certain (lots of evidence it seems – even in their edited volume) so that automatically discounts urn composition. People may not be violating Bayes Rule. They may just be feeding the formula incorrect data.

Impact of Menu on Choices: Choosing What You Want Or Deciding What You Should Want

24 Sep

In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely discusses the clever (ex)-subscription menu of The Economist that purportedly manipulates people to subscribe to a pricier plan. In an experiment based on the menu, Ariely shows that addition of an item to the menu (that very few choose) can cause preference reversal over other items in the menu.

Let’s consider a minor variation of Ariely’s experiment. Assume there are two different menus that look as follows:
1. 400 cal, 500 cal.
2. 400 cal, 500 cal, 800 cal.

Assume that all items cost and taste the same. When given the first menu, say 20% choose the 500 calorie item. When selecting from the second menu, percent of respondents selecting the 500 calorie choice is likely to be significantly greater.

Now, why may that be? One reason may be that people do not have absolute preferences; here for a specific number of calories. And that people make judgments about what is the reasonable number of calories based on the menu. For instance, they decide that they do not want the item with the maximum calorie count. And when presented with a menu with more than two distinct calorie choices, another consideration comes to mind — they do not too little food either. More generally, they may let the options on the menu anchor for them what is ‘too much’ and what is ‘too little.’

If this is true, it can have potentially negative consequences. For instance, McDonald’s has on the menu a Bacon Angus Burger that is about 1360 calories (calories are now being displayed on McDonald’s menus courtesy Richard Thaler). It is possible that people choose higher calorie items when they see this menu option, than when they do not.

More generally, people’s reliance on the menu to discover their own preferences means that marketers can manipulate what is seen as the middle (and hence ‘reasonable’). This also translates to some degree to politics where what is considered the middle (in both social and economic policy) is sometimes exogenously shifted by the elites.

That is but one way a choice on the menu can impact preference order over other choices. Separately, sometimes a choice can prime people about how to judge other choices. For instance, in a paper exploring effect of Nader on preferences over Bush and Kerry, researchers find that “[W]hen Nader is in the choice set all voters’ choices are more sharply aligned with their spatial placements of the candidates.”

This all means, assumptions of IIA need to be rethought. Adverse conclusions about human rationality are best withheld (see Sen).

Further Reading:

1. R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa. Games and Decision. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1957.
2. Amartya Sen. Internal consistency of choice. Econometrica, 61(3):495– -521, May 1993.
3. Amartya Sen. Is the idea of purely internal consistency of choice bizarre? In J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison, editors, World, Mind, and Ethics. Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Does Children’s Sex Cause Partisanship?

26 May

More women identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans. The disparity is yet greater among single women. It is possible (perhaps even likely) that this difference in partisan identification is due to (perceived) policy positions of Republicans and Democrats.

Now let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine a couple about to have a kid. Also, assume that the couple doesn’t engage in sex-selection. Two things can happen – the couple can have a son or a daughter. It is possible that having a daughter persuades the parent to change his or her policy preferences towards a direction that is perceived as more congenial to women. It is also possible that having a son has the opposite impact — persuading parents to adopt more male congenial political preferences. Overall, it is possible that gender of the child makes a difference to parents’ policy preferences. With panel data, one can identify both movements. With cross-sectional data, one can only identify the difference between those who had a son, and those who had a daughter.

Let’s test this using cross-sectional data from Jennings and Stoker’s “Study of Political Socialization: Parent-Child Pairs Based on Survey of Youth Panel and Their Offspring, 1997.”

Let’s assume that a couple’s partisan affiliation doesn’t impact the gender of their kid.

The number of kids, however, is determined by personal choice, which in turn may be impacted by ideology, income, etc. For example, it is likely that conservatives have more kids as they are less likely to believe in contraception, etc. This is also supported by the data. (Ideology is a post-treatment variable. This may not matter if the impact of having a daughter is same in magnitude as the impact of having a son, and if there are similar numbers of each across people.)

Hence, one may conceptualize “treatment” as the gender of the kids, conditional on the number of kids.

Understandably, we only study people who have one or more kids.

Conditional on number of kids, the more daughters respondent has, the less likely respondent is to identify herself as a Republican (b = -.342, p < .01) (when dependent variable is curtailed to Republican/Democrat dichotomous variable; the relationship holds—indeed becomes stronger—if the dependent variable is coded as an ordinal trichotomous variable: Republican, Independent, and Democrat, and an ordered multinomial estimated)

Future:

If what we observe is true then we should also see that as party stances evolve, the impact of gender on policy preference of a parent should vary. One should also be able to do this cross-nationally.

Some other findings:

  1. Probability of having a son (limiting to live births in the U.S.) is about .51. This natural rate varies slightly by income. Daughters are more likely to be born among people with lower incomes. However, the effect of income is extremely modest in the U.S. The live birth ratio is marginally rebalanced by the higher child mortality rate among males. As a result, among 0–21, the ratio between men and women is about equal in U.S.

    In the sample, there are significantly more daughters than sons. The female/male ratio is 1.16. This is ‘significantly’ unusual.

  2. If families are less likely to have kids after the birth of a boy, the number of kids will be negatively correlated with proportion sons. Among people with just one kid, the number of sons is indeed greater than number of daughters, though the difference is insignificant. Overall correlation between proportion sons and number of kids is also very low (corr. = -.041).

Nudging

5 May

Nudging the mood?
Important consequential decisions in life are hostage to our mood. What we intend to do (and actually do) often varies by mood. Mood, in turn, can vary due to a variety of exogenous reasons – negative swings can be caused by ill-health (a headache, or allergies) and positive swings can be caused by a nice thing said by someone you meet by accident. This variation is a proof of our irrationality. The irrational aspect is not just misattribution of ill-health to mood, but why mood at all affects our decisions. Being aware of the relationship between mood and decisions can allow one to choose better. Given the central place mood occupies in decision making, it is likely that a nudge to affect the mood would be powerful.

End of a nudge
One of the paper-towel dispensers I use has the following sticker ‘These come from trees.’ This is a famous ‘nudge’ (In Sunstein/Thaler terminology). So far so good. Till perhaps a few months ago, I always read the sticker when I used the dispenser. Yesterday I noticed that I had stopped noticing the sticker. This contrasts with my behavior towards the hotel notes about saving water – which I still read. I think that is so partly because there is so much time in a hotel room. Nudges for quick everyday decisions perhaps need to change over time.

Measuring Partisan Affect Coldly

24 Mar

Outside of the variety of ways of explicitly asking people how they feel about another group — feeling thermometers, like/dislike scales, favorability ratings — explicit measures asked using mechanisms designed to overcome or attenuate social desirability concerns — bogus pipeline, ACASI — and a plethora of implicit measures — affect misattribution, IAT — there exist a few other interesting ways of measuring affect:

  • Games as measures – Jeremy Weinstein uses games like the dictator game to measure (inter-ethnic) affect. One can use prisoner’s dilemma, among other games, to do the same.
  • Systematic bias in responding to factual questions when ignorant about the correct answer. For example, most presidential elections years since 1988, ANES has posed a variety of retrospective evaluative and factual questions including assessments of the state of the economy, whether the inflation/unemployment/crime rose, remained the same, or declined in the past year (or some other time frame). Analyses of these questions have revealed significant ‘partisan bias’, but these questions have yet to be used as a measure of ‘partisan affect’ that is the likely cause of the observed ‘bias’.

French for Bread

14 Feb

Pain is an unpleasant sensation. It is generally assumed that pain has two purposes: 1. to stop us from engaging in a behavior that is causing the pain, say, continuing to dip the hand in boiling water, and 2. to train the body to not engage in such behavior in the future. Given the purpose, pain seems to be poorly implemented.

Think of a system that is coded to send a message to the controller to alert it to the damage and to ask it to reconsider engaging in an activity that is causing the damage (or independently take some hard-coded action). One envisions that the message is sent in a manner that “makes” the controller pay attention, if such attention is warranted, and efficiently conveys a summary of what is going wrong and to what degree, and what particular action that the user is taking that is causing that to happen. One also imagines an “acknowledge” button that the controller presses to assume the responsibility for further action. Then using this information, the controller, depending on the circumstance, takes some action and updates the memory and circuiting, if warranted, to create an appropriate aversion for certain activities.

Such signaling is implemented very differently in our body. Firstly it is implemented as “pain.” Next, pain is not proportional to the extent of the injury. This sometimes creates “irrational” aversion. More bizarrely, some harmful things are pleasant, while some good things are painful. Thirdly, there is no direct way for the brain to acknowledge the signal, assume responsibility for action, and shut off the pain. Next, and worryingly, depending on the extent to which our brain is distracted (say, watching television), pain’s intensity varies (This last point has been exploited to build “treatments” for pain). Lastly, our brains can’t temporarily order the signals shut.

It is ‘possible’ that people may warm up to the science of warming

25 Jan

In science we believe

Belief in science is likely partly based on scientists’ ability to predict.
As M.S. notes, climate scientists accurately predicted that temperatures were going to rise in the future in late 1980s. Hence, for people who are aware of that (like himself), belief in climate science is greater.

Similarly, unpredictability in weather (as opposed to climate), e.g., snowstorms, which are typically widely covered in media, etc., may lower people’s belief in climate science.

Possibility of showers in the afternoon
Over conversations with lay and not to say lay people, I have observed that sometimes people conflate probability and possibility. In particular, they typically over-weight the probability of a possible event and then use that inflated weight to form the judgment. When I ask them to assign a probability to the event they identify as a possibility, they almost always assign very low probabilities, and their opinion comes to better reflect this realization.

Think of it like this: a possibility for people, once raised (by them or others) is very real. Only consciously thinking about the probability of that possibility allows them to get out of funky thinking.

Something else to note. Politicians use ‘possibility’ as a persuasion tool, e.g., ‘there is a possibility of a terror attack’ etc. This is something I have dealt with before but I leave the task of where to people motivated to pursue the topic.

Delay Shooting the Help

25 Dec

Procrastination

Procrastination, delaying without reason doing something that one has to do, makes little sense. If the voluntary delay also causes anxiety, which in most cases it does, it may be particularly pointless. Yet a lot of people procrastinate at least some of the times. Why?

One can make a case for postponing unpleasant things that are avoidable—in fact why bother doing those things at all—but not things that are unavoidable, or things that a person intends to do.

The desirability of a task influences the decision to procrastinate or not. Rationally, it should not matter but the fact that it does provides a possible toehold into why we procrastinate:

  1. Sometimes problems don’t appear to have a good solution right away and one hopes that a solution would appear over time even though one may not have good reasons to think that such good fortune would strike.
  2. For example, one hopes that the ‘unavoidable’ task would become avoidable? Or we wait till the point ‘it is clear’ that the problem cannot be avoided?

Procrastination is understood exclusively as a problem about ordering and assumes that the net amount of time expended on task remains constant, irrespective of order. Perhaps that is a problematic assumption. Starting things later may just mean that we spend less time on the task than we otherwise would. However, one can easily reframe the issue as one about when to spend the reduced time, than one where we must delay achieving the aim of spending less time on the task.

Shooting the help

At times when people are worried, and when well-intentioned people try to help them, they simply become annoyed, or even mildly angry at them. Why is it that we refuse help, or more puzzlingly become angry or annoyed with people who are trying in good faith to be of help.

When people offer advice, they often use munitions from similar events and incidents they have encountered. This can be a bit galling as it undermines the ‘uniqueness’ of our problems. This ‘feeling’ is further compounded by the fact that many a time people are also over-eager and often too quick to offer solutions without a more patient listening to the individuating data. And then arguably many people while eager to help don’t do much thinking (either through incapacity, lack of motivation, or on the assumption that no thought is needed) about the problem itself, and offer comments that are not particularly insightful. And then many a time all people want is a sympathetic ear or a pat on the back. In other words, sometimes public self-pity is all we want. This is typically so when either the solutions are obvious or non-existent.

Outside of this, it is also the case that high achievers are less likely to seek help, and bristle when offered help, for seeking help forces them to face their own vulnerability.

On Love

25 Nov

Mothers spend a great deal of their time and energy on their kids, especially newborns. They spend far more time thinking, and working to ensure welfare of another human being (their kid), than most humans will spend on any other human being, say their romantic partner or sibling. Add to this that till the child reaches adulthood, often till much later, the relationship is overwhelmingly one-way – with children thinking little about their parent’s welfare. Still, most mothers find the experience, and the work that goes with it, greatly rewarding.

Joy despite this sizable disparity has been explained by cynics, but only poorly. While parents proclaim that children bring joy to their lives, it doesn’t cause parents to invest time and money for often similar joy can be had at much lower rates of work. And financial investments, investments of time, the toll on the mother’s body, and inconveniences like lack of sleep, problems traveling, etc. likely outweigh potential financial benefits, which are likely either way away from most parents’ minds.

In this puzzle there are perhaps a couple of lessons about love – one is that relationships that are overwhelmingly one-way, say in resources like time and money, can still be basis for mutual joy; second perhaps is that spending more time on people we love can make those relationships more fulfilling, and us happier.

Measuring Love

Love and to love are vague conceptually and in minds of people who use these terms. The concepts have evolved such that attempts to define or deliberate these concepts rile sensibilities – offend the notion that love is really the domain of emotion, not thought. Such thoughtlessness has meant that nearly everyone can get away with claiming love, even when the overall impact on the quality of life they have on their loved one is a deeply negative one.

One way to think about how much we love each other is to take into account how much time we spend actively thinking about the welfare of those we love. Such exercise when done without deliberation elicits an emotionally biased line up of instances where we were thoughtful. To move beyond such selective counting, for what matters are averages, with a penalty for egregious negatives, one ought to think carefully and honestly, and perhaps base assessments on the testimony of the loved one. Intentionality ought to play a part in calculations but not as a blanket defense – I truly want your welfare but there is nothing in the record that backs up the claim – but to down-weight some instances of sub-optimal decision making under pressure, and limited resources.

Personal Milestone Campaigners

24 May

We have all read about beautiful women undressing to raise awareness about cruelty to animals (less handsome women just don’t care about the animals), men and women strutting on runways wearing fashionable clothes to raise awareness about global warming, intrepid souls sailing across vast oceans to raise awareness about plastic waste in the sea, people climbing mountains to raise awareness about cancer and global warming, and swarms of marathoners running many times a year to raise awareness about breast cancer and of late, St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital. To this pantheon of heroes, add the ‘human polar bear’, who recently swam in a glacial lake in the Himalayas to raise awareness about global warming [BBC].

I often wonder how many things we would have remained in the dark about had it not been for these heroic men and women, and the camera crews in tow. And then I mull over the contributions they have made to the world. It is work by such people and cameras following them that has led 76% of the people to believe that breast cancer is the single most deadly disease afflicting women. (It is the fourth largest.)

Not only do these men and women raise awareness, but they also raise money. The ‘acts’ they perform are now sponsored by corporations; the boosters have their boosters. And all of these incredible personal achievements, which only incidentally flood trophy cases and Facebook walls, have been accumulated selflessly in service of some worthy cause (applause). It also reasons that the money and hours that these selfless volunteers spend on training, recovering from training, registering for races, and organizing events, pales in comparison to the money they raise.

The Myth of Knowledge

14 Apr

People frequently overestimate how much they know. They also confidently share things they don’t know.

But why?

One reason is social desirability—the motivation to appear knowledgeable in front of others and perhaps ourselves (our ability to fool ourselves deserves closer inspection). Another is that conversations are typically not carried out for any epistemological purpose but for emotional and social purposes. So we make up things because the truth is unimportant, at times even a hindrance. For example, envision a conversation where both parties profess their ignorance. The conversation will be pretty short. Fencing yourself within what you know means you can’t discuss many salient topics.

For two, lay conjecture often suffices when the audience is ignorant. More generally, the propensity to make up something depends on the speaker’s assessment of chances of getting caught, which is a function of the audience’s knowledge, sympathies—towards the speaker or the topic being spoken about, and volubility, which in itself may depend on the status difference, among other things. But as any professor will tell you—students happily make things up even when they are in the presence of experts. So the rate of decline in propensity to make up stuff as the chance of getting caught increases is low, and the absolute level of propensity to make up stuff is high. It is also likely that the confidence with which people typically say such ‘lies’ is an attempt to cover up their ignorance as confidence is taken by others at its face value: as a sign of surety about facts. Thus, never seriously threatened by their ignorance, people build a somewhat more positive assessment of how much they know.

But can it also be that people think that lying about their ignorance is only a minor transgression? Do people have this innate belief (which rarely gets challenged) that somehow when they speak, they will be able to be right; some sort of a ‘God bias’ — that they will be the exception to making sense without knowing?


The modern era of knowledge production has brought its own challenges. First, the rate of production of knowledge has exploded. And as the rate of production of knowledge accelerates and the rate of learning stagnates, relative ignorance increases, which I take is the case. But not only has the rate of knowledge production exploded but so has the complexity. Increasingly substantive discussions about important areas of human activity (public policy more broadly but say health, fiscal policy, etc.) need more sophisticated thought and deeper immersion in the wealth of knowledge that has been produced.


It is often said, often without a whoop of surprise, ‘the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.’ But why would that be? Are limits of knowledge so obscure that they cannot be known by the proverbial (and now the literal) average Joe? In fact, it is easy to deduce one’s ignorance. For example, we are surrounded by phenomena that we can’t describe well, much less explain. To infer our mean level of knowledge, we may want to do the following: recognize the fact that even in areas where we claim expertise we often fall short, hence we must really know very little about the things we don’t spend time learning.

The point about the limits of our knowledge is broader and not there to malign the average Joe. There are real limits to what humans can achieve. Think about the following: If one were to read a book a week for the next 50 years, one would end up reading 2500 books. If the smallness of the number surprises you, then let that be a lesson. The point allows me to segue into the next one—the myth of being well-read.

The Myth of Being Well-Read

Often, people confuse being well-read to mean reading a few bad books poorly. To be well-read, one must satisfy three criteria: 1) have read at the very least ~250 (arbitrary low number) books; 2) a substantial majority, if not all, of which ought to be good—literature or non-fiction; 3) and they ought to have been read well.

The 7-step program for correctly classifying yourself as well-read or not

  • Only a few people (<< 1%) are well-read. Do you think you are in such an elite company?
  • Force yourself to list as many books that you have read in the past year (or life). If that number is less than 10, you may not be well-read. Apply this to specific areas as needed. For example, you may ask yourself whether you are well-read in political science.
  • Alternately, think hard about how many books you bought or checked out from the library last year.
  • If you catch yourself citing one book repeatedly, whenever the topic of books comes up during conversations, you are unlikely to be well-read. In the U.S., it is typically The Catcher in the Rye, though that may be changing — Harry Potter, Dan Brown, Twilight series, etc. may be the new ‘go-to’ books. For a colleague of mine, it is White Noise. In some circles, it may be some Malcolm Gladwell or Thomas Friedman’s book.
  • Relatedly, if Harry Potter, Blink, Atlas Shrugged, Catcher in the Rye, etc., are among your favorite books, it is unlikely that you are well-read.
  • If you are younger than 21 (or typically 25), you couldn’t have read much. There are a few exceptions. They help make the rule.
  • Count the books you own. If you don’t own more than 50 books, you are unlikely to have read much.

An Appetizing Question: Why Don’t We Read Nutrition Labels?

24 Feb

A single wheat tortilla has 18% of the daily value of sodium. I discovered it just recently. The discovery followed my reading an article discussing serious negative consequences of excess sodium for heart health. In turn, the discovery was followed by two others: I realized that I insufficiently assimilated information from food labels in general and that I was curious to know why that was the case.

One way to understand this shift is the following: attention is a limited resource and only allocated to things deemed important. Once the importance was established, attention followed.

However,

  1. Attention is not that limited a resource.
  2. The marginal cost of attention to sodium is small given I generally do look at the calorie content.
  3. Given that I encounter same or similar choice tasks repeatedly—cost per choice, invested once, is close to zero.

What are the reasons behind this seeming conundrum?

In the domain of food, we care about three things: price, taste, and health. Let’s leave out the price for now. This leaves us with taste and health. While making a choice, we recruit ‘relevant’ (more later) information to assess choices in a manner that maximize our utility.

Assume we have a strict preference for taste over health; more narrowly —taste always wins whatever the health information; health information comes into play only when the taste is equivalent. Health information in this scenario is immaterial, and one only needs to focus on information about taste to maximize his/her utility. So, one way to explain my inattention to relevant health information is just that.

Expanding upon the toy example, orderings of things we care about (utilities) dictate the way we seek information, and what information is sought. However, observation tells us that the ordinal structure of utilities is manipulable in the domain of food. For example, we prefer taste strongly but if health information were to be made salient, we would be liable to choose something healthy. One inference which we can draw from such manipulability of order is that the initial preference ordering must not have been strong. But that doesn’t seem right given our strong preference for taste ‘explains’ subdual of information seeking on health.

Rational choice assumes that if information acquisition costs are zero, more information should always be sought, and used in decision making. Rational Choice seems inadequate to the task of explaining, hide and not seek.

Let’s assume we have subconscious and conscious preferences (aside from assuming a subconscious). Subconsciously we greatly prefer taste more than health. Consciously we prefer the reverse. Taste wins if health information is not made salient at the time of purchase. Assuming subconscious controls behavior, health information is deliberately not sought.

Another way to think about underlying preference structure is the following— aside from preferring tastier food, we also prefer feeling good about our decision. Feelings about a decision are evaluative and emerge from whether we chose wisely given information. So one way to include good feelings is to choose healthy food but that sacrifices our preference for taste. Another way this is resolved is ignoring information about health, which is much more easily ignored than information about taste.

Given this, we suppress health information. Interestingly this suppression doesn’t extend to information seeking about health on all fronts but applies only during decision time about a food.

Another interesting psychological thing to note here is that we have negative affect associated with decisions that lead to negative long-term consequences, but we also have ways to prevent this negative affect pathway from being triggered at all. Additionally, the information suppression isn’t a one-time-only but long term because we want to repeatedly ”sin.” This, in turn, means that we firstly somehow ‘know’ that the food is unhealthy and hence not look at the health information, otherwise wouldn’t it just help boost one of the reasons for consuming something tasty, but don’t consciously acknowledge this information.

Yet another way to think about the problem is to assume that we have preferences for health but they are somewhat lower in order of priority. For lower order preferences (here health), information seeking becomes more passive and increasingly depends on how easy it is to acquire information, for example, how prominently it is displayed. Social desirability pressures may also play a larger role in moderating information acquisition when importance is low. For example, in US people frown upon those who look at labels in a supermarket. Thus cowed, people may be less likely to look up information. Though it was always possible to look up the information once home, and now given ease and convenience of anonymous information gathering (Internet), it is likely that social desirability issues are less of a factor (it is likely that social desirability pressures continue to apply when one is alone.) However in cases where other lower order preferences predict same choice information about them is likely highlighted. For example, if a tasty thing were healthy as well, it is likely that one reminds oneself of the health benefits while making the choice.

But why is taste implicitly prioritized over health? One explanation is that preference for taste is evolutionary – the positive immuno-response from eating calorie-rich food is biologically potent. Another is that consequences on health from choosing unhealthy food are long term while gratifications from taste are instantaneous. Given that, it allows us to more readily imagine the consequences of one which in turn is perhaps define one of the key ways we decide our preferences. Lastly, the preference for taste in matters of food has become likelier due to advertising and its constant valorization of taste over everything else.

It is still awe-inducing to see to what degree our brain is lazy and inhibits acquisition of reasonably readily available information.

The above analysis assumed considerations dictating choice at the point of purchase. Once we have bought something, however, another consideration applies — we have invested in x, so now enjoy it. What is the point of reading information now that I have already spent money?

A few straight forward policy proposals emerge, given what we know about how people behave,

  1. Front of package labeling
  2. Prominent, easy to read, comprehend, labeling
  3. Priming aim — be healthy
  4. Priming habit — look for information when buying food
  5. Priming consequences

Link:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14

Note:
The word ‘we’ is in quotes in the title because I do not have data to show how widespread the tendency is.