More on the complexity of happiness: New TED lecture by Daniel Kahneman

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate who has spent his long life making dozens of startling discoveries regarding judgment and decision-making. More recently, he has done considerable work in hedonic psychology. He recently appeared at TED to discuss the "The riddle of experience vs. memory." [caption id="attachment_11875" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Nruboc at Dreamstime.com (with permission)"]Image by Nruboc at Dreamstime.com (with permission)[/caption] There is no person better qualified than Kahneman to describe how the human psyche is rife with "cognitive traps." In this TED talk Kahneman explains that these traps "make it difficult to think about happiness." One foundational problem is that humans tend to resist admitting complexity; happiness is a monolithic term for most of us. Kahneman states, however, that "happiness is no longer a useful word, in that it applies to many things. We need to completely give up the simple word "happiness" in order to effectively communicate. One of the biggest problems is that there is a huge confusion between experience and memory when it comes to determining happiness. The distinction is with A) happiness IN your life versus B) happiness ABOUT your life (or WITH your life). The problem with trying to determine one's own happiness is exacerbated by the "focusing illusion." The effect of this illusion is that "we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance." Kahneman gave an example of a friend who claimed that a scratching sound at the very end of a music recording ruins the entire experience. This is utter nonsense, since the scratching sound occurred only at the end of the recording. It didn't ruin the entire experience. Rather, it ruined "the memory of the experience." Human beings consist of two selves: the experiencing self (who lives in the moment) and the remembering self (who keeps score and maintains the story of our lives, selecting and maintaining our memories. For the remembering self, a critical part of any story is how it ends. If it ends badly, the memory of the entire experience is contaminated (In this video, Kahneman describes earlier studies regarding colonoscopies which dramatically illustrated this point). Time is a funny thing for human beings. For our experiencing self, a two-week vacation is twice as good as a one-week vacation. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation might not be any better than a one-week vacation--"time has very little impact on the story" for the remembering self. [More . . . ]

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Victory at what cost?

I'm on Lawrence Lessig's mailing list. Here is an excerpt from an email he sent today, which you can read at Huffpo:

However good, however essential, however transformative this health care bill may be, we should not mistake success here as a sign that Washington has been cured. Indeed, as Glenn Greenwald reminded us over the weekend -- in an essay that should be every reformer's required reading -- success on this bill is no justification for:

claiming that it represents a change in the way Washington works and a fulfillment of Obama's campaign pledges. The way this bill has been shaped is the ultimate expression -- and bolstering -- of how Washington has long worked. One can find reasonable excuses for why it had to be done that way, but one cannot reasonably deny that it was.

Obama's victory was achieved because his team played the old game brilliantly. Staffed with the very best from the league of conventional politics, his team bought off PhRMA (with the promise not to use market forces to force market prices for prescription drugs) and the insurance industry (with the promise -- and in this moment of celebration, let's ignore the duplicity in this -- that they would face no new competition from a public option), so that by the end, as Greenwald puts it, the administration succeeded in "bribing and accommodating them to such an extreme degree that they ended up affirmatively supporting a bill that lavishes them with massive benefits." Obama didn't "push back on the undue influence of special interests," as he said today. He bought them off. And the price he paid should make us all wonder: how much reform can this administration -- and this Nation -- afford?

Another thing: As Greenwald noted in his excellent article, to get this bill passed Obama used "the exact secret processes that he railed against and which he swore he would banish."

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Annual spring competition packs arenas across the country

It’s that time of the year for packed arenas, where the fans cheer on the players who compete intensely. No, I’m not talking about NCAA basketball. I’m talking about robot soccer, sponsored by First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). What is the mission of First?

Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.
On Saturday, I attended part of the all-day competition involving 35 high school teams from the Midwest. The competition involved thousands of individual participants and spectators, who filled up much of St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena. I had an extra incentive to attend: my nephew was competing as part of the team from University City. "U City" made the semi-finals even though they were a rookie team—congratulations Nephew!). Talking to my nephew and his father prior to seeing any of this with my own eyes, I had a difficult time understanding the rules of the competition (“FRC” = First Robotics Competition). I did understood that the teams of high school students (ages 14-18) spent considerable time and energy assembling and programming their robots to compete. These robots parts are quite expensive—around $10,000—but corporate sponsorships (Boeing is a prominent sponsor) and fund-raising enable these robot purchases. I understood that the students themselves did all of the hands-on work, training-up their robots to (hopefully) excel at both the autonomous phase (the robot tries to recognize the targets located over the goals and then tries to move the ball into the goals) and the controlled phase of the game. Until I witnessed the competition, though, I wasn’t prepared for the advanced technology, the excitement and intensity. At the arena, I learned that there were two goals at each end of the field, and that the humps that the robots need to navigate looked formidable to my non-robot eyes. I learned that during each part of the competition, three teams form an alliance against three other teams. Prior to the competition, each of the teams had carefully customized its robot so that it was able to navigate the field, to score points and (I didn’t know this either) that it could attempt for 2 bonus points by hoisting itself up a “tower” on the field prior to the buzzer. If you want to know the technical requirements of the competition, check out the detailed Robotics Competition Manual. Many matches were played Saturday. I videotaped parts of several of the matches, as well as the sorts of things that occurred between matches, assembling excerpts to give you a flavor for both the competition and the pageantry. The competition was both fun and energizing to the participants—you could see it in their faces and body language. The real value of this program, of course, is educational. The biggest congratulations go to all of the students from across the United States who have made a substantial time commitment by participating in this program, learning a great deal real-world information about robotics in the process. As these students become adults, one can only assume that many of them will make good use of this hands-on robotics training. Robotics has come a long way in the past few decades and there is no reason to doubt major additional progress. Maybe in a few decades, the First competition will have advanced to the point that the participants won’t any longer build soccer-playing robots; instead, they’ll design a new kind of robot that does the work of designing and building those soccer-playing robots. . . .

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Preachers who don’t believe in God

Daniel Dennett and Linda Lascola have published a paper called, "Preachers who are not Believers." The authors extensively interviewed five active preachers who don't believe in God. They are all closeted in this regard. Fascinating reading. Why not just come out of the closet and admit that they no longer believe? You'll see that they believe that they can still do an important job without that core belief. Interestingly, the participants expressed that lack of belief in God is common among active preachers. When asked his opinion of why ministers do not pass on their seminary-learned knowledge of Christian history to parishioners, one of the participants had this to say:

They don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to lose donations. They want to keep their jobs. They don’t want to stir up trouble in the congregation. They’ve got enough trouble as it is, keeping things moving along. They don’t want to make people mad at them. They don’t want to lose members. What they will often do is bring in someone like me to be a lightning rod, and teach it, and they’ll follow up on it.
I myself have spoken with at least four active members of the clergy over my lifetime (all of them Catholic priests) who admitted that they don't believe in the God that they describe at the pulpit. They each admitted that this is not an impediment to doing good work as a priest. Dennett's paper parallels his contention (in his book, Breaking the Spell), that most believers don't actually believe in God. Rather, they believe in belief in God. They say they believe because they think it's important to say it, whether or not they actually believe. I have often discussed Daniel Dennett's work at this site (e.g., here). He has a track record of being extraordinarily able to thoroughly think through many topics regarding religion and express his conclusions succinctly.

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