Overcoming Bias

Be biased to be happy

Robin writes "Optimism bias is clearly not an unnoticed accident - people want to be so biased."

In poker, there is a joke which goes "Have you ever noticed that when you win, it's all skill, and when you lose, it was bad luck?"  It's funny because this method of protecting one's own ego is universal enough to strike a deep chord, yet any good player knows how wrong it is.  In the short-term, poker is mostly luck, and it takes a great deal of experience to even partially disentangle the effects of one's own strategy from the vicissitudes of fortune.  (Hint: a crucial first step is to always think in terms of opponent hand distributions, not specific hands.)

While in poker, this way of thinking will hold a player back from accurately evaluating and improving their game, the evidence from positive psychology is that it helps you be a winner in life.  From Half Full, a blog about the science of raising happy kids:

According to Seligman and other researchers, how optimistic or pessimistic we are amounts to how we explain life’s events, be they good or bad. There are three basic dimensions to an explanation: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.   The OPTIMISTIC way of understanding why something GOOD happened would explain:

The cause of what just happened as Permanent (so it will reoccur);
And Pervasive (it will affect many other circumstances, too);
And Personal (I made it happen).

On the other hand, the PESSIMISTIC way of explaining why something GOOD just happened would illustrate that:

The cause of what just happened is Temporary (something short-lived caused it – probably won’t happen again);
And Specific (affecting only this situation);
And Impersonal (I didn’t have anything to do with what happened, other people or the circumstances did).

The reverse is also true when something bad happens. A kid trips on the sidewalk and skins her knee, dirtying her new dress. The pessimist thinks: “I’m so clumsy – I’m always tripping everywhere, and now I look stupid.” The cause of her fall is (1) permanent—she sees it as a personality trait, and therefore it is both (2) pervasive and (3) personal. On the other hand, the optimist thinks: “Dang!  Someone oughtta fix that crack in the sidewalk!” She’s thinking that a flaw in the sidewalk, not her own inherent clumsiness, caused her to trip. That crack is (1) temporary; (2) specific to that moment; and (3) impersonal—she had nothing to do with it.

There is plenty of evidence that those with the optimistic mindset are happier, healthier, and more successful, but of course we have to be careful because the causality runs both ways.  (If life has been good to you, you will tend to expect more of the same).  But (while I don't have cites on hand), I've seen some research on interventions to improve optimism, and on predicting later success based on earlier optimism (controlling for other obvious factors of success), which suggest that at least some of the causality runs from optimism to happiness.

It seems a bit sad to me that our egos need such nurturing, and as a rationalist I worry that optimistic bias (like any false view of the world) will sometimes lead us to make worse decisions which will increase suffering.  But to the degree that we're stuck with the biased minds we have, the evidence seems to be that it's better to be optimistic than pessimistic.

Ancient Political Self-Deception

From Gene Expression:

There are certain things which are sacred, certain lines you don't cross. ... I was thinking about [this] a few months ago when I read Rome & Jerusalem: A Clash of Ancient Civilizations and God's Rule - Government and Islam.  You see, the ancient Romans and Muslims did not have kings. Kings were tyrants, and the early Roman and Islamic polities rejected such tyranny on principle. So of course, instead of kings, the Roman Empire was headed by an emperor, while the Muslims had caliphs. Get it? When Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra the official narrative was that the doughty republican traditions of Rome had bested once more the oriental despotism of the Hellenistic world, with their Greek kings and queens. Similarly, the righteous AbbasidsUmayyads. In its place they established a genuine Islamic state which was guided by the traditions of the community as opposed to profane naked autocracy. Right....

As you can see here, the extent of the self-deception and semantic delusion is really humorous. Now, it is true that the early emperors of Rome tended to keep up the illusion that they were simply stewards of the Roman Republic with some verisimilitude. Augustus' shtick was that his was a restorationist project; he was no dictator or king, just the First Citizen. Similarly, the early Abbasids were ostensibly bringing the vision of the Islamic community to its true fulfillment (especially the Shia party), whereas the Umayyads had been worldly Arab tribalists more in keeping with the values of the jahiliya. ... Muslim soldiers were enraged and shocked when the conqueror of Spain allowed his Visigothic wife to convince him to don a crown and so indicate kingship; they accused him of becoming a Christian.

I've been saying for years that people prefer democracy mainly because they think it raises their social status - being ruled by a king makes you lower status relative to people who "rule themselves."  We can't quite fool ourselves into thinking a king is just a "steward", but we apparently can think we really rule because we elect our rulers.

Added 2Apr:  Nazi Hermann Göring:

Oh, [democracy] is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.  [HT Caplan] 

Leave a Line of Retreat

"When you surround the enemy
Always allow them an escape route.
They must see that there is
An alternative to death."
        -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Cloud Hands edition

"Don't raise the pressure, lower the wall."
        -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

Last night I happened to be conversing with a nonrationalist who had somehow wandered into a local rationalists' gathering.  She had just declared (a) her belief in souls and (b) that she didn't believe in cryonics because she believed the soul wouldn't stay with the frozen body.  I asked, "But how do you know that?"  From the confusion that flashed on her face, it was pretty clear that this question had never occurred to her.  I don't say this in a bad way - she seemed like a nice person with absolutely no training in rationality, just like most of the rest of the human species.  I really need to write that book.

Most of the ensuing conversation was on items already covered on Overcoming Bias - if you're really curious about something, you probably can figure out a good way to test it; try to attain accurate beliefs first and then let your emotions flow from that - that sort of thing.  But the conversation reminded me of one notion I haven't covered here yet:

"Make sure," I suggested to her, "that you visualize what the world would be like if there are no souls, and what you would do about that.  Don't think about all the reasons that it can't be that way, just accept it as a premise and then visualize the consequences.  So that you'll think, 'Well, if there are no souls, I can just sign up for cryonics', or 'If there is no God, I can just go on being moral anyway,' rather than it being too horrifying to face.  As a matter of self-respect you should try to believe the truth no matter how uncomfortable it is, like I said before; but as a matter of human nature, it helps to make a belief less uncomfortable, before you try to evaluate the evidence for it."

If Self-Fulfilling Optimism is Wrong, I Don't Wanna be Right

Often, I hear claims like the following: "too many people are cynical about electoral politics."  It's hard to know just what to make of that sort of assertion.  For cynicism is most likely true about electoral politics, and, moreover, as a good little Bayesian, I should count the cynicism of just about everyone else as evidence to strengthen that belief. 

"But!," the anticynic might say, "cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy!  If we all believe that politics is run by crooks, we won't demand better at the voting booth [for example, because we vote strategically for the least offensive guy we think can win rather than the one we trust]!  If enough people are optimistic, your optimism will be self-fulfilling too!" 

So imagine the following belief/payoff correspondences.  If you hold a true cynical belief, you get payoff A.  If you hold a false cynical belief (cynicism in a nice world), you get payoff B.  If you hold a true optimistic belief, you get payoff C, and if you hold a false optimistic belief, you get payoff D.  Suppose C>A>B>D (or C>A>D>B -- it doesn't matter.)  And suppose that the world is nice if M people are optimistic (where N is the number of people in the world, and N>M>1) and nasty otherwise.

Anyone who knows game theory will immediately see that this world amounts to a coordination game with two nash equilibria: everyone optimistic in a nice world and everyone cynical in a nasty world.  And the nice world equilibrium has higher payoffs for all.

Now suppose we're in a nasty world.  How do we get to the nice world?  It seems like we'd do best if someone came along and deceived at least M people into thinking we're in the nice world already! 

This shows us that not only can individually rational behavior be collectively suboptimal, so can individually rational (truth-maximizing) belief.  Should we support demagoguery? 

I imagine the self-fulfilling false belief problem works on some individual cases too.  For example, suppose I have more success in dating if I'm confident?  Suppose I'm a person who has poor success in dating.  True beliefs for me are not confident ones, but I'll do better if I adopt falsely confident beliefs, which will then be retroactively justified by the facts.  Should I engage in self-deception? 

With blame comes hope

After the smoke clears, we begin to apportion blame.  We have a natural tendency to try to shift the blame onto others, avoiding guilt and responsibility for errors.  But there are some obvious problems with this strategy.

Errors are valuable training instances, and our bias against accepting blame reduces the number available.  If we could externally shift blame while internally maintaining a rational apportionment, we would not be reducing our training data, but people don't work like that.  To be believable, our efforts to shift blame must be sincere, and so our brain engages in self-deception rather than partitioning.  The result will then be to tend to underestimate the dangers of our action (and inaction) and underestimate the degree to which we can prevent bad outcomes by acting differently.

It is this latter point which gives the connection between blame and hope.  For to avoid blame is to avoid responsibility, and to avoid responsibility is to disempower oneself.  To say "I was not to blame for what happened" is to say "I could not have prevented it", which is to say "In future situations like that, I will be helpless".

So let us instead be honest about how we could have acted differently, even when things turn out craptacularly.  We can trick our minds into doing this by focusing on the positive, forward-looking nature of responsibility: thinking about how we might do better in the future, rather than the negative-sum fight to divide the anti-spoils of the past.  And reminding ourselves that some bitter blame is a small price to pay to hold onto hope.

Leading bias researcher turns out to be... biased, renounces result

A few days ago, Robin posted on the Edge's annual question, which this year is about the changing of minds.  One of the participants (a social scientist who undoubtedly knows lots) is Daniel Kahneman.  It's impossible to overstate Kahneman's eminence.  He's unquestionably one of a handful of top researchers ever, and arguably the most important yet alive, on the subjects that make up the theme of this very blog.  In addition to being one of the inventors of the "heuristics and biases" research program, as well as prospect theory, he also won the 2002 "Nobel Prize" in economics. 

Yet he, too, is not immune from motivated error.  A friend and colleague recently forwarded Kahneman's Edge answer to me.  Apparently, Kahneman himself was so captivated by the lure of a neat theory to handle some difficulties in hedonic experience that he managed to misinterpret the first set of results!

Our hypothesis was that differences in life circumstances would have more impact on this measure than on life satisfaction.  We were so convinced that when we got our first batch of data, comparing teachers in top-rated schools to teachers in inferior schools, we actually misread the results as confirming our hypothesis.  In fact, they showed the opposite: the groups of teachers differed more in their work satisfaction than in their affective experience at work. This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact.  Measuring experienced happiness turned out to be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected.  We had simply been wrong. (Emphasis added)

Social scientists, beware.  If this can happen to Daniel Kahneman, it can happen to anyone.

But There's Still A Chance, Right?

Years ago, I was speaking to someone when he casually remarked that he didn't believe in evolution.  And I said, "This is not the nineteenth century.  When Darwin first proposed evolution, it might have been reasonable to doubt it.  But this is the twenty-first century.  We can read the genes.  Humans and chimpanzees have 98% shared DNA.  We know humans and chimps are related.  It's over."

He said, "Maybe the DNA is just similar by coincidence."

I said, "The odds of that are something like two to the power of seven hundred and fifty million to one."

He said, "But there's still a chance, right?"

Cultish Countercultishness

Followup to:  Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult, Lonely Dissent

In the modern world, joining a cult is probably one of the worse things that can happen to you.  The best-case scenario is that you'll end up in a group of sincere but deluded people, making an honest mistake but otherwise well-behaved, and you'll spend a lot of time and money but end up with nothing to show.  Actually, that could describe any failed Silicon Valley startup.  Which is supposed to be a hell of a harrowing experience, come to think.  So yes, very scary.

Real cults are vastly worse.  "Love bombing" as a recruitment technique, targeted at people going through a personal crisis.  Sleep deprivation.  Induced fatigue from hard labor.  Distant communes to isolate the recruit from friends and family.  Daily meetings to confess impure thoughts.  It's not unusual for cults to take all the recruit's money - life savings plus weekly paycheck - forcing them to depend on the cult for food and clothing.  Starvation as a punishment for disobedience.  Serious brainwashing and serious harm.

With all that taken into account, I should probably sympathize more with people who are terribly nervous, embarking on some odd-seeming endeavor, that they might be joining a cult.  It should not grate on my nerves.  Which it does.

Fake Optimization Criteria

Followup to:  Fake Justification, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism

I've previously dwelt in considerable length upon forms of rationalization whereby our beliefs appear to match the evidence much more strongly than they actually do.  And I'm not overemphasizing the point, either.  If we could beat this fundamental metabias and see what every hypothesis really predicted, we would be able to recover from almost any other error of fact.

The mirror challenge for decision theory is seeing which option a choice criterion really endorses.  If your stated moral principles call for you to provide laptops to everyone, does that really endorse buying a $1 million gem-studded laptop for yourself, or spending the same money on shipping 5000 OLPCs?

We seem to have evolved a knack for arguing that practically any goal implies practically any action.  A phlogiston theorist explaining why magnesium gains weight when burned has nothing on an Inquisitor explaining why God's infinite love for all His children requires burning some of them at the stake.

There's no mystery about this.  Politics was a feature of the ancestral environment.  We are descended from those who argued most persuasively that the good of the tribe meant executing their hated rival Uglak.  (We sure ain't descended from Uglak.) 

Fake Morality

Followup to:  Fake Selfishness

God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes.  If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from murdering each other left and right?

Suppose Omega makes a credible threat that if you ever step inside a bathroom between 7AM and 10AM in the morning, he'll kill you. Would you be panicked by the prospect of Omega withdrawing his threat?  Would you cower in existential terror and cry:  "If Omega withdraws his threat, then what's to keep me from going to the bathroom?"  No; you'd probably be quite relieved at your increased opportunity to, ahem, relieve yourself.

Which is to say:  The very fact that a religious person would be afraid of God withdrawing Its threat to punish them for committing murder, shows that they have a revulsion of murder which is independent of whether God punishes murder or not.  If they had no sense that murder was wrong independently of divine retribution, the prospect of God not punishing murder would be no more existentially horrifying than the prospect of God not punishing sneezing.