Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Hello again, hypothetical newborn baby!  I’m here to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn the hard way.  Here are all fourteen lessons in one easy link. 

Let’s start off by noting that at this point in your life your parents, your crib, your blanket . . . and me, of course are your entire universe. That’s all you’ve got in front of you, yet you are feeling like there is nothing else that could be worthwhile and there is nothing at all outside of your bedroom door.

Let me tell you about my situation. My toe is hurting.  Nothing major, but it’s red and throbbing. When I think about my hurting toe, that thought gets quite big in my consciousness. It almost seems like my throbbing toe is the only thing in the universe.

Here’s another example: When I’m thinking about a lawsuit while walking to court through the downtown area, I’m barely aware of anything other than what I’m going to tell the judge when I arrive. I’m not noticing any other people or any cars or that new restaurant going up even though those thing are right in front of me as I walk. Isn’t it weird how our ability to attend to things is so incredibly limited?

Using a technique called conversation shadowing, psychologists Broadbent and Treisman demonstrated that one’s ability to absorb multiple simultaneous conversations is severely limited. Attention is bottlenecked at the site of working memory  during perception. In 1956, George Miller pointed, “[T]he span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process and remember.” George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information.” Given that humans have such tiny attentional windows, it is surprising the extent to which we take it for granted that we share the same world. The real world is laughingly beyond our capacity to fathom without rampant simplification. Just because we can say the phrase “the world” doesn’t mean we can comprehend more than a trillionth of it at any particular moment.

This is one of the downsides to having a human body. We are incredibly limited in what we can attend to at each moment. That’s Part One of a two-part whammy that affects us human animals every hour of every day. This attentional limitation in attention interacts with an equally important phenomenon that I have long thought of as the “illusion of fullness.” I’m referring to this: it seems like whatever we are currently seeing or pondering, it’s somehow enough for us to feel well-informed when the stream of information we are getting is almost nothing at all.

Morgan House wrote the following in “Ideas that Changed my Life”:

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.

It’s like we see the world through fish-eye lenses. The things that are in front of us look very big, indeed. Yet the things that are not directly in front of us are barely visible or not visible at all. Our perceptual machinery make us (and I’m writing this in a non-judgmental way) extremely self-centered. We are condemned to make severely overconfident and skewed generalizations and to engage in a lifelong adventure of sense-making based on not-nearly-enough awareness about the billion ring circus into which we have been plopped. Each of us is only one out of 8 billion people. You are almost nothing at all in the scheme of things and you are experiencing only the tiniest speck of what is going on, yet it feels like you are sitting in the front row VIP seat to the most important event in the universe.

It takes conscious effort to know what is happening outside of ourselves. This makes it easy to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own story, justifying our routine of putting half of our conscious horsepower to work doing PR, in-person or on Facebook, tooting to everyone who will listen that we are saving the planet by switching to LED bulbs or whatever.

Skip this paragraph if want to continue being the hero of your own story. Human cognitive machinery massively distorts our sense of morality. With very little effort, we can cause any troublesome moral issue to vanish simply by not paying attention to it. In many cases we develop (sometimes consciously at first) deeply ingrained habits of not paying attention to certain aspects of the world, making our immorality conveniently unconscious. Here’s a common habit among people who are financially comfortable: Not-thinking that on here on our planet, a child starves to death every 5 seconds. If you have habituated yourself to not-think about this horrible and undeniable fact, it is quite easy to blow a large sums of money in clear conscience on things like haircuts for your poodle, vacations in far-flung places and steady streams of meals at high-priced restaurants. If this troublesome thought ever bubbles up into consciousness, we scrub away all traces of inchoate guilt by reminding ourselves that everyone else we know is behaves much like us and then we run off to purchase some new porch furniture for our vacation home, thus pushing thoughts of child starvation off the tiny stage of attention. If by some chance we experience the prickly thought we are hypocritical, immoral and selfish because we purposely don’t think about starving children, we can take care of that troublesome thought too by thinking about something else. We can fix most of our most disturbing thoughts merely by thinking about something else.

It can be fun to meet new people. When that happens, I like to trade stories to get to know each other. While I’m doing this, wouldn’t it be inconvenient to think about the skeletons in my closet? Sometimes I imagine the worst ten moments in my life where I was badly, cringe-worthily, behaved. Sometimes by act and sometimes by omission. I have shit like that in my past and so do you! I haven’t killed anyone, but here’s the point: If those ten moments had been captured by video and played for any person I was in the process of meeting, they would run away fast and have nothing to do with me. Luckily, thanks to our limited ability to attend to things, the problem of my spotted past can be solved by not thinking of those embarrassing things. Thank you, limited attention (and it’s cousin, fading memory)!

Let’s return to the illusion of fullness. Our numerous massive perceptual and memory gaps are usually invisible. At any given moment, it’s difficult to think of what might be “missing” from our perception of the world. The answer, of course, is more than we could possibly imagine,

Even after the death of a close friend, one’s loss is quickly obscured by the deceptive “fullness” of one’s ongoing perceptions. After the death of an extremely close friend, an unbroken stream of thing-after-thing starts filling our perceptual field with new streams of people, places, things and ideas, and these things hide the absence of the person who just died. It seems that there should be some obvious visual, auditory or tactile “gap,” some obvious and incessant break in sensory “fullness” when a newly deceased close friend no longer physically walks and talks on this planet. It would seem that every time we open our eyes, we would see a blank outline of where that person would have been, something like a big missing puzzle piece. After the death of a loved one, however, the rest of this world quickly moves in like thick fluid. Or maybe that’s what ghosts are (for people who claim to see ghosts) moving outlines of missing people. Unrelated note: As more and more people obtained phones with cameras, the number of ghost-sighting has fallen off dramatically.

We almost always assume that we are looking at a full picture of what is out there. While making decisions, then, we often overlook the things we don’t see, which can be have terrible consequences.  At other times, this illusion of fullness might be for our own good. If we were constantly aware that we were only seeing one speck of a huge world, we might goad ourselves to learn more and more to the point of insanity in an attempt to learn about more things than our brains could possibly process. We would no longer be able to wistfully sing out what a wonderful place the world is because we would know that we were missing out on almost everything.

I thought about this illusion of “Fullness” and our happy willingness to make decisions even when we are woefully ill-informed while I was reading Daniel Kahneman’s description of a related concept, What-you-see-is-all-there-is (“WYSIATI”), in his extraordinary book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman starts his book by pointing out that human animals have two often-conflicting systems for making decisions. System 1 is quick, dirty and automatic. System 2 must be engaged consciously, and with some effort:]

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demanded, including complex computations. The operations of system 2 are often associated with subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration … When we think of ourselves we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.… You will be invited to think of the two systems as agents with their individual abilities, limitations and functions… The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away.… System 2 has some ability to change the way System 1 works, by programming the normally automatic functions of attention and memory.

Pages 20-24.

WYSIATI is a function of “System I,” and it encourages us to jump to conclusions based on that which is in front of us.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking, and comes up so often in Kahneman’s book, that I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

Page 86. We run and gun based on the evidence that we DO know, rarely questioning the things that we don’t yet know. In fact, the less we know, the better, because in the absence of detailed knowledge, we are better able to construct a story that supports our beliefs:

Participants [of a psychological study] who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments of those who saw both sides. This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they managed to construct from available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.

(Page 87). WYSIATI occurs because “associative memory quickly and automatically constructs the best possible story from the information available.” We are not good at weighing quality and quantity of evidence. Rather, we tend to look for a coherent story.” (Page 186). The combination of WYSIATI and associative coherence [we seek out facts that together tend to evoke an explanation in the form of a coherent story] tends to make us believe in stories we spin for ourselves.” (Page 75, 154).

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Page 201.

WYSIATI gives us the freedom to easily make friends, enemies and gods:

Our minds are always eager to identify agents, assigning them personality traits and specific intentions.

Page 77.

WYSIATI also gives rise to the “focusing illusion,”: “Nothing In Life Is As Important As You Think It Is, While You Are Thinking About It.”

All we need to be confident that we are correct are a few facts and a story. For example, WYSIATI explains many cognitive biases including overconfidence (“we often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing–what we see is all there is”), framing effects (different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions”), and “base rate neglect” (our judgments regarding probability are often warped by vivid exemplars). (Page 87.)

Gappy information is no problem at all. Unless a message is rejected as a lie, “it will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability. The gist of the message is the story, which is based on whatever information is available, even if the quantity of the information is slight and its quality is poor. WYSIATI.” (Page 127). to come full circle, Kahneman also concurs that, thanks to WYSIATI, we are fearless in our profound ignorance:

A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.

Page 239.

Speaking of over-confidence, Robert Burton, indicates that a feeling of certitude silently substitutes for careful self-critical inquiry. Also relevant to the above is the Dunning-Kruger effect (and see here):

[T]he unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes

It appears that WYSIATI makes us all victims to Dunning-Kruger. Perhaps this gives rise to the best argument for why “no man is an island,” and we need each other to periodically remind and challenge each other the world is always bigger and more complex than we could ever imagine.

In summary, go hither and vigorously explore your tiny corner of Planet Earth.