Tag Archives: NearFar

Beware Inspiration

By Robin Hanson · December 25, 2011 11:15 am · Comments (3)

From a review of William Gavin’s book Speechwright:

Gavin became [Nixon's] speechwriter … [and] came to share [his] suspicion of stirring, soaring speechifying and his preference, instead, for what Gavin calls “working rhetoric” — plain, forceful, purposeful prose. Words that bear down instead of lift up. “The desire to be inspired,” Gavin writes in “Speechwright,” “to be uplifted, to be made to feel deeply, to be swept away, and thrilled is the mark of jaded citizens who have forgotten that the major goal of political rhetoric should be to make good arguments, clearly and honestly.” For Gavin, the original sin had been committed by John Kennedy, whose inaugural address begat “the modern cult of thrill-talk.” That speech was “magnificent,” Gavin allows, “but it wasn’t true, because it wasn’t achievable.” (more)

The reviewer disagrees:

He is mostly right that politicians should “stop trying to get us to stand up and cheer” and “start persuading us to sit down and think.” But … the basic purpose of political rhetoric is to “move men to action or alliance.” … Yes, “thrill-talk,” as Gavin insists, often gives wings to “impossible dream[s]” and “inevitable disappointment.” But the words that excite us are also the words that can change us — words that stretch our national sense of self, that make us believe we really can end Jim Crow and win a war and put a man on the moon. Not every dream is an impossible one.

Yes, inspiring idealistic far-mode talk can motivate cooperative and idealistic acts in ways that realistic near-mode desire, fear, practicality, etc. talk cannot. But know that you will let yourself believe more lies and impossibilities in that mode. You may coordinate to take more actions, but actions that are more likely than you think to be useless or even harmful.

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Creativity Clues

By Robin Hanson · December 7, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (13)

People like creativity less than they say, especially when they feel uncertain. (more)

Sex is near and love is far, logical analysis is near while “aha” creativity is far, and conventional art is near while unconventional art is far. These results seem to confirm my suggestion that near mode emphasizes practical action, while far mode emphasizes social image. … “When in love, people typically focus on a long-term perspective, which should enhance holistic thinking and thereby creative thought.” … Far mode does better at word creativity. (more)

I’ve argued “school functions in part to help folks accept workplace domination,” said modern workplaces don’t reward creativity, and cited evidence that schools discourage creativity. … So I’m not surprised to learn creativity has been falling for decades. (more)

Participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence. .. Participants who were primed to think creatively were more likely to behave dishonestly than those in a control condition and that greater ability to justify their dishonest behavior explained the link between creativity and increased dishonesty. (more)

Consistent with distrust’s social consequences, subliminal distrust (vs. trust) priming had detrimental effects on creative generation presumed to be public. Consistent with distrust’s cognitive consequences, though, an opposite tendency emerged in private. Study 2 confirmed a beneficial effect of distrust on private creative generation with a different priming method and pointed to cognitive flexibility as the mediating process. Studies 3 and 4 showed increased category inclusiveness versus increased remote semantic spread after distrust priming, consistent with enhanced cognitive flexibility as a consequence of distrust. (more)

We are more creative in far mode, and we are happier there too, but we are only more conformist and trustworthy on publicly visible acts. On private hidden acts we are more likely to cheat. This confirms far mode as more focused on managing social images. And it helps us appreciate why employers, and hence schools, aren’t so eager to encourage creativity.

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Near Is Warm, Relational

By Robin Hanson · November 29, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (1)

I had heard before: warm is near:

‘Holding warm feelings toward someone’’ and ‘‘giving someone the cold shoulder’’ indicate different levels of social proximity. In this article, we show effects of temperature that go beyond these metaphors people live by. In three experiments, warmer conditions, compared with colder conditions, induced (a) greater social proximity, (b) use of more concrete language, and (c) a more relational focus. Different temperature conditions were created by either handing participants warm or cold beverages (Experiment 1) or placing them in comfortable warm or cold ambient conditions (Experiments 2 and 3). (more; HT Eric Barker via Katja Grace)

I had not heard: in near mode we talk more about the relations between things, relative to their categories or properties:

An … argument found in cultural psychology suggests that cultures emphasizing interdependence (placing the self in general in social proximity to others) are more likely to emphasize relationships, whereas cultures emphasizing independence (placing the self in general in lower social proximity to others) are more likely to emphasize properties. Similar conclusions have been drawn in a wide array of research: Individuals from cultures emphasizing interdependence not only tend to categorize objects on the basis of interrelatedness, but also perceive Rorschach cards more as patterns and detect more changes in relationships between objects, compared with individuals from cultures emphasizing independence, who tend more to categorize objects on the basis of shared categories (and features), to focus on details, and to detect changes in central properties of objects. …

On the basis of this reasoning in cultural psychology, and the fact that warmer temperatures led to use of more concrete language in Experiment 2, we hypothesized that a warmer temperature would produce a greater focus on relationships, or interdependence, between objects portrayed in a perceptual focus task, and that this effect would be mediated by language use. … [Our data] analysis confirmed that participants in the warm condition had a greater relational perspective than participants in the cold condition.

See also more support for far being happy.

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Science Fiction Is Far

By Robin Hanson · November 16, 2011 8:30 am · Comments (11)

SF author Greg Benford posts a ’97 Peter Nicholls talk:

I decided that I would write ALIEN ARTEFACTS but call it BIG DUMB OBJECTS. … But the joke was on me, because as I came to write the entry, I realized that the subject– which was vast alien enigmatic artefacts–was at the heart of what attracted people to science fiction. And even stranger, I realized that no matter what literary shortcomings you found in Big Dumb Object sf – and believe me, there are plenty – that Big Dumb Object stories were often successful, that even if badly written they were usually good to read. Why? …

There is in science fiction, even or especially (as I will argue later) in so-called Hard science fiction, something which in other context we tend to think of as unscientific, be it called sense of wonder, or the sublime, or the transcendent as the Panshins have it, or the romantic. And one rather mechanical way of creating this effect is for the storyteller to imagine something very very big and mysterious, like the spaceship Rama, or like Larry Niven’s Ringworld. That is, the mysterious something in science fiction often has its locus classicus in the Big Dumb Object. …

Of the BDO novels I’ve cited, [big] voyages in space become [big] voyages in time in the majority of them: … It is, as the celebrated cliché has it, the last frontier, and this ties in with what one does in frontiers of all kinds, one meets the “other”. I think the meeting of humanity with the other is now generally accepted as one of the great themes of science fiction. … The sublime … is dehumanising. It makes us feel small and unimportant and indeed hardly there at all. I think this feeling of our vulnerability and littleness in the context of cosmic vastness and indifference, is one of the root feelings of space fiction. … Sf writers capable of perfectly good straightforward, journeyman prose, tend to fall into florid poetics of the most excruciatingly embarrassing kind when trying to imagine what transcendence might feel like. …

BDO fiction … is about being dwarfed by space and hugeness, about attempting to maintain our own humanity, warts and all, in the light of this vastness, while at the same time yearning to be better or other than what we are. And this is not a theme that is intrinsically scientific at all, which makes it all the odder that it is in the hardest and most scientific sf that we tend to find the purest examples. …

I began by saying that I had recently re-read a dozen or so classics of hard science fiction, and I listed them. What I didn’t say then is that it was a rather disappointing experience. … The main problem is the sense of wonder, that feeling you get when confronted by the truly awe-inspiring in sf. It doesn’t tend to occur so poignantly the second time round. (more)

Immersing ourselves in images of things large in space, time, and social distance puts us into a “transcendant” far mode where positive feelings are strong, our basic ideals are more visible than practical constraints, and where analysis takes a back seat to metaphor. Many “hard science” folks who won’t allow themselves ordinary religious feelings do allow themselves these transcendant feelings. Which seems ok, but for the risk that it might overly infect their practical beliefs.

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Middle Is Near

By Robin Hanson · October 24, 2011 5:45 pm · Comments (5)

We prefer items in the middle of a range:

When participants were presented with a line of five pictures, they preferred pictures in the centre rather than at either end. This applies when the line of pictures was arranged horizontally or vertically and when participants selected from five pairs of identical socks arranged vertically. The results support the centre-stage explanation of location-based preference rather than the hemispheric difference or body-specific accounts. (more)

We attend less to abstract goals for middle items, suggesting we see them more in near mode:

People are more likely to adhere to their standards at the beginning and end of goal pursuit—and slack in the middle. We demonstrate this pattern of judgment and behavior in adherence to ethical standards (e.g., cheating), religious traditions (e.g., skipping religious rituals), and performance standards (e.g., “cutting corners” on a task). We also show that the motivation to adhere to standards by using proper means is independent and follows a different pattern from the motivation to reach the end state of goal pursuit. (more)

This all fits with our preferring to act in near mode:

Not only are we designed to talk a good idealistic talk from afar while taking selfish practical actions up close, we also seem to be designed to direct our less visible actions into contexts where our near minds rule, and direct grand idealistic talk to contexts where our far minds do the talking. We talk an idealistic talk, but walk a practical walk, and try to avoid walking our talk or talking our walk. (more)

So folks who think of their era as the “end of history” or the “start of the future” are more likely to see it in far mode. To get yourself to think more in near mode, for better analysis, try to see the object of your attention as in the middle of a range of possibilities. Of course if you instead want to be more creative about your topic, think of it as an extreme.

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Info Cuts Confidence

By Robin Hanson · September 17, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (6)

An interesting tendency:

By the time Project Blue Book folded in 1969, it had evaluated 12,618 reports of sightings. … Special Report Number 14 [is] a vast statistical analysis of 3,201 UFO cases, with hundreds of graphs, tables, charts, and maps. … According to the report, about 22 percent of sightings were declared “unknown.” That means their origin couldn’t be determined even after all the evidence was in—these were objects that didn’t look like airplanes or balloons or any other discernible vessel. They maneuvered in strange ways, hovering or changing speed and direction suddenly. Sometimes witnesses, many of them Air Force pilots, described seeing actual saucer- or cigar-shaped objects. Unknowns tended to be cases with better information: 35 percent of “excellent” sightings—those with more reliable witnesses and, sometimes, corresponding physical evidence—defied explanation; only 19 percent of poor ones did. And the longer a sighting lasted, Friedman says, the more likely it was to remain unexplained: 36 percent of unknowns were seen for more than five minutes. (more)

Since things with fewer details are seen more in far mode, and since in far mode we are more confident in our theories, we should expect people to be more confident in their classifications of things that have fewer details, and so have a smaller fraction of things left as hard to explain. I’d like to see this tested elsewhere, such as planes seen near or far, or crimes known in little or much detail.

More:

In 1997 a CNN poll found that 80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding information about UFOs, and 64 percent believe that extraterrestrials have contacted humans. In a 2007 Associated Press poll, 14 percent said they’d seen a UFO. … At the end of his lectures, [Friedman] often asks the audience how many of them have seen a flying saucer. … Usually ten percent of the audience have their hands raised. … “But then I ask, ‘How many of you reported what you saw?’” Nearly every hand drops.

Thats a whole lot of skeptics of the usual official UFO story. (I’m not a skeptic.)

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Is Selfless Evil Far?

By Robin Hanson · September 6, 2011 8:10 pm · Comments (16)

Brainstorming came from Osborn in 1939 as a method for creative problem solving. He was frustrated by employees’ inability to develop creative ideas individually for ad campaigns. … Osborn claimed that two principles contribute … “1. Defer judgment,” and “2. Reach for quantity.” (more)

In the last decade or so, psychologists have confirmed one of the most robust mind patterns ever seen: construal level theory, which I call near vs. far thought. In brief: humans think more abstractly, and in less detail, about things far away in time, space, social contact, and probability, and assume that things near or far in some ways are also near or far in other ways.

Since far mode thoughts tend to have weaker decision consequences, I’ve suggested that far mode is better adapted to managing social images, relative to making helpful choices. This fits with far mode being more associated with confidence, high power/status, positive moods and reasons, pride and shame, self-control, trusting others, resisting conformity pressure, supporting underdogs, love over sex, words over sounds, polite speech over slang, and ideal values over practical constraints.

But even if its greater role in managing social images makes far mode beliefs less accurate, far mode is built too deeply in us to do without it. If we must use it, how can we best use it, to avoid bias? My tentative answer starts from the observation that in far mode we are better at creativity, while near mode we are better at analysis.

Mental tasks can be roughly divided into generation and evaluation. Our minds must search a vast space of possible thoughts, generating possible thoughts to explicitly consider. We must also evaluate such explicit thoughts. Since far mode is better at creativity, while near mode is better at analysis, we should prefer to generate in far mode, and evaluate in near mode. First see if idealism can be made practical, before resorting to cynicism. This fits with claims that groups create better when they temporarily avoid criticism and evaluation.

Of course we can’t make this a strict rule; circumstances will often force us to evaluate in far mode, and to generate in near mode. But we should at least be aware of our handicaps in such situations. Which brings us to the subject of evil.

Humans evolved a sense of morality, helping us to coordinate to discourage many specific forms of selfish behavior that hurt groups. We thus evolved to tell stories of evil villains who engaged in such harmful behaviors, and of good heroes who opposed them. Such stories often depicted villains who are tempted in near mode by concrete personal gain, such as loot or sex, and heroes who thought in far mode about a wider good.

But today, most evil is probably not of this selfish sort. Instead, very bad things are caused more by far thinking. Consider the prototypically-evil Nazis. Their urge to exterminate Jews came less from unhappy personal experiences with individual Jews, and more from abstract fears gone wrong – killing Jews probably hurt Germans overall. Similarly, most xenophobia comes less from personal interactions and more from abstract, and largely incorrect, fears. People tend to have satisfactory and mutually advantageous relations with immigrants, even as they politically support policies to prevent such relations.

Similarly, democratic regulation usually goes wrong by supplanting direct consumer evaluations of products, services, and practices, which tend to be made in near mode, with abstract public opinions about good policy, which tend to be formed in far mode. Autocratic regulation goes wrong similarly, since power tends to put leaders in a far mode. I’m not saying that there should never be regulation, but rather that an important and neglected cost of regulation is displacing reliable near mode evaluations with unreliable far mode evaluations.

We can’t think without far mode, but we can use it most where it works best: to suggest candidate actions, products, policies, theories, etc. We should minimize biases from a far mode system designed more for social image management, by using near mode where it works best, to analyze and evaluate these candidates. Science experiments, computer engineering demos, policy trials, prediction bets, and business profits all offer such crucial concrete near-mode feedback. We need these to avoid the all-too-common selfless evil of far mode evaluation errors.

Added 8Sept: There is some tension between this post and my older post on The Felt & The Unfelt.

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Obstacles Are Far

By Robin Hanson · September 5, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (4)

One standard finding about near vs. far thinking is that in far mode we tend to focus more on our goals, while in near near mode we tend to focus more on practical constraints that limit which goals we can achieve. However, there is one kind of practical consideration that can get us to think more in far mode; an “obstacle” we are inclined to overcome:

Can obstacles prompt people to look at the “big picture” and open up their minds? Do the cognitive effects of obstacles extend beyond the tasks with which they interfere? These questions were addressed in 6 studies involving both physical and nonphysical obstacles and different measures of global versus local processing styles. Perceptual scope increased after participants solved anagrams in the presence, rather than the absence, of an auditory obstacle (random words played in the background; Study 1), particularly among individuals low in volatility (i.e., those who are inclined to stay engaged and finish what they do; Study 4). It also increased immediately after participants encountered a physical obstacle while navigating a maze (Study 3A) and when compared with doing nothing (Study 3B). Conceptual scope increased after participants solved anagrams while hearing random numbers framed as an “obstacle to overcome” rather than a “distraction to ignore” (Study 2) and after participants navigated a maze with a physical obstacle, compared with a maze without a physical obstacle, but only when trait (Study 5) or state (Study 6) volatility was low. Results suggest that obstacles trigger an “if obstacle, then start global processing” response, primarily when people are inclined to stay engaged and finish ongoing activities. Implications for dealing with life’s obstacles and related research are discussed. (more)

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Predict Yourself

By Robin Hanson · September 4, 2011 7:00 pm · Comments (9)

To act more on far ideals, predict what you will do:

Asking participants to predict their future vaccination behavior … substantially increased vaccination rates among patients with high short-term vaccination barriers (who, in the absence of this intervention, have low vaccination acceptance rates). These findings are consistent with past research on temporal construal, which suggests that people asked to think about a future behavior tend to focus its abstract benefits, and disregard concrete barriers that might impede it. (more)

Consider personal prediction markets, which predict what you will do in the future, such as whether you will lose weight, get married, get an A, get promoted, etc. By allowing your associates to participate in such markets, you could let them (anonymously) tell you what they really think about what you will do. Looking often at the predictions of such markets, and asking yourself if those predictions are wrong, could help you to live up to your far ideals about what you should and will do with your life.

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Creativity Lip Service

By Robin Hanson · August 27, 2011 10:30 pm · Comments (15)

People like creativity less than they say, especially when they feel uncertain:

While people strongly endorse [a] positive view of creativity, scholars have long been puzzled by the finding that organizations, scientific institutions, and decisions-makers routinely reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as an important goal. Similarly, research documents that teachers dislike students who exhibit curiosity and creative thinking even though teachers acknowledge creativity as an important educational goal. …

[In our studies,] on one hand, participants in the baseline and uncertainty tolerance conditions demonstrated positive implicit associations with creativity relative to practicality. Additionally, 95% of participants in the high uncertainty and uncertainty intolerance conditions rated their explicit attitudes towards creativity as positive. … On the other hand, the implicit measure identified that participants in each high uncertainty condition associated words like “vomit,” “poison,” and “agony,” more so with creativity than practicality. Because there is such a strong social norm to endorse creativity and people also feel authentic positive attitudes towards creativity, people may be reluctant to admit that they do not want creativity. (more)

For how many more far values does this sort of hypocrisy apply?

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