Every so often, I’ll come across people that seem to have it all figured out. People that live the kind of life I want to live or act the way I want to act or think the way I want to think. The internet has made this especially easy – everything they display or put forward can be carefully sculpted and trimmed to be maximally appealing while at the same time seem to be off-the-cuff. This appearance of casual brilliance makes it easy for me to fall into the trap of idolizing said person. This, of course, is dangerous – idolization is a kissing cousin of certainty, and when you idolize someone you lap up whatever they say without pausing to think too much about it. You then proceed to shout whatever you’ve heard from the rooftops, without applying any appropriate skepticism to their words. The whole thing is one epic failure of rationality, one that I’ve committed time and time again.

It seems to happen (at least to me) on a smaller scale whenever I read a sufficiently good article. “Here’s someone who’s got it figured out” I think, about something I’m almost certainly not qualified to judge the quality of. I can only imagine how many false facts are lurking in my brain on account of a particularly persuasive writer.

But the whole REASON that idolization takes place in the first place (at least, once you get past high school and ‘has a motorcycle’ no longer serves as a suitable reason) is that they seem to have some sort of understanding that I lack. If they didn’t at least appear to have insights or perspective or SOMETHING to offer, fawning wouldn’t have started in the first place. So there’s a balance to be struck, to somehow avoid idolizing and calling them on their bullshit when it inevitably appears, but not restricting yourself from gleaning the insights they likely have to offer.

When people talk about their best teachers or their favorite classes, one story I’ve heard brought up more than once is the teacher who would say “One thing I’ll say in this lecture is wrong – it’s your job to find the mistake.” The students inevitably scrutinize each statement carefully, rigorously evaluating it’s truth (in some versions, the teacher cruelly ends the semester with a lecture that contains no mistakes, without telling his students). But the end result is always a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

It seems like a good generally applicable heuristic (always assume an error), but one has to be more deliberate in applying it to those we already respect (we tend to be skeptical of people outside our chain of respect by default). The likely default is to tend towards mental laziness and assume whatever they’re saying is correct without unpacking each claim and inference. The sort of looming problem that I can see with this is such examination is likely mentally exhausting – thinking is hard work. I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing you can eventually learn to do on autopilot, or if it’s something that you’ll constantly have to consider deliberately.

Beliefs come in two flavors: preferences, and methods of satisfying those preferences.

Preferences are completely arational. There’s no rigorous framework to decide what they should be – they’re basic axioms that have to be assumed (or, in this case, specified). It’s impossible to point to a person’s (or a dogs, or a computers) preference and call it ‘wrong’. The best you can do is show that it doesn’t fit coherently with other preferences, or runs counter to some lower-level preference. However, because humans are cut from the same cloth, people tend to share a similar set of preferences (though they may be weighted differently). Arguments about preferences tend to be of the unresolvable type.

Methods of satisfying those preferences, on the other hand, are 100% rational. There’s a correct way, an optimum that can be achieved -satisfying preferences is a math problem. Humans (and their preferences) are instantiated in the world as a big glob of atoms. Satisfying preferences means arranging these atoms in a particular way – there is one group that is superior to all other groups of atoms. (In actuality, huge swaths of groupings will be functionally identical, but we’ll ignore this). Because the behavior of atoms follow the laws of physics, some series of actions will result in that arrangement of atoms, and some will not. Determining what series of actions this is can, in principle, be calculated.

Of course actually calculating it is impossible for several different reasons, and any method of optimization actually used will abstract away a great deal of information. But because we’re in a universe based on laws of physics, at some point it HAS to become a math problem – go down far enough and there’s a set of rules.

People argue about preferences because they expect everyone to have the same ones they do. And they argue about methods of achieving those preferences because, lacking a Prime Intellect, it’s not always obvious what the best method to use is. Most arguments are a subtle yet rich blend of these two types.

According to standard economic theory, a minimum wage is inefficient and creates unemployment – people who would be willing to work for less money are instead excluded from the marketplace. Because economics is complicated and we generally don’t run experiments, it’s hard to tell if this actually happens or not (and people with various agendas to push argue fervently on both sides) – but that’s what falls out of the most basic level of the theory.

However, much of the disagreement (or at least, the initial reaction) isn’t concerned with whether it’s actually efficient or inefficient, but that it’s exploitative to pay someone less than a certain amount. We have a built-in fairness detector that the minimum wage sets off. In this sense, the minimum wage is like a real-life version of the ultimatum game. In the ultimatum game, there are two players. One is given an amount of money, and has to decide how much to offer the other player. The other player can either accept the offer (in which case the money is divided and the game ends) or reject the offer (in which case neither player receives any money).

The ‘rational’ thing to do is for the second player to accept whatever offer the first player gives him – any amount of money is better than zero. But this isn’t what happens. Offers less than a certain amount (it varies depending on the exact structure of the experiment, but is I believe around 40% of the total) are rejected, leaving both players empty handed. Our sense of fairness is powerful enough to overcome our rational self-interest.

It’s this inbuilt sense of fairness that seems to create our intuition about a minimum wage being necessary. Of course, it could very well be that a minimum wage actually is more efficient for various reasons – wikipedia lists a variety of arguments for both sides. But because the simple principles of supply and demand imply that it is inefficient, I suspect that one would not have been implemented without our built in fairness sensor.

If an insight doesn’t feel like an insight, how do you recognize it? Does it just slip by?

Humans don’t do anything without motivation. Energy is expensive, and acquiring it is risky – without the proper motivation, we default to doing nothing at all. Fortunately, the brain has access to a wide variety of chemical motivators that can be released to get us off our asses should the need arise, the chief one being dopamine. It plays a critical part in our pleasure and reward systems – it’s the carrot our brain dangles in front of us to get us to pursue a wide variety of behaviors, including learning. As such, the brain rewards useful thinking – generating an insight, such as “lions can’t climb trees” or “this sharp stick can be used as a weapon” sends a burst of dopamine that we interpret as a “feeling of knowing.” It’s this feeling of knowing that lets us know we’re on the right track.

However, it’s possible to decouple this feeling of knowing from the actual thought or insight its paired with. Consider the tip-of-the-tongue phenomena – you know that you know something, but you just can’t articulate it for some reason. You have a strong feeling of knowing without the thought it’s supposed to be coupled with. And strong feelings of knowing can be generated by a sufficiently powerful magnetic field applied to the right area of the brain. Not to mention a centuries worth of reports on religious experiences had under the influence of drugs.

As such, it stands to reason that the reverse is possible – that you can have an insight without being the accompanying feeling of knowing. In fact, it probably happens all the time – the mental connections in the brain are constantly adjusting, strengthening and weakening. It’s probably only the strongest ones that gain enough salience to enter working memory. And it’s only the strongest of those that give you that moment of clarity, that make you sit up and say ‘Yes!’, that send you running for a piece of paper to write it down before it slips away.

But without that feeling of knowing, that little burst of dopamine, it could pass right by without so much as a nod.

My guess (without any real information to back it up) is that it happens quite a bit. Maybe not total silence from the motivational system, but the equivalent of one lone cheer instead of a roaring crowd. There’s probably thousands of extremely intelligent people working boring jobs as accountants or tax collectors or insurance agents because they aren’t properly rewarded for their own brilliance.

Evidence shows that people have limited quantities of willpower – exercise it too much, and it gets used up. I suspect that rather than a mere mental flaw, this is a design feature of the brain.

Man is often called the social animal. We band together in groups – families, societies, civilizations – to solve our problems. Groups are valuable to have, and so we have values – altruism, generosity, loyalty – that promote group cohesion and success. However, it doesn’t pay to be COMPLETELY supportive of the group. Ultimately the goal is replication of your genes, and though being part of a group can further that goal, it can also hinder it if you take it too far (sacrificing yourself for the greater good is not adaptive behavior). So it pays to have relatively fluid group boundaries that can be created as needed, depending on which group best serves your interest. And indeed, studies show that group formation/division is the easiest thing in the world to create – even groups chosen completely at random from a larger pool will exhibit rivalry and conflict.

Despite this, it’s the group-supporting values that form the higher level values that we pay lip service too. Group values are the ones we believe are our ‘real’ values, the ones that form the backbone of our ethics, the ones we signal to others at great expense. But actually having these values is tricky from an evolutionary standpoint – strategically, you’re much better off being selfish than generous, being two-faced than loyal, and furthering your own gains at the expense of everyone elses.

So humans are in a pickle – it’s beneficial for them to form groups to solve their problems and increase their chances of survival, but it’s also beneficial for people to be selfish and mooch off the goodwill of the group. Because of this, we have sophisticated machinery called ’suspicion’ to ferret out any liars or cheaters furthering their own gains at the groups expense. Of course, evolution is an arms race, so it’s looking for a method to overcome these mechanisms, for ways it can fulfill it’s base desires while still appearing to support the group.

It accomplished this by implementing willpower. Because deceiving others about what we believe would quickly be uncovered, we don’t actually deceive them – we’re designed so that we really, truly, in our heart of hearts believe that the group-supporting values – charity, nobility, selflessness – are the right things to do. However, we’re only given a limited means to accomplish them. We can leverage our willpower to overcome the occasional temptation, but when push comes to shove – when that huge pile of money or that incredible opportunity or that amazing piece of ass is placed in front of us, willpower tends to fail us. Willpower is generally needed for the values that don’t further our evolutionary best interests – you don’t need willpower to run from danger or to hunt an animal if you’re hungry or to mate with a member of the opposite sex. We have much better, much more successful mechanisms that accomplish those goals. Willpower is designed so that we really do want to support the group, but wind up failing at it and giving in to our baser desires – the ones that will actually help our genes get replicated.

Of course, the maladaption comes into play due to the fact that we use willpower to try to accomplish other, non-group related goals – mostly the long-term, abstract plans we create using high-level, conscious thinking. This does appear to be a design flaw (though since humans are notoriously bad at making long-term predictions, it may not be as crippling as it first appears.)

These are the three options you have for dealing with a mental design flaw.

Retry – You can attempt to fix the flaw, by either removing it or patching it over. This seems to be mostly possible with relatively recent (post-childhood) behaviors – the ones floating at the top of our mental soup. Correcting them is no different than learning any other skill, really – focus hard on practicing, and you’ll eventually get better. The patterns of behavior you dislike will eventually fade away, replaced by the healthier ones you’ve decided to focus on. You also might be able to learn a new behavior that complements the offending behavior, something to tack on to make it more palatable. For instance, whenever I think of a new idea, I inevitably get excited and try interpret everything I can through its lens. Once I realized this I was able to tack on ‘you always get super excited about new ideas no matter what they are – this one probably isn’t special’ to temper my fervor somewhat, allowing a more reasonable analysis of it. Many biases fall into this category – they either disappear when recognized or become easy to circumvent with a few behavioral additions (adjusting estimates downward for overconfidence, attributing a persons behavior more to the environment than to their personality, etc.) that can become as automatic as the flaws themselves.

Abort – You can’t repair the flaw, and you’re forced to ignore the system that produces it. Some flaws are buried deep in mental structures that can’t be rewired, even if we can recognize that they’re incorrect. No matter how hard you concentrate, you won’t be able to make the two squares appear the same color – your visual system automatically makes adjustments in the perceived brightness to account for the shadow. In situations like this, you need to ignore the input from your eyes. Strongly biased feelings – anger, fear, shame – also operate this way. There’s no way to turn them off or simple behavior that can counteract their effects – you have to do your best to filter out their input. These biases are much trickier to handle.

Fail – From your perspective, there is no mental design flaw. These are the buried deep into the structure of the mind, and integral to it’s function. All sensory information is interpreted by them, all thoughts are laced with them. Our ability for abstraction allows us to postulate them hypothetically, or deal with them with the aid of an outside system (such as mathematics), but the very idea of correcting them seems to be confused, because to us it simply seems that thats how the world is. An example would be perception of color, or the sensation of touch, or the idea of causality. Those are interpretations that the mind imposes on the world at a very very low level, and every other thought or idea we have is built out of them.

The lower you go in the mind, the harder it gets to tell the difference between an interpretation of the world and the world itself.

Is there anything that causes more inner conflict than a difference betwen preferences and meta-preferences? Between our low-level, immediate, subconscious desires and our high-level, long-term conscious desires? (The conscious/subconscious divide isn’t exactly accurate, but I’m drawing a blank on a better way to frame it.)

We want to eat delicious junk food, but we want to want to eat healthy. We want to be lazy, but we want to want to get exercise. We want to watch tv, but we want to want to study for that test and pass our class. Our desires for the way we wish we were are constantly at odds with our behavioral defaults, that can’t be overcome without using self-help tricks, productivity hacks, and various other methods of mental chicanery. Despite the vaunted power of consciousness, it’s more often than not the baser desires that we end up fulfilling.

However, it’s the conscious desires that we pay lip service to. We talk about being led into temptation and sin, away from righteousness (well, we don’t, but other people do). Someone fulfilling their high-level desires is noble, ethical, and high-status, whereas someone fulfilling their low-level desires is crass, disgusting, immoral and low-status. We feel shame or embarrasment about the things we actually want (sex, status, and money, roughly in that order), and people that don’t are considered selfish and unethical. As individuals and as a society we place high value on suppressing or overcoming your baser instincts.

But what’s most interesting is that we seem to value the suppression, the act of pure will as much or more than the actual high-level values. Someone who’s genuinely altruistic is eyed with suspicion, and someone happy by default is viewed as unrealistic. We value success, morality, and altruism more if it’s laced with struggle – we admire years of tenacious practice more than natural talents, and prefer tales of overcoming hardship to stories of freewheeling success. Being human seems to be about difficulties, conflict, and pain. Agent Smith was right.

What is it about suppression and struggle, about difficulty, that impresses us so much?

Today I narrowly avoided causing a car accident.

I was driving home from work, on the same road I’ve taken almost every day for over two years. It’s a sort of winding two lane road that widens to four as you approach a busy intersection. Neighborhoods shoot off from either side every so often, and there’s very few traffic lights. It’s a reasonably busy road, but aside from a bottleneck when going from four to two lanes, there’s seldom any traffic problems.

Anyway, I was driving along the two-lane stretch at around 6 pm. It was starting to get dark, but I’m essentially on autopilot – it’s the same drive every day. Ever since I deleted all the music on my iPod (a whole other story), I don’t really do anything on my commutes except sit and think. So that’s what I was doing, cruising along, sitting, and thinking – no radio, no phone, no distractions whatsoever.

Despite this, perhaps because of some previously undocumented superhuman lack of focus, I managed to stop paying attention to the road for a few seconds. Maybe I spent a little too long looking at the dials, maybe my eyes were glazed over as I turned something over in my head – I honestly don’t remember. But when my eyes found the road again (again, it couldn’t have been more than a couple seconds), there was an inexplicably long line of cars stretching in front of me. Traffic, for whatever reason, was at a complete standstill. My foot was still on the gas. The car in front of me was getting very close very fast – I was doing the speed limit, 50 miles per hour.

“I am going to crash my car.” I remember thinking that.

I stomped on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel to the right. The tires squealed over the ‘gnk-gnk-gnk’ noise that anti-lock brakes make when they’re really working hard. I missed the car in front of me by what probably wasn’t more than a few inches. Fortunately, the incident in question happened at the entrance to a neighborhood, and so I was able to guide the still-squealing car into the middle of a narrow two-lane street shooting off from the main road. I caught my breath, imagining the property damage and cases of whiplash I very nearly caused. I warily drove to the end of the street (it ended in a cul-de-sac), turned around, and got back on the main road. The traffic had cleared by that point, and I drove home without any further incidents.

There’s no pithy lesson or clever insight from this. But it’s the sort of thing you regret not writing down immediately, while its still fresh in your mind.

We never have all the information necessary to describe something’s state. We always compress, abstract, and simplify, including nothing but the bare minimum of description necessary to account for the behavior we’re interested in. A concept is like a puzzle piece, the information we have about it it’s shape. A small amount of information can give you a rough idea of what the piece looks like, but for all the intricate edges you need to be well-versed in whatever concept is being referred to. The map of the world we create inside our heads is an enormous mesh of these concepts stitched together at the seams.

This leads us to the expert problem, what Steven Pinker cheekily calls ‘The Igon Value problem’. If you’re not an expert on a particular concept or topic, your puzzle-piece is going to necessarily be oversimplified. Without the background information, the years of study necessary to place it in the proper context, the best you can hope for is a shape that’s roughly similar, that leaves out the rough, messy, complicated edges. And without those messy, complicated edges, it’s all too easy to use the concept in a way that it doesn’t apply, to start stitching unrelated concepts together along what appear to be nice smooth edges.

For instance, say you haven’t read any Dawkins, but you’ve heard of his selfish gene theory, that genes selfishly do whatever it takes to get themselves copied. And say you’re also somewhat familiar with Freud, and his idea that subconsicous desires motivate most of our behavior. Without the proper background in evolutionary theory or psychology, you might stitch these two unrelated concepts together into the idea that all our behavior comes from subconscious desires to pass on our genes. And indeed, many people have committed this particular error.

This brings me to what I call the “Rough Edges Heuristic”, which essentially states ‘If something seems simple, you probably don’t understand it very well.’ This doesn’t stop me from oversimplifying concepts and welding them together – that’s all this blog is, really – but it does stop me from putting too much stock in them.

As any and all writing seems to coming out as a (figurative) illegible scrawl, I present to you a short excerpt from my hastily written, unedited novel. Enjoy:

–

Marc walked up to the nurses station, put down his pad, and leaned heavily against it. It had been a long day.

“We need to move patient 34B to another room again. And have you heard back from the JSDF psychologists yet?”

“They said the case is a top-priority, then hung up. I’d hate to see what a low-priority looked like” said the nurse. Murray was by far the oldest person on the now-skeleton staff, but everyone liked him too much to let him go – he had been manning the nurses station for the past 2 and a half years. “What’d he do this time?” he remarked while jotting something down on the screen in front of him.

“Sent his hand clear through the glass – you know, the kind thats supposed to stop a bullet – and tried to decapitate himself on the edge of the hole.” He reached for the coffeepot, pouring himself a large cup. “Damn near did it to – got halfway through the artery before he passed out.” He took a long sip. “Blood everywhere.”

“Christ” said Murray, though he didn’t look up from his pad. “He stable?”

“Yeah” replied Marc. “I’m not even sure decapitation would have done the trick. Those mites are something else.”

“Yes they are” said Murray nonchalantly. Marc supposed Murray had seen everything change enough times that he had gotten used to it by now, but he was still struggling with it. All those years of schooling, all his experience – almost completely replaced by a bag full of microscopic bugs. The thought still made him shake his head in disbelief.

Still, he supposed he should be happy to have a job – the upper floors of the hospital were completely empty, not even supplied with electricity anymore. All their equipment was in the process of being boxed up and shipped off to God-knows-where, certainly not any other hospital. The only patients left were the ones with degenerative, incurable diseases, along with a few nutjobs like 34B. And even for them, his was more of a maintenance role than actual healthcare. There wasn’t much he could do besides monitor their mite levels, making sure the little bastards were still hard at work. But it was a boring job – they always were.

“I hear Mitch got a job with that…lets see what he called it again…Joint Committee Branch of Medical Resource Management, or some other such gobbledygook. They’ve got that new building down in the Plaza.”

“Yeah” sighed Marc. “Good for him.” He has seen the new building, a towering edifice of glass that had sprung up in the span of a week. The only jobs going around seemed to be with the conglomerates – InTech, Dynasis, Industrial Electric – or as a damn legal advisor. Why a U.S. Congressional committee had an office in downtown Kyoto he hadn’t quite figured out, but the thought of going to work for them, of sitting in a damn cube all day made him shudder. His place was here, among his patients. It didn’t matter how good the machines got, he thought to himself – you still gotta have a doctor in there somewhere to make the tough calls.

He reached for the nearest pad, and pulled up the file on patient 34B. Kazuki Hitoshi – JSDF fighter pilot, shot down over the sea of Japan. He had been recovered, rushed to a treatment facility, and undergone some experimental surgery that had, apparently, worked. Marc vaguely remembered reading about this “miracle case” in the pages some months back, but hadn’t thought about it again until the “miracle case” had been unceremoniously dropped into his lap after trying to kill himself one too many times.

He flipped to the next page. Brought in after displaying severe suicidal and psychotic tendencies. He flipped through page after page of incident reports – given himself a concussion by slamming his head against his cockpit window, dousing himself in petrol and nearly setting himself on fire, pouring liquid mercury down his throat, attempts to sever various limbs – and those were just the ones that weren’t blacked out. And his self-destructive habits hadn’t changed after he’d been admitted. If anything, they’d increased – rare was the day that Marc wasn’t informed that patient 34B had tried to hang himself again, or had been scalded by a hot steam vent, or had stuck his hand in an electrical socket. It was as much a part of his routine as his daily ham sandwich.

Past the pages of incident reports were the patient interviews – simultaneously the most and least interesting parts of the file. Marc could see there were several of them, each of them nearly an hour in length, but the audio and video recordings were blocked, and the transcriptions were blacked out to the point of illegibility. All that remained were a few cryptic phrase fragments – “me here and me way over there”, “fallen inside myself and can’t get back”, “cut off, don’t you get it PIECES ARE MISSING. IMPORTANT PIECES.” Marc had pestered the JSDF every time he submitted his biweekly report – “No change in patients condition” – but they hadn’t budged. And whatever cocktail was being pumped into him was, if nothing else, good at preventing him from talking. Either that or he thought Marc was a dark wizard bent on capturing his soul, Marc thought to himself.

He came to the end of the report – care instructions provided by the JSDF. “Patient is to be sequestered and monitored at all times. Given daily injections of MDS-001 and MDS-004, and constant drips of nanomite treatment 3-DB, 965A, and AB-Theta. Report on patients condition to be filed bi-weekly.” Marc had only a vague idea of what the nanotreatments were made of, and the injections were a complete mystery. He had considered digging deeper, but always chickened out at the last minute – didn’t want to give them anymore excuses to can him than they already had.

He tipped his cup back, finishing the last of his coffee.

“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff” said Murray. “It’s always the same flavor – a mixed blend of mud and shit.”

“Keeps me awake long enough to get home to my bottle of whiskey” replied Marc, grabbing his briefcase and heading for the door. He half-waved to the doctor relieving him as he got in his car to head home.

He drove down the impeccable streets, barely noticing the skyline that had changed again since he had seen it that morning. On the radio was a story about the most recent terrorist attack – this one in Seattle – but Marc barely heard it. His mind was focused on that bottle he had waiting, on that warm oakey taste that rushed past his lips, on the pleasant fuzziness that almost made everything seem normal. A smile crossed his face as he sped forward into the setting sun.