Tag Archives: Self-Deception

Consider these points:

1. Our entire life stories are fixed by our genetics and our childhood environment (nature and nurture, more broadly), both of which we did not choose;
2. Our bodies are slowly growing more frail and debilitated until we die of something such as heart disease, cancer or stroke (or accident before then);
3. Even if someone develops a cure for aging, most of the experts who have studied the issue estimate about a 50/50 chance that our species will survive this century;
4. We live on a giant rotating planet, in an unimaginably large universe that is almost all empty space, and appears to be lifeless;
5. The fact that we were designed by evolution to value or desire certain things doesn’t seem to justify actually valuing or desiring them;
6. While most people believe in some sort of religion that provides cosmic context, the thousands of religions contradict each other, and all appear to be fictions created by men;
7. While most people believe in an “afterlife,” people don’t believe that parts of a crazy person’s mind go to Heaven when he loses them; by extrapolation, all of a person’s mind doesn’t go to Heaven when you lose all of it.

My point is not to push these beliefs onto anyone who resists them.  I suspect, though, that most OB readers already think they are facts.  And I suspect that many otherwise religious people, in their heart of hearts, already believe the above too.

My point, instead, is to make an observation about the above set of facts, which I’ll call “the human condition,” in the pessimistic sense.  My observation is this: while all of the above facts can be considered an insult or injury, there is one more that goes largely unnoticed.  The final insult is that we are not supposed to talk about the human condition.  Indeed, we are not even supposed to acknowledge its existence.  I call this last insult the “Meta-Human Condition”—the salt in the wound.

Continue reading "The Meta-Human Condition" »

Often when I’m dreaming I “feel” that I’m awake.  When I’m awake, however, I always  “feel” that I’m awake and have no conscious doubt (except in the philosophical sense) that I’m not dreaming.

But logically when I “feel” awake I should believe there is a non-trivial chance that I’m dreaming.  This has implications for how I should behave.

For example, imagine I’m considering eating spinach or chocolate.  I like the taste of chocolate more than spinach, but recognize that spinach is healthier for me.  Let’s say that if the probability of my being awake were greater than 99% then to maximize the expected overall quality of my life I should eat the spinach otherwise I should pick the chocolate. 

Rationally, I should probably figure that the chance of my being awake is less than 99% so I should go with the chocolate.  Yet like most other humans I don’t take into account that I might be dreaming when I “feel” awake.

Over the long run you would likely reduce your inclusive genetic fitness if when you  “feel” awake you act as if there is a less than 100% chance of your actually being awake.  For this reason I suspect we are “genetically programmed” to never doubt that we are awake when we “feel” awake even though it would be rational to hold such a doubt.

Aimone and Houser find we are willing to pay to avoid knowing that we have been betrayed: 

Here we report data from one-shot two-person binary investment games in which investors can choose not to know the decision of their particular trustee, and instead receive payment according to a random draw from a separate pool of decisions identical to the pool of trustees’ decisions. Note that the probability of receiving the "cooperative" outcome is identical in the two cases, and participants understand this is the case. … Our main finding is that investors systematically prefer to remain ignorant of their specific trustee’s decision. Moreover, when avoiding this information is not possible investors are substantially less likely to make trusting decisions. These results are convergent evidence that outcome-based models cannot fully explain economic decision making in strategic environments.

Added 25 Oct: Can this help explain why we rely so little on incentive contracts for docs, real estate agents, etc.? 

It bothers me that my commitment to overcoming bias is contracted daily by these dishonesties:

1. I am tragically uncertain about how I should divide my time between work and play, among various possible work projects, and with who I should ally and spend my time.  These are terribly important decisions about which I have only very weak clues.  But I usually act as if I know what I’m doing.
2. I actually care a lot what other people think of me, and in most conversations the major topic for most everyone is who praises or blames who else how much.  But this strong subtext is usually not acknowledged in our explicit text.  Like most people, I act as if we were talking about other topics, and only indirectly make points of praise or blame.
3. I think about sex an awful lot – it is not far from my awareness anytime I am in the presence of, or thinking about, most any healthy female.  But I almost never acknowledge that fact directly via my actions or words.

Now I don’t think I’m very different from most people on these points.  And there are obviously very good reasons why we are dishonest in these ways.  Telling associates explicitly how uncertain we are about associating with them would seem like threatening to "break up" with them.  Talking explicitly about who we like how much would sound like bragging and insecure requests for praise.  And talking explicitly about sexual undercurrents would usually be seen as sexual harassment. 

So like most people I am stuck in a signaling equilibrium where my best strategy is to act in a way that seems to me dishonest.  Oh you might say that everyone knows about all this so I’m not really fooling  anyone.  But while we "know" at some level, to function effectively it seems we must self-deceive enough to often take appearances at face value.   (See a nice related quote by Nagel, courtesy of Richard.)

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.

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.