Category 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.?