Why Pretend?

It’s all relative to some benchmark group, and I’m sympathetic. Clearly, in asset management, benchmarking is common enough. The real question is, how general is this relative benchmarking? It’s easy to accept such reasoning applied to parochial matters. Yet, if parochial, it invites simple arbitrage of various sorts. And if general, what about ‘welfare economics’, or what it means for a policy to be ‘efficient’ in that arena? I think this kind of reasoning has many simple, obvious, useful implications. It also invalidates lots of very esteemed theory.

Maybe people are just stupid. Seriously. All of us.

I mean, isn’t a plausible explanation that human behavior is complicated so people confabulate explanations for it and then explain subsequent behavior by referring cached confabulations? Those confabulations are memes which don’t drive much anticipation in most people most of the time, as the anticipation driving mechanisms in most people are pretty independent of the language generating mechanisms by adulthood, e.g. by an age where one has enough knowledge of how things work that one doesn’t have to guess or make long-chain inferences.

A few people have connections between verbal/symbolic manipulation mechanisms and anticipation mechanisms which don’t mostly turn off by adulthood. Those people end up very confused. Most people aren’t like them, don’t share their confusion, keep talking about X because that’s what’s done and keep punishing deviators who talk about Y because talking about Y isn’t done and deviating from an archetype indicates imperfections and also increases cognitive complexity and cost for those around you. They don’t care about correcting their verbal declarations, as those declarations are only a mark of form at this point, the verbal content has long been replaced by implicitly learned models, but they do care about deviance which is a form of ugliness, at least at first or from a certain perspective.

I made a stream of tweets on this topic on November 14, btw.

One may only need a small seed of confabulation.
You claim to see a simple but pervasive pattern.
Simple but pervasive patterns can emerge from small and simple seeds of complexity growing to become pervasive. Children somewhat non-randomly, but in an unreliable manner, plant such seeds and then nourish their growth through our way of speaking of the world. Adults, normal adults, care little for words and ignore these works of childhood, and thus never lean to see explicitly those pebbles on the beach which point to structure in the movements of the stars.

Great subject. There are many reasons for believing and encouraging Y while doing X, some reasonable, some outdated, some simply counterproductive. I think I have accurate stories for many such circumstances.

One major motivation is that society sometimes strives to identify and project an ideal. By jointly believing, or projecting belief at least, of that ideal, they are creating social pressure toward that ideal, even if it is unattainable, unstable, and something no one is really doing for more than an instant. The Leave-It-To-Beaver 50’s seems like this. This is a standard paradigm of religious doctrine enforcement, although there is various levels of realism.

Another instance of this is where such an ideal or fiction is beneficial to certain people in certain circumstances. The clearest examples are indoctrination of teenagers and young adults: We want them to develop in a healthy way with minimal trauma & disease and maximal satisfaction and productivity. Most of the accepted sexual and behavioral norms have been centered around the implicit theories of what would lead to success or failure. The efforts to hide adult things from even adults, let alone teenagers, is an attempt to keep them from disaster otherwise expected. Realistically, there *is* an emotional, decision making, and social skill capability progression that doesn’t end at 18 or 21 but continues for decades. Usually, only after one or more long-term relationships, raising children, and overcoming various trials and tribulations do you reach the later levels of maturity. Society at large seems, in many ways, to project a model of adulthood frozen at the newlywed stage.

This is one reason that many divorced women with children forgo relationships and sex for years: they are constrained by the perceived need to raise their children without the (perceived) confusing-to-children complications and potential inelegance of adult dating.

As this author recalls [1]: ‘HL Mencken wrote that “A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun.”’ In some cases, people may be earnest about those beliefs. In others, they try to get others to follow an ideal that they cannot or choose not to live up to. In some cases, this may be done out of fear. [1] In others, it is some form of peer-pressure feedback. This is especially true with religion. Even in small-town Ohio where I grew up, “peer-pressure theism” was quite obvious. I.e., people were shamed into believing, resulting in many who felt they had to act out a belief that they didn’t have.

Or, perhaps more frequently, people in a certain stage of life impose an ideal on people in another stage of life, perhaps unrealistically or even harmfully, that they did not endure when they were in that stage.[2]

[1] http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/02/06/using-violence-people-are-afraid-to-criticize-islam.htm

[2] http://www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog8/babypuritans.htm
> 4. Denial.
> Prejudiced? Intolerant? Hypocritical? Me??!!? No way. Why, I vote the straight (choose one) Democratic/ Libertarian/ Socialist/ Green ticket. And my neighbors only stay in the Republican Party to open it up to new ideas like “compassionate conservatism.”
>
> What’s the result of such massive, hypocritical repression? You don’t see much result on the smooth surface of the lives of the Baby Puritans. They’ve got their stock options, their swankiendas, their Range Rovers. But something deeply, wrenchingly tragic seems to be happening with their children.
>
> Nationally, globally, we’re baffled by the violent acting out of the children. You want proof for my harsh analysis of the Baby Puritans? I give you Columbine High School.
>
> Children raised in a dark, cold, windowless prison–which adults persist in seeing as a comfortable, airy, well-equipped home full of “freedom” and “love”–will inevitably be driven to the most extreme possible behavior where their violent actions scream:
>
> “STOP IT!
> Stop the lying!
> Stop the fake-love!
> You may be fooling the world,
> but you’re not fooling me!”
>
> Maybe a more accurate name for these ignorant, intolerant, hypocritical, denying mommies and daddies would be FYBs: Fascist Yuppie Boomers. FYB. Pronounced “fib.” Lying to themselves, lying to their children.
>
> Those who live by the fib, die by the fib.

Perhaps this is too simple, but it could be that there are a lot of situations where X is better for the group than for the individual, and, vice -versa, Y is better for the individual than the group. Since there’s strength in numbers, it would behoove an individual to at least appear to be embodying X and therefore garner the favor of the group. If they can do that while surreptitiously reaping the rewards of Y, so much the better.

How many such pairs of X and Y can we (well, you) come up with, and how do they track against this hypothesis? This question isn’t of a sufficiently high priority for me to consider seriously devoting cycles to it, but I’m definitely curious.