There are so many cognitive biases that it is difficult to keep track of them. This article provides a chart of 50 well documented cognitive biases. Maybe I'll print out this chart and put it on my refrigerator for easy access . . .
I wore two hats today at a presentation by two of my friends, Dan Rubright and Leslie Peters. I was already planning to attend the “The Hidden Jazz of Groups” presented in the Cortex District of St. Louis. Dan asked me whether I could also shoot some photos of the presentation, which sounded like fun.
Dan and Leslie, who are married to each other, have combined their skillsets into a way that celebrates both individual differences and the magic of collaboration. Dan, who is both an exquisite musician and an educator, began the session by giving his insight into the process of creating jazz, and then moved on to discuss the wide variety of creating and combining sounds to create music. Leslie, an author and speaker on group dynamics, then joined in. It was a smart and unintimidating way to broach the topic of efficient group dynamics. These are a few of my photos from the presentation.
If you click on the video, you'll hear Dan’s impromptu performance of some of his music. His style is truly his own. I’m always delighted by the amount of music he can coax out of a single guitar.
Today, I was thinking about Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I think of this book at least several times each week. It's got to be one of the most important books I have ever read, in that it identifies numerous ways in which people are unwittingly mislead by mental heuristics, i.e., by their intuitions and shortcuts. You might be a bigger threat to yourself than any outsider.
The solution to Kahneman's heuristics is seemingly that we should
be more careful or that we should train ourselves so that we are not mislead by these heuristics. Kahneman concludes, unfortunately, that heuristics are too strong to recognize in real time. He characterizes them to be like optical illusions. When we look at them over and over we will be fooled over and over.
Here is one of my favorite optical illusions: The Ames Window. My mind is intransigent. I can't unsee this illusion even though I know exactly what is going on.
Many (e.g., I've heard interviews by Sam Harris and Shane Parrish) have suggested to Kahneman that since we know about these systematic ways in which the mind runs off the rails, we can make adjustments. Kahneman will have none of it. "“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.” Kahneman writes further: "Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”
Or consider that Kahneman and Richard Nisbett seem to disagree on whether we can train out our systematic mistakes, yet this article ("The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your BrainScience suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?") suggests that we seem to be more easily trainable with regard to "easy problems."
This is nonetheless, discouraging, right? Maybe that's why it is a good idea to work with groups of people. Maybe someone else will catch your mistakes. And if not, maybe you can catch your mistakes in a post-mortem and then add your mistakes on your check list to help you for the next time the situation arises.
The impeachment hearings offer daily fodder to those who struggle to understand how the human mind works. Many people keep expressing frustration about the lies being told by the politicians. That raises the question: Did the brain evolve as a truth-seeking organ? What if the brain's main function is survival, not truth? What if the brain's main function centers on the "Four F's": Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting and Reproduction? What if Truth is only a fragile, occasional, happenstance by-product of the brain's main evolved function?
That brought this Scientific American article front and center: "Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are? Do we perceive reality as it is?" Here's an excerpt:
One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory . . . is garnering attention . . . Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.
Lindsey Graham is now taking the position that the Impeachment is improper because not actual crimes were committed. The Democrats then carted out Graham's 1999 video where he said the opposite. Every human being watching this drama unfold knows all of the following with a certainty:
How is it possible for Graham to justify these diametrically opposite positions? The function of the human brain is well beyond my understanding, of course. At this time, I would simply point out that one's own farts smell OK, whereas the farts of others are unpleasant. There's actually some science on why our own farts smell OK. I would simply extrapolate: Both our farts and our own dysfunctional thoughts get free passes. Why? Because they are our farts and our thoughts, not those of others. And where our entire tribe farts, that's OK too, because it's our tribe and not some other tribe. Our crappy thoughts constitute our theories, meaning that the confirmation bias kicks in like a powerful optical illusion to help us ignore conflicting evidence.
Hypocrisy is an ancient problem, of course. It goes back at least to biblical times:
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; ... You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.
This hypocrisy continues to modern times:Morality is difficult. As [psychologist Johnathan] Haidt writes on his website, "It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups. . . . Morality binds and blinds. The metaphor [Haidt] uses to describe this idea is that we are 90 percent chimp 10 percent bee. That is to say, though we are inherently selfish, human nature is also about being what he terms "groupish."
The hypocrisy we are witnessing might be a little less distressing to the extent that we can accept the fact that the brain did not evolve for truth, but rather for assimilating resources to assist survival, utilizing the power of one's tribe whenever useful. If we can wrap our heads around this scary fact that the brain is much more geared for social power than truth, the impeachment hearings are nothing extraordinary. These hearings are merely more episodes of watching people gathered in tribes fighting for evolutionary fitness. That said, this is an enormous and distressing price to pay in exchange for understanding. But maybe it's . . . . true. Maybe those moments where human minds transcend daily survival pressures to seek consistent principled truth are extraordinarily precious moments that need to be noted and celebrated. Maybe we will never have a society based on truthful principles unless we work hard together. Nietzsche pointed that being able to see truthfully is a moral issue. He wrote that one is truthful only to the degree that one is courageous. Maybe those fragility of those moments where people work hard and self-critically to embrace truth should remind us to appreciate what we have when politicians show the moral courage to act on principle.
The following excerpt is from an article at Gizmodo: "Alcohol Is Killing More Americans Than Ever."
More and more Americans are drinking themselves to death. A new study this week finds there were around 72,000 alcohol-related deaths among people over the age of 16 in 2017—more than double the number of similar deaths recorded two decades earlier.
When an airplane crashes, killing 200 people, we get upset and we demand to know how airplanes can be made more safe. When the equivalent of 360 airplanes filled with people die of alcohol use each year, we shrug. We shrug even though every one of these alcohol deaths affects many other people, including members of the dead person's immediate family. We shrug even though for each death, there are many living alcoholics out there destroying precious relationships they used to have with their loved ones.The number of alcohol‐related deaths per year among people aged 16+ doubled from 35,914 to 72,558, and the rate increased 50.9% from 16.9 to 25.5 per 100,000. Nearly 1 million alcohol‐related deaths (944,880) were recorded between 1999 and 2017. In 2017, 2.6% of roughly 2.8 million deaths in the United States involved alcohol. Nearly half of alcohol‐related deaths resulted from liver disease (30.7%; 22,245) or overdoses on alcohol alone or with other drugs (17.9%; 12,954). . . . The largest annual increase occurred among Non-Hispanic White females. Rates of acute alcohol‐related deaths increased more for people aged 55 to 64, but rates of chronic alcohol‐related deaths, which accounted for the majority of alcohol‐related deaths, increased more for younger adults aged 25 to 34