Preparing for temptation by setting our own limits

When it comes to temptations, we often fail. I'm referring to over-eating, over-drinking, procrastinating, losing one's temper, speaking out in ignorance, and many other types of temptations--there are certainly hundreds of them. Maybe we don't immediately fail, but eventually, when we are faced with an easy opportunities to fail, we tend to succumb. Removing the opportunity ahead of time tends to remove much of the temptation. That is why a good strategy for avoiding obesity is to avoid bringing sugary/fatty/salty food into the house in the first place. This strategy of not allowing such food into the house is much more effective than bringing junk food into the house, then trying to ignore its easy accessibility and trying to just say no. Richard Thaler is known as the “Father of Behavioral Economics.” At Edge.org, Thaler warns that we are not better off to have more alternatives to choose from. His reason runs parallel to the reasoning of Barry Schwartz, who warned of the “paradox of choice.” According to Thaler, “there are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.” Thaler mentions the example of Odysseus, who instructed his crew to tie him to the mast and the decision of Cortés to burn his ships upon arriving in Mexico, thus removing retreat as an option. He then offers this general principle:

Many of society's thorniest problems, from climate change to Middle East peace could be solved if the relevant parties could only find a way to commit themselves to some future course of action.

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Of course I knew how things would turn out back then: The Illusion of Inevitability

In his new book, Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman notes that human beings constantly claim that they understood the past much better than they actually did at the time. Referring to Nissam Taleb's concept of “narrative fallacy,” Kahneman details how we employ flawed stories from the past to shape our current views of the world. This is not a good thing (though it often feels good while we engage in over-confident reasoning, as pointed out by Robert Burton); the narrative fallacy is a pernicious problem often a dangerous one.

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories of people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on countless events that failed to happen. Any recent civilian event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing that they are true.
[Page 199]. Human beings strive to create and embrace simple stories that give simple causal accounts based upon general propensities and personality traits. The “halo effect” contributes to this coherence--we tend to assign a generalized valence to other humans, and to assume that those people always act in accordance with our generalized positive or negative characterization of them. In this world, handsome people are also smart, moral and athletic. The halo effect keeps our narratives simple and it leaves little room for true statements such as the following shocker: “Hitler loved dogs and little children.” Our simplistic stories don’t leave room for outlier qualities. We resist the fact that obtuse people are sometimes correct and that the people we admire sometimes act foolishly.

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Excellence honed by self-criticism: the insights of Daniel Kahneman

"Think of, and look at, your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost." - Samuel Butler "The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month." - Fyodor Dostoevsky At Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis celebrates the distinguished career of Daniel Kahneman, whose most recent book, Thinking: Fast and Slow, comes to mind at least several times every day, ever since I started reading it (I've posted several times on the book already, and it is so filled with challenging and often counter-intuitive observations that I will likely mention it dozens more times. Here's one snippet from Lewis' article. The topic is the unrelenting intensity of Kahneman's self-criticism, a technique Kahneman employs to a borderline-sadistic extent, though it has admittedly served him well:

He was working on a book, he said. It would be both intellectual memoir and an attempt to teach people how to think. As he was the world’s leading authority on his subject, and a lot of people would pay hard cash to learn how to think, this sounded promising enough to me. He disagreed: he was certain his book would end in miserable failure. He wasn’t even sure that he should be writing a book, and it was probably just a vanity project for a washed-up old man, an unfinished task he would use to convince himself that he still had something to do, right up until the moment he died. Twenty minutes into meeting the world’s most distinguished living psychologist I found myself in the strange position of trying to buck up his spirits. But there was no point: his spirits did not want bucking up. Having spent maybe 15 minutes discussing just how bad his book was going to be, we moved on to a more depressing subject. He was working, equally unhappily, on a paper about human intuition—when people should trust their gut and when they should not—with a fellow scholar of human decision-making named Gary Klein. Klein, as it happened, was the leader of a school of thought that stressed the power of human intuition, and disagreed with the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman said that he did this as often as he could: seek out people who had attacked or criticized him and persuade them to collaborate with him. He not only tortured himself, in other words, but invited his enemies to help him to do it. “Most people after they win the Nobel Prize just want to go play golf,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton and a disciple of Amos Tversky’s. “Danny’s busy trying to disprove his own theories that led to the prize. It’s beautiful, really.” . . .
Now, if you think the above is extreme, read on. If only I would be so determined to see my own thought-process like an outsider sees it, to this extent:
Then, after I left him, he sat down and reviewed his own work. The mere fact that he had abandoned it probably raised the likelihood that he would now embrace it: after all, finding merit in the thing would now prove him wrong, and he seemed to take pleasure in doing that. Sure enough, when he looked at his manuscript his feelings about it changed again. That’s when he did the thing that I find not just peculiar and unusual but possibly unique in the history of human literary suffering. He called a young psychologist he knew well and asked him to find four experts in the field of judgment and decision-making, and offer them $2,000 each to read his book and tell him if he should quit writing it. “I wanted to know, basically, whether it would destroy my reputation,” he says. He wanted his reviewers to remain anonymous, so they might trash his book without fear of retribution. The endlessly self-questioning author was now paying people to write nasty reviews of his work. The reviews came in, but they were glowing. “By this time it got so ridiculous to quit again,” he says, “I just finished it.”
I urge you to visit Lewis' fine article. More importantly, if you haven't done so yet, I urge you to invest the time to read Thinking, Fast and Slow.. Michael Lewis is spot on when he describes Kahneman's work and persona (I haven't met Kahneman, but his gentle manner and his stunning ability to get to the point and then to offer real-world applications, shine through, chapter after chapter. I've rarely read a book so bursting with useful ideas for understanding one's self and others, for learning to really understand those things we think we are certain about. And Kahneman's book is far more than this too--it is a book with ideas for helping you to avoid many types of cognitive traps that would cost you dearly. It is a book for all of those who are students of the human mind, even on their off-hours.

Continue ReadingExcellence honed by self-criticism: the insights of Daniel Kahneman

On the state of our dysfunctional political communications

On his most recent show, Bill Moyers discusses the heightened polarization in the political discourse with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who runs the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, including the sites FactCheck.org (which monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players) and FlackCheck.org (which tracks patterns of political deception). This is a high-quality discussion well worth watching. The starting point for the discussion was the defeat of Senator Lugar, who was accused by his more conservative opponent of working with Barack Obama to dismantle the world's stocks of aging nuclear weapons to make sure that they don't fall into the wrong hands. Cooperating with the enemy (in this case, a member of the opposing political party) has become a mortal sin. The result is, politically speaking, we cannot any longer talk with each other. Jamieson spreads the blame in many directions; this is not your typical polarized pundit who aims her arrows only at the other party. For instance, Factcheck.org has challenged Barack Obama's Life of Julia illustration as being based on "some false or dubious assumptions." According to Jamieson, the following questions should be the focus of our budget disputes and the upcoming election: "How do we afford this level of government, if we want to keep it? Do we want to keep it? How are we going to pay for it? If we're going to cut, where are we going to cut?" The campaigns of Obama and Romney are mostly devoid of economic facts, "depriving us of the common ground we need." She explains that if this trend continues, massive damage will be done to this country. What do you do to force these issues? The media needs to take charge: These questions regarding spending priorities need to be repeated endlessly at debates until they are actually answered. (min 12). Check out the simple questions that need to be asked, but usually aren't, and are never answered in political debates (last half of min 12):

That's what we need to do in the presidential debates. We're going to have them. When they don't answer the question, the next person up should forgo his or her question and ask the question again. And if the entire debate simply has to ask the question then let's ask, what about Simpson-Bowles don't you like, Mr. President? You know, Governor Romney? What about it do you like? Are you ready to advance-- to say that we should move the Social Security age to 70 in some kind of a phased-in structure?

Should we be doing means testing in some ways? What are your alternatives? When you say you're going to reform the tax code, is that an excuse for saying you're going to do nothing? How much money can you get out of the reforms that you were offering? And what are you going to eliminate and what are you going to cut? Right now we're playing this game. Right now you've got the Ryan budget proposal.

BILL MOYERS: Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Uh-huh. And to his credit, there is a proposal there. The first thing the Democrats did a response was to say, "Ha, we're going to assume he's cutting everything across the board." So they started pushing on the assumption that this good thing is going to be cut. This good thing, this good thing by “X” percent.

Congressman Ryan responds, "No, I'm going to get rid of some things entirely, and I'm going to preserve some things entirely. And I'm going to cut some things." That's actually the beginning of a productive exchange. Now the question is what for both sides? And let's get the public on board to accept that there's some things we take for granted now we're not going to have. There's some costs we're not now paying that we're going to have to pay. It's necessary to preserve our country.

Jamieson came to this discussion with ideas for improving our deplorable situation. I very much like this one:

I would like to see a proposal that Harvard floated a number of years ago, that we devote Sunday nights, from the beginning of the general election period through the election, to intensive discussions with presidential candidates about the serious issues of the day. I think you'd find an attentive audience for that. And I think the person who's elected would find that he was better able to govern if the public had had that opportunity. The public isn't stupid. The public actually is smart in some important ways.

Moyers asked whether our political system is close to collapsing "of its own absurdity." Jamieson doesn't mince her words (min 16):

We're close right now to having a campaign run on attack and irrelevant arguments that are highly deceptive and, as a result, make it extremely difficult to solve the problems facing the country, which is what all the concern about money and politics is well justified and why we ought to worry about trying to vigilantly hold the super PACs and the third-party advertisers accountable.

Now, what are the consequences of high level of attack? You don't have a reason to vote for someone. You're only being told why to vote against. Hence, no projection of what the alternatives are and no understanding of the trade-offs in government . . . We're going to have high level of attack; hence, no relevance to governance and votes against. And that we're going to have high level of deception; hence, people who feel betrayed once they see actual governance or who vote against a candidate they might otherwise support.

The problem with modern political advertising is not framed properly by the use of the phrase "negative advertising":

I don't like to use the word "negative" because it conflates legitimate and illegitimate attack and because negative to most people means duplicitous. [The big problem occurs] when there's a differential in spending and a high level of deception tied to a high level attack because now you have the worst possible consequences.

Continue ReadingOn the state of our dysfunctional political communications

The Onion: Anxiety-Ridden man is ashamed of everything he does

Here's the report from The Onion, and here's an excerpt:

"Tim's the kind of guy who is forever second-guessing his behavior, as if the people in his life are constantly scrutinizing every single move he makes, and he's completely correct about that—we are," said Paula Ramirez, a coworker who admitted she can barely look at Gibula without a medley of his most embarrassing moments replaying in her head. "Anytime he's been petrified at the thought of social interaction or obsessively reexamined something he's said, his fears have been entirely reasonable, given our nonstop monitoring of his behavior."

Continue ReadingThe Onion: Anxiety-Ridden man is ashamed of everything he does