Vedantam on the Lear Pathology

In a series of experiments, the psychologist found that people tend to believe flattery directed at them, even though they recognize such praise as fake when directed at a third party. Vonk said the error arises because people generally believe they are better than others recognize. When someone says nice things about us, this assessment "fits better" with our intuitive sense of ourselves, making flattery feel more accurate than criticism.

the behaviour file

Basketball turns out to be a surprisingly useful subject for studying other elements of human behavior and decision making. When psychologists once asked sports fans to visualize how a particular team might win a game, the volunteers became far more likely to later believe that the team would win -- and to bet money on it. Essentially, psychologist Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University said, focusing on some part of a conundrum makes it much more difficult for people to keep in mind how much they do not know about all the other variables involved.

"Focusing on one potential outcome leads to the overestimation of the probability that this focal outcome will occur," Gibson and his colleagues concluded. "This inflated probability estimate . . . leads to a greater willingness to gamble."

Gibson has also found that gambling is one domain in which it may be wiser to have a pessimistic personality rather than an optimistic personality. Gamblers tend to be optimists in that they inherently believe good things are likely to happen to them. When a pessimist wins a bet, he is likely to walk away with his winnings because he can't believe that his lucky streak will continue.

By contrast, Gibson found in one series of experiments, optimists were far more likely to throw good money after bad because they believed that, sooner or later, things would break their way.

Morality in the Future

I am fascinated by the question of how our morality will change in the future. It's relevant to the issue we have been discussing of whether we are truly making moral progress or not. So long as we view the question from a perspective where we assume that we are at the apex of the moral pyramid, it is easy to judge past societies from our lofty position and perceive their inadequacies. But if we imagine ourselves as being judged harshly by the society of the future, there is less self-satisfaction and ego boosting involved in making a case for true moral progress, hence less chance for bias. (In fact, when people make claims about how future society will judge the world of today, they almost always assume that their own personal moral views will become universal, so this hypothetical judgment merely mirrors their own criticism of contemporary society.)

designing a cow

Today, I feel like doing a plant – no, an animal. Yes, today, I am going to make an animal. And it will be a masterpiece. I shall call it the.... No wait! Maybe I should think of the name later. Yes, you should always name your pieces after you have completed them. Better that way.

OK then. An animal it is. More specifically, a vertebrate. Large body, four legs, one tail, one head, usual stuff on the head – i.e., let’s just follow the standard animalia rubric. Nothing exciting there. Not yet anyway. So let’s give it an armored tail, with poisonous tendrils and a stink that can kill. Oooh, I like that – but maybe it’s too much. Why such a fancy tail? Maybe the tendrils can come out of its nostrils (note to self: Have I designed nostrils yet?). And the stink can come from the body itself.

The Unthinkable

In October, 2005, a radiation sensor at the Port of Colombo, in Sri Lanka, signalled that the contents of an outbound shipping container included radioactive material. The port’s surveillance system, installed with funds from the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Energy, wasn’t yet in place, so the container was loaded and sent to sea before it could be identified. After American and Sri Lankan inspectors hurriedly checked camera images at the port, they concluded that the suspect crate might be on any one of five ships—two of which were steaming toward New York.

Sri Lanka is a locus of guerrilla war and arms smuggling. It is not far from Pakistan, which possesses nuclear arms, is a haven for Al Qaeda, and has a poor record of nuclear security. The radiation-emitting container presented at least the theoretical danger of a “pariah ship,” Vayl Oxford, the director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said. It seemed plausible, if unlikely, that Al Qaeda or rogue Pakistani generals might load a bomb onto a cargo vessel. Within days, American satellites located the five suspect ships and intelligence analysts scrutinized their manifests; a team at the National Security Council took charge. One ship, it learned, was bound for Canada, and another for Hamburg, Germany. The White House decided to call in its atomic-bomb squad, known as NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team—scientists who are trained to search for nuclear weapons. One team flew to Canada and a second to Europe, where it intercepted one of the ships at sea before it could reach Hamburg. They found nothing.

Alcholism and genes

prisons and mental institutions fact

Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68

Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75

Percentage today who are in prisons: 97

Evolutionary morality

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

The Nonobvious Social Psychology of Happiness

Although the idea of the hedonic treadmill has not been supported in all of its particulars (see Diener & Lucas, 2004), it still provides a fundamental insight – over time good things and bad things usually lose their power to strongly affect us. Although there are some extreme conditions that can lower our well-being, many of the good and bad events provide only short boosts and downdrafts. Receiving a raise at work, buying a new car, or winning an award are not usually the road to long-term happiness. Instead, fresh involvement in activities, relationships, and goals can be a continuous source of happiness. In this sense, the euphemism, “Happiness is a process, not a place,” seems to be accurate. This does not mean that our circumstances have no influence whatsoever on our happiness; they do. Rather it means that we should not rely on circumstances alone to give us long-term feelings of well-being. Continued involvement in new goals, meaningful social interactions, and interesting activities is required to maintain a flourishing sense of happiness (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, in press).

Duels

It emerged as an institution during the Italian Renaissance, when various aristocrats sought, by affecting an exaggerated sense of honor, to establish themselves as a social, as well as a military, class. ... abstract notions of honor ... enabled a man of the upper class to live a more noble life. Such a man would always keep his word, always rush to the aid of a comrade or a woman in distress, and never allow an insult or injury to himself or his family to go unavenged. ... From Italy, the duel of honor spread to France and then the rest of Europe. ... Although English gentlemen did not duel with the fervor of their French counterparts, duelling remained a good career move in Britain into the early nineteenth century. ...

The gentry, however, took honor so seriously that just about every offense became an offense against honor. Two Englishmen duelled because their dogs had fought. Two Italian gentlemen fell out over the respective merits of Tasso and Ariosto, an argument that ended when one combatant, mortally wounded, admitted that he had not read the poet he was championing. And Byron's great-uncle William, the fifth Baron Byron, killed a man after disagreeing about whose property furnished more game. ... Courtiers ... duelled to impress a princess, eliminate a rival, or curry favor with a higher-up. Instead of arguments leading to a duel, the duel became a reason to have an argument.

Even today, men argue to show their dominance, and their willingness and ability to resist domination. That strong feeling "but I'm right" may really be "I'll be damned if I let him win."

Evolution of laughter

The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Washington State University, discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling.

He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

the value of information

Abstract
Economic models typically allow for “free disposal” or “reversibility” of information, which implies non-negative value. Building on previous research on the “curse of knowledge” we explore situations where this might not be so. In three experiments, we document situations in which participants place positive value on information in attempting to predict the performance of uninformed others, even when acquiring that information hurts their performance and earnings. In the first experiment, a majority of participants choose to hire informed – rather than uninformed – agents, leading to lower earnings. In the second experiment, a significant number of participants pay for information – the solution to a puzzle – that hurts their ability to predict how many others will solve the puzzle. In the third experiment, we find that the effect is reduced with experience and feedback on the actual performance to be predicted. We discuss implications of our results for the role of information and informed decision making in economic situations.

people clumping

There is an old book by Thomas Shelling from 1978, entitled Micromotives and Macrobehavior. In it he describes a computer model to explain segregated neighbourhoods, but it also can describe self-sustaining biased communities. In the model, every agent is grey or black. They prefer their own colour, but not strongly - they will move only if 45% of their neighbours are of a different colour. Very quickly, however (within "two moves" in the original computer model) the result is a completely segregated society. More intriguingly, he finds that
increased tolerance does not necessarily make a stable mixed result more likely.
Now 'colour' can stand in for many things - race, religion, politics, social class, and biases/opinions. That last category is where it become relevant for us. Modeling 'neighbours' as the people you choose to interact with, this shows how a slight preference for avoiding disagreement ("I don't want the majority of my friends to be of opposite political views") can result in the clumping together of groups with similar biases.
And once the groups are formed, social factors then act to reinforce the biases of the agents - when all those you interact with have similar biases, it becomes very unlikely you will change your mind. Even if you decide to investigate something impartially, all those you know will be pulling in the same direction, meaning that you are unlikely to make a clean break. And stronger biases then feed into the clumping guaranteeing the stability of the segregation.
But that's just standard social biases. The new piece in this model is that simply reducing biases (or at least reducing public announcement of biases, since those cause the group clumping) may not reduce the clumping at all. They may need to nearly vanish before that happens. Another relevant new point in the model is that individuals did not want or seek out the biased 'mono-culture' they ended up with - it was just the sum of their interactions.
In summary:1) Segregated biased groups can arise from small individual biases2) Thus we shouldn't conclude from the overall situation that the individual biases are strong3) Once segregated, the biases are reinforced4) The overall situation is not one that the individuals desired5) Just reducing individual biases may not help
So how to deal with a situation where we suspect this is happening? The approach pioneered by this blog - trying to reduce individual biases through discussion and analysis - probably won't work in this case. Weak market incentives won't work either. It seems we need either institutionalised correction or strong market incentives to reduce the bias.
Case studies or examples of situations like this would be interesting. Political views seem the most obvious biases to model as above, but there should be lots of more subtle examples.
NB: There might be a different approach - change the definition of 'neighbours' so that microbiases are no longer amplified. If we no longer have 'the neighbours of my neighbours are more likely to be neighbours of mine', then the assumptions break down. The internet was helping to do this, but social networking sites are moving the other way.

fromf overcoming bias

Rats turn backs on pink elephants

A study of alcohol-dependent animals shows that a newly discovered compound that blocks chemical signals active during the brain’s response to stress effectively stops excessive drinking and prevents relapse.
The new, synthetic compound, known as MTIP, also muted the anxiety that typically develops in rats experiencing the equivalent of a hangover. Such stress is linked with higher levels of a brain chemical called corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), which is also thought to trigger relapse in rats that have developed a long-term dependency on alcohol

New compound prevents alcoholic behavior, relapse in rats

Inventions 1900-2050

Reputation trading, helio-berylium, virtual protest marches...

Kandel on Neuro-cognitive optimisms...

Beck tested Freud’s idea by comparing the dreams of depressed patients with those of patients who were not depressed. He found that depressed patients exhibited not more, but less hostility than other patients. In the course of carrying out this study and listening carefully to his patients, Beck found that rather than expressing hostility, depressed people express a systematic negative bias in the way they think about life. They almost invariably have unrealistically high expectations of themselves, overreact dramatically to any disappointment, put themselves down whenever possible, and are pessimistic about their future.

futrures markets in love

Consider, for example, our level of interest and attachment in romantic and business
relationships. Early in such relationships we tend to over-estimate how much we like our
partners, and the chance we will remain together (Tennov, 1979). Late in such relationships,
however, we tend to under-estimate these things. Both of these self-deceptions follow our
interests; early on we want to convince others to invest in us, while later on we want them
to think we will leave if not treated fairly.

Betting on consciousness

Hanson on Lies

Sciam on the Jesus Family Tomb

eclipse fotos

via kottke