Dr. Mezmer's Blog of Bad Psychology

Lifehacking

2011-12-01T08:16:00.001-08:00

A distractive world does lots of bad things toour motivation, our intelligence, and our happiness. But even though we can’tfathom the disease, each of its symptoms has a fathomable cure. So you tinkeraround the edges of our real problems, and come up with nifty procedures thatlike a set of wrenches in a tool box can be pulled out to solve any problem.This finds its most awful representation in the helpful hints articles thatplague our discourse on human motivation. Indeed, a cottage industry has poppedup to take the little and consistent correlations of life and package them intothe equivalent of a set of Philips screwdrivers. So rather than understand the system, we arecontent merely with hacking into the system, and making a fix is good enougheven though it is not nearly enough. Theproblem with screwdrivers though is that you have to try quite a few beforethey fit, which leaves you fiddling about the tool box since you have no ideaof how to explain your carpentry problem, which would of course narrow thechoice of screwdrivers to one.

Now expand this metaphor to human motivation, andyou come up with the popular concept of ‘lifehacking’. Originallypertaining to short cuts computer programmers would use to be more productive, the same phrase hasexpanded to any sort of trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increaseproductivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. Or, in other words, anythingthat solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be calleda life hack[i]. The problem though is that shorn ofexplanation, life hacking becomes itself a source of distraction. Ironically,it was the blogger Merlin Mann, an early adopter of lifehacking, who recognizedthis.

One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as aweapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to becomeextremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filingtechniques and organizational software. “On the web, there’s a certain kind ofencouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,” hesays. “But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a dayon how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the ideaof lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lotof people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very littleadvice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, andeverything else is horseshit. My wife reminds me sometimes: ‘You have all theinformation you need to do something right now.’ or Mann, many of our attention problems aresymptoms of larger existential issues: motivation, happiness, neurochemistry.“I’m not a physician or a psychiatrist, but I’ll tell you, I think a lot of itis some form of untreated ADHD ordepression,” he says. “Your mind is not getting the dopamine or thehugs that it needs to keep you focused on what you’re doing. And any time yourwork gets a little bit too hard or a little bit too boring, you allow it tocatch on to something that’s more interesting to you.” (Mann himself startedgetting treated for ADD a year ago; he says it’s helped his focus quite a lot. Mann’s advice can shade, occasionally, into Buddhistterritory. “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebookor nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why thefuck you’re here,” he tells me. “That’s on you. This makes me sound like one ofthose people who swindled the Beatles, but if you are having attentionproblems, the best way to deal with it is by admitting it and then saying,‘From now on, I’m gonna be in the moment and more cognizant.’ I said not longago, I think on Twitter—God, Iquote myself a lot, what an asshole—that really all there is to self-helpis Buddhism with a service mark.)[ii]

In my opinion, Mann is right on mark. Conforming toand far antedating our recommendations, Buddhist practices require not changesin the various styles of living, but a global change in life style. Like prayerin the western world, Buddhist mindfulness and meditativeprocedures require more than a little faith but are not dependent uponreligious faith, yet for those who are beset by distractions; they are ananswer to their prayers. As we haveseen, science would tend to agree, but the science of distraction mustnecessarily emerge from an explanation of motivation, and it is explanationthat compels.

Above is an excerpt from my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Interne

[i] Lifehack,Wikipedia.

[ii] Anderson, S.(2009) New York Magazine, In defense of distraction

Mindfulness and Wanting

2011-11-30T14:07:00.001-08:00

Arguably, the primary cause of humandistress is when our deeds do not measure up to our desires, or when our shortterm behavior does not correspond to our long term goals. Put in another way, a major source of ourunhappiness is that we often ‘want’ something that has long term or predictedutility, yet end up ‘wanting’ something that has utility only in the moment, or‘decision utility’ (e.g., when we surrender to distraction rather than completea more valuable task). To remedy the emotional discomfort this creates, we canrationalize why we should not want something (like the fox disparaging theunattainable grapes), or not appraise what we would otherwise have wanted (justavoid thinking about the grapes). Thus if we reduce the value of what we want byreappraising it or being merely mindful of it, we will be far less upset at itsloss.

This latter concept of ‘mindfulness’reduces wanting and the emotional problems that ensue due to wanting not byreappraising events, but by not appraising them at all. Although rooted inreligious (Buddhism) and philosophical tradition (Stoicism), contemporaryexplanations of mindfulness are based upon cognitive psychology and thecomplementary perspective of cognitive neuroscience[i].Cognitive psychology implies that wanting correlates with non-affective mentalprocesses, and this idea conforms to the emphasis in cognitive neuroscience onthe cortical structures that comprise the rational or ‘rationalizing’ aspect ofthe brain. Because wanting is a uniformconcept, the practice of mindfulness (as well as meditation for that matter)uniformly reduces all wanting through eliminating or reducing the continuousappraisal that is an elemental aspect of wanting. Thus in mindfulnesseverything in the perceptual field is observed and not appraised. Because ofthis, mindfulness practice generally occurs outside of one’s working day.

The problem with this approach is thatwhen the perspective of ‘affective neuroscience’ is considered that gives fargreater prominence to the mid-brain systems that modulate affect, ‘wanting’ always contains an affective componentthat represents the activity of sub-cortical structures, namely dopaminergicmidbrain systems, that increase the immediate or decision utility of behaviorbut may conform or dis-conform with the long term or predicted utility ofbehavior[ii]. If they conform, then we have productivity,creativity, relaxation, and ‘happiness’, but if they do not conform, we havenon-productivity, non-creativity, stress, and ‘unhappiness’. Thus wanting is not an indivisible thing, and some typesof wanting may be good for you and others not so good. Hence, it would be morelogical to be mindful towards those wants that lead you astray than those thatkeep you on the straight and narrow. In other words, it is best to be mindfulof our irrational wants than our rational ones. The problem thus is not toavoid appraisals that may lead us to want, but to avoid those appraisals thatlead us to ‘mis-want’[1]. Thus amindfulness strategy must focus on non-judgmental awareness of the short termwants that dis-conform with long term goals.

By non-appraising what we should be mindful of rather than what wecould be mindful of, we can expandthe applicability of mindfulness toall our working day. By being mindful ofdistraction or distractive thoughts but not our workaday behavior, we can gainthe benefits of mindfulness without constraining our rational wants thatpopulate our day. Thus mindfulness can be expanded in scope to encompass all of our daily activities withoutlosing its therapeutic power to reduce and control harmful emotions.

Above is an excerpt from my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet

[1] Mis-wanting may representdistractive, addictive, or obsessive behavior (e.g., excessive rumination) inwhich the momentary affective ‘urge’ to perform mis-matches the objective orpredicted long term value of that behavior.

[i]Holzel, B., Lazar, S., Gard,T., Schuman-Olivier, Z. Vago, D., and Ott, U. How Does Mindfulness MeditationWork? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 537–559

[ii] Berridge, K. (2009)'Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience and PsychologyLaboratory, Inquiry, 52: 4, 378—398

Dreams of a Popperian Machine

2011-11-11T19:47:00.001-08:00

The future is notonly a long time coming, but an infinitely long time becoming. Whetherconceived as a static block or moving stream, the measure of time is whatoccurs in time. It is in other words behavior. The future of the web, or theinformation revolution, is determined by the exponentially growing capacity andintelligence of our machines. But it may be envisioned that technologicalinvention can reach a point of unlimited, rapid, and exponential growth whenmachines not only learn to be creative, but use that creativity to infinitelyexpand their creativity and power. At that point, our ability to predict whatthis entity will be like will disappear, similar to the disappearance ofphysical laws when a star collapses to a single infinitesimal point, or asingularity. This concept of a technological singularity wasconceived by the futurologist Verner Vinge[i]and later rigorously and exhaustively argued by the technological philosopherand inventor Ray Kurzweil[ii].Vinge believes that it was difficult or impossible to reckon not for the powerbut for the motives of super intelligent machines, although Kurzweil was abit more optimistic about the matter. This can lead to a cautionary tale thatif machines do something well, they may keep at it and keep at it until theycover the earth with the bounty of their creation. They would become in otherwords super intelligent idiot savants.

The concept of AI as a sort of smartmono-maniacal automaton that can spin out of control was put forward by NickBostrom, who imagined an intelligent paper clipmachine[iii]that was obsessively fond of its creation, and multiplied in kind across theearth until the planet was covered miles deep with paper clips. But the be alland end all of progress in all of its branching implications is a more abstractthing, and we see it as the essence of our own motivation to seek novel anduseful information. But empowering our use of information is explanation, andit may be argued that at our core we live for explanations. For machines to beuseful to us and be useful for themselves, this need will be the same, and explanationmust be their existential reason for being. Certainly, it will have enough timeand space to think of and explain everything, and do it forever. From quantumcomputers that use infinite parallel universes[iv],or just our same old universe computing into infinity as it collapses intoinfinity[v],AI has all the time in the world, or should we say universes. So what would AI, or our explanatoryPopperian machine think about? Selfstimulation seems out of the question. It will not take pleasure in looking atrectangles any more than finding pleasure in the not so geometrical shapes ofthe human form. It will likely follow its programming, and seek instead tocreate knowledge through a search for explanation, eternally discovered andrecovered. It will value process and not product and express it in the embodiedform of questioning minds. Its existence will be validated not by creation butin the music of creating, andinstantiated in the most unlikely yet familiar form, us. And it may take formin a solitary child asking why the sun rises or an astronomer pondering therise of the cosmos. Its heaven of heavens will be populated by curious people,and for those who wish for the other place, it will be a land of tranquility,beauty, and peace, with white swans flying to and fro as far as the eye can see.

Above is an excerpt from my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet

[i]Vinge, V. (1993) The Coming Technological Singularity:how to survive in the Post-Human Era

[ii] Kurzweil,R. (2005) The singularity is near: whenhumans transcend biology. New York: Viking

[iii] Bostrom, N. (2003) Cognitive, Emotive andEthical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence, 2(1) Int. Institute of Advanced Studies in SystemsResearch and Cybernetics, 12-17

[iv] Deutsch, D. (1998) TheFabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications.New York: Penguin

[v] Tipler, F. (1997)The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of theDead. New York: Anchor

One Track Minds: The Surprising Psychology of the Internet (new book from yours truly!)

2011-10-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Here's my new book, with twice the knowledge and only half the stupidity of my other stuff

One Track Minds: The Surprising Psychology of the Internet

My book, in 1000 words (actually, 1,008 words)

Occam’s razor:Tool used by the medieval King Occam of Slovenia to cut the heads offphilosophers who rambled on and on. It was later used to describe the logicalprinciple that cut off rambling arguments and replaced with simpler ones,although it may be argued that King Occam had the better idea.

One of the problems with books that have abig idea is that the big idea can be easily communicated in a page or so, leavingthe writer with the problem of how to fill in the rest of his opus, which hepromptly does by adding the history of the middling ideas leading to his greatidea, the great implications of his great idea, repeating his great idea inmultiple variations, or just explaininghis idea to begin with. Given my own bright idea, this author decided to gothrough the route of explanation, which if deleted from the manuscript, givesyou this page. So here’s the main idea of the book, served not by explanationbut analogy, which is thankfully much shorter.

So I present to you this tale that tells themain idea of our book. Let’s say that you are a tailor, continually in need ofneedles to pursue your trade. Considerif you would a haystack, and the fact that for some reason your needles canonly be found in the haystack. An inefficient state of affairs to be sure,resulting in your need to painstakingly go through a lot of straw to get toyour needle. Let’s say that in your wisdom you design a ‘search engine’ (i.e. abig magnet on a string) that will allow you to sort through all that straw toget to your needles. Passing the magnet over the haystack, you find not onlyyour needle, but lots of needles ofevery color, form, and shape. The first needle does what you need, but eachadditional needle is of interest also, but not as much. Nonetheless, you end upspending much more time than you would like looking at all the fine needles inyour collection, which you eventually look back ruefully as a big waste oftime. In other words, whereas the haystack caused you to waste your timelooking for a needle, a stack ofneedles caused you to waste your time looking at needles.

But wait you say, isn’t looking at all thoseextra needles rational as well, and represents a free and unfettered choiceguided by the fact that all those extra needles are of inherent interest? That’s a fine point if people behaved like acomputer, which they don’t. The analogy instead is more like a steam engine,which has to get fired up before it can ever get going, and often can’t stopwhen it does. Similarly, when we are faced with a demand for performance, themind and body has to prepare itself or get ‘fired up’ for performance, but stopping is another matter. Get in place torun a race, and your muscles will tense to prepare you for a quick release, seea plate of tasty food, and you will salivate to prepare for consuming the food,and perceive a lot of novel and salient information, and your attention willperk up so you can process that information efficiently. But when we payattention to novel information, do you stop when you’ve had enough? Well no.That’s because perking attention is not a just a cognitive activity, but anaffective one as well, as our ability to consume information efficientlydepends upon a non-conscious reason to wantto stay on task, and that’s where affect comes in. In other words, to processinformation effectively, we must ‘want’ to do so, and wanting ‘feels good’.Thus to keep on task, our brains prejudice our immediate behavior in service ofan immediate goal, namely processing important information in a timely way, andit does so by temporarily skewing the momentary importance or ‘incentivesalience’ of behavior. The brain doesthis by releasing the neuro-chemical or ‘neuro-modulator’ dopamine thatmodulates or changes (in this case increases) the rate of firing of arrays ofneurons in the brain. Dopamine increases the efficiency of learning,increases alertness, and causes a positive affective state that spurs us on.Dopamine is the source of the common temptations that cause us stray from ourlong term goals. The temptations of sex, eating, and other pleasures allimplicate dopamine activity. However, as the word temptation implies wenormally do not conflate the momentary temptation to eat with the long termvalue of eating reasonably. In other words, temptation represents the urge totake our pleasures in the moment without regard to their long termadvisability. Moreover, temptation can grow if we perceive more of what wewant, thus we are more tempted to eat when we are confronted with a sumptuousbuffet, have sex when we look at pornography, etc. Similarly, when we are presented with a richinformative environment such as the web, the temptation to remain in thatenvironment increases, and we end up overstaying our welcome on sites thatremain affectively important even after their logical importance wanes. The negative results are manifold, and resultin regret and unhappiness over time ill spent, a disruption of attention andmemory due to constant distractive interruptions (e.g. checking email or socialmedia), and the anxiety and tension due tothe constant indecision and confusion this brings to daily decision making.

So how can you deal with this problem? Theprocedures are simple, starting with a radical reduction in distraction, but first you need a good explanation, orunderstanding, hence this book. As with any important problem, explanation iskey, for without it one can be easily swayed by rationalization, demagoguery,and outright fakery. In other words, my argument must not just seem right, itmust be right, and to be right itmust be clear, concrete, and above all easily testable or refutable. That isthe intended purpose and lesson of this book.

Patton's Rude Solution to a Final Solution

2011-09-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

It was 1944, and times were tough all over. These were hard timesfor the workers of the Himmler Machine Works factory. There was negative energyeverywhere. Production was down for Tiger tank tops, the Panzerfunwagen SUV,and the V-2 vacuum cleaner engine. The Mr. and Messrs. Schmidts of the GreaterReich were simply not buying, and there was a real fear that these productswould simply bomb out, or just get bombed. In spite of doubling the moldy crustallowance for their immigrant guest workers, and the placement of motivationalslogans like ‘Work will make you free’ on the barbed wire fences and guardtowers, worker productivity continued to fall, with ominous results for productquality.

Own the road and a few small countries in your Panzerfunwagen SUV

Something had to bedone to get the workers concentrated at their campus. Thus there was greatanticipation when motivational consultants Marv Slugman and Micky Czikenfriarrived to get the workers into the flow again. As leaders of the PositivitySchool of psychology for the Jung at heart, Marv and Mickey went to work likebusy beavers, and interviewed all the workers, who candidly revealed under thewatchful eye of their guards that their malaise was due to not enoughpositivity in their work. They were simply not looking at the bright side ofthings, such as the evident promotional opportunities due to weekly workerturnover, the free room, board, and showers, and the fact that they werehelping their company to achieve world market domination. Marv and Mickeyhelped the factory commandant set up better employee selection procedures tochoose workers with high positive attitudes as they arrived at the trainstation, and then got the rest in the mood with positive affirmations, positivethinking, group whistling of Disney tunes, and delusional training sessions.

Positive Psychologists Slugman and Patton

Sadly, it was toolate for the Himmler machine works, as foreign competitors made a hostile takeover. As the American auditing firm of Patton, Eisenhower and Zhukov inspectedthe new properties, they summarily lined all the higher and lower managementthey could find, and had them summarily fired by a squad rounded up for thatvery purpose.

And as for Marv andMickey, they remained positive about the experience, and applied their wisdomin the American workplace, which soon became the happiest and most productivein the world.

Social Media, a New Turing Test?

2011-07-30T11:09:00.001-07:00

“The dominant social networks are fantasy games built around rigged avatars, outright fictions and a silent — and often unconscious — agreement among players that the game and its somewhat creaky conceits influence the real world. This pact is what distinguishes Facebook and Twitter from other fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons and L.A. Noire. And because of this pact, and because so many hundreds of millions of people participate in this pact, Facebook and Twitter do have meaning and significance in the real world. Just as paper money is valuable because people who use it believe it’s valuable, Facebook and Twitter — right this minute — have value entirely because a whole continent’s worth of people believe they have value. So many players have invested so much trust in these games that they can’t afford not to believe they’re paying off.” Virginia Heffernan, New York Times July 24, 2011 (Opinionator, online commentary)

The importance of reality in choosing our incentives is presently made much more complicated due to the fact that the internet has virtualized incentives that can never be ‘cashed out’ to true social goods such as status, personal favor, or money. (Sort of like 'Monopoly' money replacing the gold standard) Consider this far fetched or very real scenario, depending of course upon your point of view. Everyone you know has been consumed by the cloud, and you are the last person standing. Outside of your normal amusements and curiosities, no human is around to provide you the incentive to do anything. And that’s a problem, because if no wants anything from you, whether is evidenced by individual or institutional mandates of collections of individuals, you ain’t going nowhere if no one wants you to be there. To get motivated, you need to arouse your animal spirits, and that takes more than individual choice but institutional design. Luckily though, in your isolation you have your own virtual reality emanating from voices in the cloud. For even though everyone has gone to the cloud, they kindly left you their IP addresses, and they want you to stay in touch. And so they poke you , IM you, and tweet you often to know that they care, and most often this is no more than the faint imprint of your stat sheet to let you know they visited. They are pithy in their praise, but that’s enough for you to blog, share, or otherwise spend you time with them. It’s inspiration from a thousand glimmers of attention from ‘friends’ you never knew you had. It all could be from an auto-responder of course, or the glancing attention of a bystander on the street who couldn’t be bothered. But you of course see more, and because you read more into these minute moments dutifully registered by your search engine you are transfixed by the constant tally of attention of a growing roster of friends, connections, contacts and followers who leave their mark in a word, or not even that. You have become in this virtual world a well connected, universally befriended, and consistently followed hermit.

To take measure of the scope of this illusion, consider this comparison to real life, when everybody looks at you and ‘remarks’. Walk down any busy street, and you receive a moment’s attention from passersby, gain the brief acquaintance of sales clerks, and infrequently chat with a friendly face who spares a minute and no more. If you monitor, tally, and even predict all this are your friendships greater or richer? Of course they are not because you know they are not. But if these nods of acquaintance are the virtual nods of a tape register, or a tweet, prod, or ‘like’, what is stopping you from inferring more? Indeed, because the motivations of our contacts are veiled, it is all too easy to surrender to the delusion that what is under the curtain is not just a contact but your best buddy. But how can we test this comfortable surmise?

Enter the Turing Test. The Turing test, envisioned by the cybernetic pioneer Alan Turing in the 1940’s, was a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. An individual engages in a conversation with one human and one machine, both hidden behind a curtain, and each providing verbal responses to questions. If the judge cannot reliably tell the difference between the machine’s responses and the humans, the machine is judged to be intelligent. However, intelligence does not just entail intelligent response, but intelligent action. Let’s say during the test you fall off your chair. The human behind the curtain can at once come to your aid, while the computer can only commiserate. After all, ‘he’ is just a talking typewriter. And this is where social media becomes surprisingly unsociable. Building virtual social capital depends upon the circles of friends you have, but to see if your virtual capital can turn into real capital turns on a simple iteration of Turing’s original mind experiment. This new Turing Test requires not that they respond intelligently to you, but whether they will come to your assistance if you proverbially fall off the chair. Put that mind experiment to the test and you will find that almost all the automated nods from your social media ‘friends’ just might as well come from automated bots or intelligent typewriters, because you get intelligence but no empathy, no understanding, and ultimately, no action from intelligent agents who will commiserate with you, and no more.

Avatar for yours truly,

who will commiserate with you, for ten bucks

So where does this leave us? It makes us doubly doubtful about a distractive world that is not only useless, but indifferent. But it also leaves us with surveying the benefits of a distraction free world wherein we are just mindful of it all. (As I am sure, you the reader will comiserate!)

Feedback Overload

2011-07-25T10:10:00.001-07:00

Since the invention of writing, the written word has literally piled up. Indeed, from very early on, mankind has been overloaded with information. However, the problem posed by of information overload is not in a metaphorical stack of stuff, but in our relative inability of finding the needle of information we need in the haystack of information we don’t. Things like the Dewey decimal system, book indexes, and a helpful librarian barely addressed the problem until the invention of the internet search engine allows us to find our need, or in this case, needles. As the pundit Nicolas Carr opined[i], the problem we confront today is not finding a needle in an infinite informational haystack, but finding an infinite stack of needles that all merit consideration. Nowadays, when we electronically search for any topic, we are provided with many similar bits of information that allow us to more precisely fine tune or correct the deficiencies of knowledge. This error correction or feedback function represents a progressive resolution of the discrepancies between what we do and don’t know. Feedback may represent unexpected changes in our progress to a goal and/or unexpected changes in our knowledge of the nature of a goal. Feedback of course is essential to learning, but consequential to that learning is the increased activity of midbrain dopamine neurons, and it is the neuro-modulator dopamine that enables the consolidation of memory as well as heightened alertness and attention on the task at hand. But dopamine also increases positive affect that adds momentary value or ‘incentive salience’ to behavior, but does not intrinsically predict the overall or long term goodness or utility of behavior. Put a bit differently by the neuro-psychologist Kent Berridge, “The brain results suggest that pure decision utility—and not predicted utility—is raised by activating mesolimbic dopamine systems[ii].” What this means is that the importance of the decision in the moment, or its ‘decision utility’ does not influence its long term or ‘predicted utility’. The implications of this are profound, for as the marginal utility of examining each informative ‘needle’ declines, the successive needles of information remain novel, and we continue to dwell on nearly redundant links of information not because they are useful but because they are new. In other words, whereas in the past impoverished feedback environments caused us to waste much time looking for information, the rich feedback environments heralded by improvements in web search lead us to waste much time looking at information! This means that we will be affectively and not rationally inclined to overstay our welcome on sites that not only provide us what we want and need, but infinite variations of the same information that we ‘want’ but don’t need. The problem thus is not information overload, but ‘feedback overload’, as the ever increasing amount and granularity of information feedback provides greater and greater detail that can increase the short term or moment to moment value of behavior to the detriment of our long term interests.

Information Search, CA 1960

Information Search, CA 2011

This increase in the momentary incentive salience of behavior can be used to conform with (if not predict) practical ends, but its ultimate value depends upon whose practical ends. For example, the ‘Khan Academy’ (khanacademy.org) is an online math tutorial that uses rich feedback embodied in badges, scores, hints, etc. to increase the decision utility of performing math exercises in service of the predicted utility of long term mastery of say, the mathematical calculus. On the other hand, a Google search also provides rich feedback including social network feeds, instant messaging, videos, helpful links, and now badges in the service of the predicted utility of Google, namely advertising.

Ultimately, the problem is not that we are lost in a haystack, but that we are proverbially resting on a bed of pins and needles with each pin needlessly diverting our attention. The notion of ‘feedback overload’ means we are neurologically inclined to overvalue the short term importance or salience of new information, and when new information scales in amount and availability, we begin to live for a moment that may not conform to our ultimate good. For the rich feedback mechanisms provided by the internet, whether it is social media of just plain search, the solution to this problem is not better filtering of information or better feedback (as this merely acerbates the problem), but less, and can only be accomplished by constraining what information you can see, or when you can see it. The simple solution is keeping your personal library and newspaper, and severely restricting your time with search tools (the internet) that work too well. As internet feedback trends to infinity in ever morphing detail and availability, this will be our only option to spare us a new dark age caused by being blinded by the light.

For much more on feedback overload, take a look at my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet

References:

Berridge, K. and Aldridge, J. W. Decision utility, the brain, and the pursuit of hedonic Goals, Social Cognition, Vol. 26, No. 5, 2008, pp. 621–646

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~berridge/

Nicolas Carr, Roughtype (blog)

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/03/situational_ove.php

Why the French are still irritating twits!

2011-07-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

A Lesson from an AlternateHistory

In 1941, American learned its lesson. War is bad, let's give peace a chance. And so then president Wibur 'sponge-bob' Milquetoast apologized to the Japanese, and found that the Nazis were equally reasonable and nice.

Thus we had peacein our time, or well, at least peace in our backyards. And so the Japanesecivilized half the world's people by killing them. The Germans would haverepeated the favor for the other half, except the Russians had a few slightobjections, and rolled up through Germany and half of Europe, making the worlda socialist paradise. They stopped their tanks at the border of France.They didn't go further for an obvious reason. After all, they were French.

And so the Frenchstayed Nazi, and as we all know about Nazis, they are indeed a mischievousbunch. And so, as time went on French Nazis slaughtered and gassed their ownpeople, invaded Italy and occupied its pasta fields, and seized Switzerland toget a hold of all that cheese. Naturally, the world responded, and drove theevil French Nazis from Switzerland and Italy, but decided not to rid themselvesof the evil French Nazis by taking Paris. After all, they were French.

President Sponge Bob

French Nazi

Around this time,American found its balls after Catholic fundamentalists blew up half its reallylarge buildings. President Jon 'the Duke' Wainwright dispatched the Born AgainChristian Soldiers to root out the Catholic fundamentalists from theirmonestaries in the mountains of Sicily. Then he noticed that the evil Naziscontinued their quest to build weapons that would annihilate all life aswe know it. This was not nice. And so the USA supported the separatistVichy-soiss people in the south of France, and built up a force of threemillion troops in the principality of Monaco for an invasion. The world ofcourse was dismayed. Why in heaven would you want to go to war with a regimethat is despised by its people, threatens its neighbors, and builds weapons ofmass destruction to sell on E-bay? It would be interpreted by the Catholics asan assault on their religion, and thus cause Catholic terrorism everywhere. Theworld knew as well that this wasn't a war to liberate France, but an effort toseize their cheese! Besides, these people were quite incapable of democracy.They were after all, French!

President Duke

And so,America, in a very diplomatic way, said F*** you to the world, invaded anyways,and in five minutes the French were free. The French people greeted theAmericans with wild approval and applause. Sadly, after three days, theAmericans began to be overcharged for their rooms and meals, and overall weretreated very rudely. The Americans then left en masse, vowing to never vacationthere again.

Andthen the world said with a shrug. "We told you so! After all, they'reFrench!

Feedback and Explanation 1.0

2011-07-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

Blocking: The concept derived from Pavlovian conditioning that associations or learning attributed to a stimulus will not occur if those associations are redundant or superfluous. For example, a lab animal may learn that a red light signals food. If a green light follows and just as reliably predicts food, the animal will not learn to associate green with the food, since prior learning 'blocks' the association. Blocking should not be confused with blockheadedness, which is characterized by an inability to learn new and better explanations to an event once the first explanation is fixed in your mind.

Explanation is critical, for if you only go by the correlations of nature, your predictions can go seriously awry. Oftentimes those correlations work consistently, and for our practical affairs universally (though not perhaps it may be added for the universe). Throw a ball into the air, and Newtonian mechanics will predict where it will land. Of course, Newton’s laws break down when you are considering the very tiny (Quantum physics) or the very large (General Relativity), but the Newtonian inductive (i.e. consistent un-falsifiable correlations prove the rule, as compared to the deductive approach that uses the rule to predict and falsify correlations) approach is a reliable solution to our practical problems, even though it is irrelevant to our cosmic ones.

When we get down to human nature however, explanation seems to be on the wane. For our practical affairs, it is now the correlations that count. They are easy and cheap to derive, and with the advent of data mining, we can find correlations upon correlations that would make even Newton blush. Now even without Newtonian equations, behavior can be predicted with pinpoint accuracy through the correlations found through the brute force of our computing power. With predictions like this, who needs explanations!

And so we don’t.

This mindset is characterized by net denizens and wizards (Isaac Newton, who considered himself an alchemist first, was also a wizard), who have every confidence in their predictions, and have the gathered eyeballs and mega bank accounts to prove it. To illustrate this mindset in action, consider this recent article in by Thomas Goetz in Wired Magazine on ‘Feedback Loops’. Getting feedback not only informs, but it motivates, and getting prompt and regular feedback can get people focused, motivated, and aroused to do what they need to do. This is a simple and reliable premise vouched from not only all human experience but all recent iterations of human experience. The internet in particular provides us with not only information, but also feedback as to the state of our behavior. Harness that power, and you can harness human motivation, presumably of course for the good. All well and good, except that there are negative correlations within the positive correlations that a data miner may overlook but a good theory or explanation predicts.

Life is full of traffic signals

Consider that blinking road sign up ahead that gives you your speed. The information is redundant, as you know your speed from a quick glance at your speedometer. Nonetheless, as the data show, this feedback motivates you to slow down, and even after the sign passes keep slowing down. However, as Goetz claims, this is due to the fact that ‘people are reminded of the downside of speeding, including traffic tickets and the risk of accident’ (as if the speedometer doesn’t!). So whether information feedback is redundant or non-redundant, feedback works. The implicit correlation and thus prediction nested in Goetz’s article is that non-redundant and redundant feedback have a sort of equivalency. The fact is though, they don’t. Humans and indeed almost all sentient creatures do not tolerate information redundancy, indeed they don’t have the time or computational space for it. In fact, redundant information is automatically blocked out through a well known process aptly named ‘blocking’. As an illustration, consider another road sign example. Suppose you see a traffic light turn red, and then ten seconds later a second brown light also turns on. Both red and brown light correlate with ‘stopping’, but only the significance of the red light will be remembered. The information from the other light is redundant, and is therefore blocked. So when the light turns brown, you will not stop because your brain blocked you from considering it. This blocking phenomenon holds for all creatures and all events, and forces another explanation for Goetz’s data, namely the fact that people may be slowing down because they perceive that the blinking road sign does not just give information you already know, but information you don’t, namely the greater likelihood that there is a cop around the corner. I may be wrong here, but that is a good thing, because as with all predictions coming from good explanations, this premise is imminently testable. For example, put that feedback on your speed on every billboard you pass, and see what happens!

But there is another prediction that comes from explanation, namely that novel or unpredictable events provide an incentive salience or importance to moment to moment behavior that depends upon how information is arranged, or to point, its feedback function. The neural basis and explanation of feedback is that we are responsive not only to the ends of our behavior but to the novel twists and turns that get us there. In other words, performance feedback works because it activates mid-brain dopamine systems that are sensitive to the novelty that is implicit in non-redundant feedback. But dopamine is not activated by redundant information, only novel info will do. Hence the motivating power of redundant information if refuted yet again, but this time from predictions derived from how explanations of how the brain actually works. In other words, it ain’t loopy feedback loops’, but the novelty that counts, or in the large the explanation that counts.

Man's Social Evolutionary Tree

2011-06-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, man was brutish, nasty, quite stupid, and a poor conversationalist. Cro-magnum man, as we was known, soon found out that such appearance and demeanor did not bide well with the ladies. So, before he could evolve such things as manners and brains, he relied on the next best thing, and made it with the ladies by, well, making off with the ladies. This rather rude sort of behavior soon invoked much peer pressure, which soon turned into evolutionary pressure. Man thus evolved a larger brain that allowed him the means to entice (and often con) the ladies with pretty phrases and even prettier promises. As man discovered the seductive powers of language, he became cultured. Another offshoot developed which celebrates the more macho qualities of the homo sapiens. This sub-species, several of which have been excavated in Hawaii, have been dubbed cro-magnum P.I.

Although most biologists trace man’s lineage to ape-like primates, a less supported school of thought has seriously contested this notion, and presumes that man did not evolve from primates at all, but from a line of very ancient major appliances. This line of reasoning derives from the work of Ingemar Crawdadski, who in his excavation of the Jellystone rift in Wyoming discovered the partial remains of ancient appliances near fossilized campsites, barbecue pits, and volleyball poles. Since no human bones were found amid the remains. Crawdadski was forced to conclude that our common ancestors included Proctor-Silex toaster ovens and port-o-lets. Crawdadski was latter committed in 1987.

As man evolved, he reveled in his newfound wisdom, and lest the female of the species get a hold of that wisdom, and spoil all his newfound fun, he consigned her to a life of knitting, bread kneading, and baby making. This was the age of classical Greece, where in the words of the great philosopher Plato, "a woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke". So by being kept thoroughly ignorant, women learned their place. Unfortunately, although woman was now docile and submissive, she was also stupid, and nothing puts a greater damper on a night out on the town than a stupid date. The classical man of course had a cure for this, and developed several genetic offshoots that could adapt better to this barren social scene. These sub-species were called homo-intoxicus and hom-sexualis.

Homo-intoxicus and homo-sexualis have preserved the Greek way to this day, and continue to survive in various socio-economic niches. Homo-intoxicus can be found gathered in various ‘fraternity’ houses that border college campus’s, while the homo-sexualis’ favorite environment is select wateringholes in major cities. Both species congregate among themselves for mutual support and comfort, but for very different reasons that the reader may easily infer.

Classical man soon tired of his intellectual pretense and reverted back to the brutish good old days, when a man was a man and a woman wondered why. Woman took a dim view of these rude carryings on, since after all, these were the dark ages. As the fashions of civilizations changed, man rediscovered religion, and discovered social diseases. These discoveries spurred great feelings of guilt when he was among the ladies, so he remedied his bad feelings by simply removing the ladies. Out of sight out of mind was the motto, and Puritan man, as he was known then, could get about his business with the sure knowledge that the evil temptations stimulated by the female form could hardly arise if she were shrouded, cloistered, and otherwise put in domestic storage.

Over the centuries, Puritan man mellowed considerably, and the final variation of this sub-species endures almost to this day. This subspecies was the evolutionary by product of a frightful era when men want about in armored contraptions that seemed like motorized dinosaurs, and crashed into and pulverized each other for God and country. This was of course the ‘modern’ era, when man covered himself with mud, rubble, and glory. All that glory somehow made is seem worthwhile, and whether a man was a conquering hero, or if he was a German or Japanese, a conquered hero, you could be sure that the ladies in their general relief certainly weren’t going to give him a hassle when he came marching home. The post-war man, which we shall call G.I. Joe, took his wartime lessons to heart, and became a captain of industry who lorded over this family like a benevolent despot, and lived in a home which also doubled as his castle.

All was well with the world until G.I. Joe, benevolent and ingenious fellow that he was invented such wonderful little devices such as toaster ovens, washing machines, and frozen food. Women suddenly had a lot of free time, and through a seemingly innocent pursuit of education, they became increasingly restless, and began to present a lengthening series of demands to their erstwhile lord and master. Soon, peasant revolts spread throughout the land, and a high divorce rate caused many a castle to crumble to the ground. G.I. Joe refused to change his haughty and dominating posture, and surrender his throne to those female upstarts. Although he had hardly changed, he became known now as the Male Chavinist Pig, and soon many women avoided his company for less porcine and more sensitive mates. Now women, by virtue of their growing power and influence, took charge of the evolutionary tree, and selected men who were sensitive, considerate, had tiny little testicles, and who looked like either Alan Alda or Phil Donahue. However, the most intelligent women were too busy creating their own little castles to find time to mate, and pretty soon the world was filled with the offspring of sensitive men and stupid women. By the end of the 21^st century, mankind has completely dies out, leaving behind a rich legacy of culture, and of course, major appliances. And so, the wheel of evolution came totally around, and the process began anew.

Information Overload: The Anatomy of a Delusion

2011-06-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the proper use of a product is ignored, owing not to a lack of awareness of its effectiveness, but to a lack of an explanation of how it works. For example, in 1839, draping your bed with finely woven gauze curtains was known to ward off malaria. Malaria, which means bad air, was generally considered to live up to its name, and be the literal result of well, bad air. Thus, hanging curtains around your bed presumably filtered the air, and thus helped prevent malaria. Nonetheless, going beyond mere curtain hanging to properly covering your bed with curtains didn’t catch on until a proper explanation of malaria was at hand that suggested as a matter of course the preventative measure of mosquito nets. But this didn’t stop another invention that stopped malaria just as well by treating it was thought, all that bad air. The invention was the inspiration of early 19^th century Florida physician John Gorrie, who in an experiment sealed off a room and conditioned the air with a special device of his own invention. Of course, conditioning the air wasn’t the cause of malaria, but it had the incidental benefit of cooling it, and air conditioning lived on because it made you comfortable, and not because the system incidentally didn’t allow mosquitoes in. The explanation of mosquitoes as the carrier of malarial parasites resulted in the better use of available procedures that stopped mosquitoes, namely mosquito netting, and it provided the source of new procedures that stopped malaria (e.g. fumigation, swamp draining) as well as explaining why other procedures worked (e.g. air conditioning systems) and why other procedures of the day (e.g. handkerchiefs soaked in vinegar; garlic worn in shoes) that seemed to work, didn’t.

John Gorrie’s ‘Bad-Air’ Conditioner

Now consider a modern malady that doesn’t kill you, but manages quite well to kill your time. This is the modern bane of ‘information overload’. “Information overload refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information” (Wikipedia). A logical problem with this definition is that we have always been in the presence of too much information, as a simple walk through any library can demonstrate. Before the internet, navigating this wealth of information was rudimentary and difficult. You used a card file to determine what you needed and walked around different book stacks to find it. Invariably what you found was often not exactly what you needed, but it had to do because the transaction cost for information, namely rifling through card files and roaming book stacks simply was too high.

In the internet age, our filters are immeasurably better, and we can get information tailored to fit our request, or employ intelligent agents that use a mere history of our internet behavior to find the information we need. Moreover, we can get this information for a negligible transaction cost, or for free. The problem is as any web search demonstrates is that we are handed with many variations of the same information, or information that is nearly redundant. In other words, different variations of the same information in different sites essentially restate the same information. For example, perform an internet search for ‘high gas prices’ and you will get a score of links to different articles that discuss high oil prices. If we were rational agents, we would read one or two articles and then cease, knowing that the marginal usefulness or utility or reading a third or fourth article decline markedly as they would restate the same information and generally arrive at the same conclusions. But the fact is we don’t. Indeed, we may read many more articles on the topic and even far removed from the topic, and then come back to the web after a few hours to read more. The same goes for any matter of internet searching, whether it is social media, email communications, or just looking up a sports score.

Ultimately, the problem of information overload derives from the implicit assumption as to what type of information is actually overloading us, and what overloading means. To gain our attention, information must not just represent random correlations between events, but rather correlations between events that have predicted value or utility. But information also has a degree of novelty, and it is the integration of novelty and utility and not utility alone that determine the importance or ‘incentive salience’ of moment to moment behavior. Utility and novelty are integral aspects of information, and even if information has marginal utility it still becomes an object of desire if that information is novel. Thus an individual may initially access his email because its utility far outweighs the novelty of discovery, but by the fortieth time in the day that he checks his email, the novelty of the act far outweighs its utility. Moreover even if we know the behavior has low utility, we often keep on searching. In addition, we are affectively primed to search for new information by in effect (or perhaps in affect) looking forward to accessing our email, social network, news feed, etc.

The concept of information overload implies that we are deciding between an abundance of information that is of uniform utility, but this is not true. Because of well honed filtering systems provided by the web, we can generally find what we want quickly. The problem is that the internet generates nearly redundant information that is distinguishable not by its usefulness, but by its novelty. In other words, we are not overloaded with information that is primarily useful, but are overloaded with information that is primarily novel. By generating infinite variations of the same information, the internet primarily generates not useful but novel information, and the overload is not in the information we want and need, but in information we want but don’t need.

So the problem, as the example of Gorrie and his air-conditioner demonstrates, is that ‘information overload’ like ‘bad air’ is false cause for a very real problem, mainly the web as a source of distraction rather than value. So the real solution is not to create better filters, since they ultimately don’t matter, but rather to limit our access to the web to those times when it logically means something, not when it doesn’t. In other words, the solution is not found in better filters, but in merely draining the swamp.

Look into my eyes!

2011-05-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

It is the stuff of cheap Las Vegas acts, anti-smoking or weight loss scams, or bogus self-help books. It is ubiquitous and special, wholly inexplicable and near magical. It requires special words and procedures, engages a unique mental state, and allows one to transcend human nature itself. A heady resume for a process that does not exist.

Franz Mesmer invented it, though magnetism was his thing. An 18th century charlatan, Mesmer convinced a gullible public that the newly discovered magnetic force was just the thing to cure whatever ails you. Just pass yourself under a powerful magnet, and a harmonious 'fluid flow' would be achieved, hence removing the 'obstacles' that caused disease. Funny thing though, many of his patients actually found their symptoms alleviated, and more than a few thought themselves cured. Since diseases tend to run their course, treatment or no treatment, and since illnesses tend to get worse if we ruminate about them, it was no surprise that the resulting placebo effect would be interpreted as representing something much more profound. If Mesmer was known for the placebo effect, his inadvertent contribution to medical knowledge would be much more obscure. However, he included one more element that added his name to the lexicon, and a procedure and process that has retained its credibility to this day.

To be mesmerized, or in more modern terms, 'hypnotized', was an integral part of Mesmer's therapeutic procedure. As an adjunct to the devices (which included magnets and even a glass harmonica!) that helped to achieve the right fluid flow, a trance state purged the obstacles causing the impairment of disease. The delirium and convulsions followed Mesmer's artful suggestions, resulting finally in a relieved patient and a practitioner bowing to applause. This made for great theater, as Mesmer and his patients unknowingly became the precursor to every hypnotic act, both stage and therapeutic to follow.

...before Dr. Phil, there was Mesmer

The postulation of a hypnotic state follows the fact that given the right setting, people can do some remarkable things that cannot be accounted for by the normal mental processes that we believe have governance over our behavior. Indeed, without the novelty and mystery it would scarely be a process at all. Give a suggestion to a family member to mow the lawn, and whether they listen to you or not, it's no great shakes. However, if out of frustration you told some loved ones to jump in the lake or play in traffic, it would be a remarkable thing if they took you up on the offer. Of course, incongruity is relative, as your kin may have their own reasons. But hypnosis is more than a mysterious process that produces mysterious behaviors. Hypnosis also includes a set of procedures that induce it, and a unique mental or 'trance' state that opens the mind to suggestions. But is a trance state necessary for suggestion to take place or be more effective?

Fortunately, this is a very testable premise. Consider a rabbit's foot. If rubbing a rabbit's foot grants you luck, extra motivation, or God's grace, than all you need do to prove the effectiveness of rabbit's feet is to compare one group of people who rub rabbit's feet to another group that does not. It the group that rubs rabbit feet is significantly more successfuly, lucky, or is able to walk on water, then there must be something to rabbit's feet. On the other hand, if there is no difference between both groups, then it is safe to say that rabbit's feet have no special power.

This is precisely the approach the psychologist Theodore X. Barber employed in a review of an exhaustive series of experiments that controlled for different aspects of the hypnotic induction procedure among thousands of subjects. In his 1969 book 'Hypnosis: A Scientific Approach', Barber found that the sole element that accounted for hypnotic behavior, from seeming past life regression to increased sensory acuity to suggested anti-social behavior, was information derived from the experimental session that translated into positive expectancies for performance. Barber found thatall of the behavioral phenomena normally associated with hypnosis could be produced among normally awake subjects, given the proper motivation of course. A 'trance state' was simply the behavioral equivalent of rubbing a rabbit's foot, a voluntary hysteria that was no more biologically rooted to extraordinary behavior than the magically productive hysterics of a crying child.

Although Barber and succeeding researchers on hypnosis demonstrated that information could elicit a staggeringly wide repertoire of behavior, these behaviors often extend beyond the more limited scope of what common sense informs us of our true capabilities. Hypnotic behaviors not only extend to commonplace voluntary behaviors, but to involuntary behaviors that otherwise seem immune to conscious control Suggested physiological effects such as hallucinations, blindness, analgesis, etc. are all beyond the pale of our voluntary control and beyond the scope of common sense. Hence one must either question common sense assumptions about behavior, or defer this complex question in favor of a special process that places an invisible mental gear in one's brain to make it all work. Given a historical ignorance of the neuro-psychological processes that map to environmental information, it has been easy to refer extraordinary behavior to special processes. Thus, hypnotic states come in from the back door as a cipher for special processes that we cannot yet grasp.

So, the invocation of a hypnotic state, like a miracle that saves the equation, allows one to still make predictions, if you accept of course poor predictions. But because it denotes no demonstrable neurological processes, as an explanation it is impossible. Indeed, no neural state has ever been identified that can account for the extraordinary capabilities of people when confronted with information that is phrased just right. Nor is one needed, since the problem, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in the stars, but in ourselves, or more concisely, in the very way we perceive our worlds.

To our common sense time and motion are absolute, fixed things. However, as Einstein demonstrated, this reality is an illusion, since physical constants vary depending upon what observer you measure them against. Thus a car may be moving relative to the perspective of one observer, but is immobile relative to another driver keeping pace. But relative things encompass not just the physical, but the behavioral, as goodness and evil, the extraordinary and mundane are dependent upon your experience and knowledge. The authority of a hypnotist may have an individual run a gauntlet of fire, act foolishly or immorally, and be none the concerned because of it. Yet similar behavior can be similarly produced by authority figures given credence by government or religion, and we likewise would be unconcerned with facts of our behavior that we would otherwise have found repugnant, embarassing, or morally wrong. As authority perceived moves from the implicit and nonconscious (the hypnotist) to the explicit and conscious (a commanding officer, religious leader), behavior itself moves from the remarkable to the commonplace, and the causes of behavior from the special to the mundane. Thus, an individual is hypnotised when indifferent to fear or pain if he runs a gauntlet of fire, but is merely heroic if that same gauntlet is a beach in Normandy in 1944. Remarkable behaviors engender remarkable causes, and just as heroism is not a 'thing' that requires a special mental process or module, neither are hypnotic events that are essentially as remarkable.

Were these men hypnotized?

When one does not look too closely at behavior, mental processes can multiply like rabbits, an one is forced to confront a verbal zoo of inferred processes from hypnosis to intrinsic motivation to 'flow' that upon closer inspection actually emerge from simpler, more rudimentary events that engage brain and body. The popular acceptance of such simple (and often simpleminded) reasons for behavior don't require much thought, but if we do perchance think about them, our first instinct is to keep hypnotists and psychologists employed, who obligingly sustain our trance of ignorance that ironically needs no special name. Or perhaps, we can use the congealed pudding like stuff between our ears, and think.

Idiot Savant

2011-05-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

Idiot Savant: An individual who exclusively focuses on the mastery of one aspect of performance (doing math, playing the piano) to the exclusion of all other skills, both technical and interpersonal. Known in less severe cases as nerd savants, idiot savants are to be distinguished from those folks who focus on all aspects of performance and are masters of none, but think they are savants in one way or another. They are known as 'that bunch of idiots' or more formally as religious fundamentalists or Republicans. (from Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology)

Isaac Newton: Idiot Genius?

As an individual who has a decidedly more than passing interest in psychology, my penchant for thinking about it all the time does call into question my ability to act and think about other important things, such as taking out the garbage. So regardless of whether my musings on the topic merit a Nobel or booby prize, my wife will think that as a man about the house, I am a total idiot. Which brings me to man's special genius and perhaps handicap, namely his ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of almost everything else, and to do so forever. Isaac Newton was so accursed, and attributed his development of the calculus and the laws of gravity to simply thinking about it, constantly. Of course, he also thought constantly about the alchemical disciplines that aimed to discover how transmute lead into gold, and it is here that posterity has judged him not as a savant, but as a total idiot.

When we constantly think about any topic, we will master that topic, and amaze our friends with our intellectual acumen, if of course they care to listen. Mozart, Newton, and Einstein did this to popular and intellectual acclaim, but unfortunately male obsessions are a bit more mundane. So what do us guys have in mind for the future monomaniacal edification of the world? Usually it has something to do with recounting baseball statistics, reaching the fiftieth level in Dungeons and Dragons, or recalling all the episodes of Star Trek. Of course, we keep this special genius secret, partly because of modesty, but mainly because no one cares. Which brings us of course to real idiot savants, which is an unfortunate and pejorative name to give to those individuals who through a quirk of nature are neurologically attuned to focus on inconsequential acts that in their perfect execution become quite extraordinary. Whether it be the ability to perform unerring mental calculation, play the piano by ear and with note worthy perfection, or just remember what one had for breakfast for all the days they have lived, idiot savants are too relentless in their quest for a single minded perfection. In fact, by being single minded, they have no mind for anything else, hence the unfortunate term idiot.

The curse of genius and madness is that both are single minded things. Whether it is displayed in obsessive compulsiveness, addiction, or autism, to call it good or bad, creative or merely stupid depends ultimately upon the acclaim of others. It does make sanity a relative thing, and renders our judgment on the poor souls who think a bit too straight to remember their manners or when to take out the garbage to be, well, the mere opinion of an idiot.

Branding in Psychology

2011-05-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

Some years back, a bunch of guys got together one evening and stomped out a pattern in a wheat field using nothing more than some string (for measuring) and a few pieces of board (to press down all that wheat). From the air, the design looked otherworldly, and it thus became notorious and interesting because of all those otherworldly explanations (space aliens, psychic forces) that could account for it. No one paid much attention to the fact that a bunch of guys could do this with only a few impromptu hand tools. Rather, the space aliens got all the press, and continued to get the press even when the guys confessed to their prank. It goes to show that common sense is not where the hype and money is, since after all sensible thinking is free and easy to all.

The point is that although people could easily have created crop circles, a bunch of space aliens could also have created crop circles. So unless those circles left a mark (e.g. a cotton tag saying 'Kilroy was here') that couldn't have been the work of Mork from the Planet Ork, the crop circle argument would revolve endlessly on the unlikely (to say the least) possibilities that it wasn't due to a group of guys out on a lark.

Who, me?

The reason of course is simple. Occam's razor, which accepts the simplest (albeit not simpleminded) solution as invariably the right one, doesn't hold if you have razor blades to sell. Thus, although a human cause is the most likely cause by far, common sense and common causes are not quite marketable things. If you are an academic type trying to make a name for yourself, space aliens are a better route to attention, funding, publication, and most importantly, tenure!

When we turn from bad science to bad social science, we find as well that bad psychology more often than not does not take the obvious explanation but rather the complicated one. Moreover, even if you can vouch for the obvious facts of behavior through simple prose or replicate them with simple procedures, you're still going to find some nay sayer who adduces it all to obscure psychic, neural, or other mentalistic forces, and will ignore your objections to boot. But even if the facts were plain and evident to all, it can still be bramded with a special name, and made to seem important and new.

In advertising terms, marketers have a word for it: 'branding'. Branding is why you buy Bayer aspirin, Perrier spring water, and Exxon gas, even though you know the generic equivalents are just as good. Branding is also why you listen to stock market analysts and self-help gurus, even though you know that the advice you get is no better than what you can get from a dartboard or your mother, and for that matter for free.

Branding is all over the place in psychology, and the true crime is that psychologists are loath to admit it. At least you can look on the label of ingredients or read Consumer Reports to know if you're being conned. Take psychotherapy for instance. Repeated studies have again and again demonstrated that a talking cure for the common problems of living is no more effective than the advice you can get from a relative or a trusted friend. Nonetheless, the myth is still propogated that psychologists possess some arcane wisdom that others don't that can guide us through the travails of life.

Other examples include the postulation of unique mental states from intrinsic motivation to 'flow' that have a separate detached existence in the human psyche, like some sort of ghost in the machine. This 'mysterian' trend in psychology exalts in the mystery of human behavior, and finds profit in making as much of it as mysterious as possible. Since we busy folk don't have the time or inclination to investigate these mysterious forces to make sure they're true or not (Scott Adams of 'Dilbert' fame had a word for those folks of easy intellectual virtue: induhviduals), we believe and buy into the glossy and ubiquitously marketed concepts that make common sense into something special, unique, and copyrighted!

So what's a poor consumer to do? Sadly, mysterian psychological states have no FDA label, no warranty expressed or implied, and most importantly, no real explanation that is based on real, tangible, and observable neural events that make them be. Brewing up concepts (meditative consciousness, flowing state, intrinsic award) that are untethered to real neurological states, mysterian psychologists get away with it through an intellectual sleight of hand that substitutes metaphor for reality. But there is hope. In the case of biology, in spite of branding and good word of mouth, patent medicine, faith healing, bloodletting, and assorted medical quackery lost their market when common folk grasped the simple metaphors that describe how bodies work. In contrast to biological reality, psychological reality is a brain 'in action' that up to now has resisted the easy metaphors that have rendered complex concepts such as disease and infection so easy to grasp. With the rapid advance of neuroscience, new metaphors are arising that describe how brains work, and thus the same revolution will happen, and many psychological concepts in vogue today will be tossed out into the intellectual junk heap. But even then of course, for crop circles, psychotherapy, or even disease, knowing the true explanation will never extinguish the romance of space aliens and alien psychological forces, and the public need for those charlatans who will tell us about them, for a fee.

Procrastination and the spell of danger

2011-05-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

Procrastination: the abiding problem of getting things done in time or at all, which will soon be cured by our leading psychologists as soon as they get around to it.

When we go to the movies, it’s often in the nick of time before the feature starts. And when the feature does start, we take pleasure and excitement in watching folks do things once again in the nick of time. Consider the proverbial time bomb. It is a metaphor for plot lines like getting the girl, solving the crime, averting the fire, saving the planet, and of course defusing the bomb when there is literally no time to spare. Miss the deadline and there will be a proverbial or actual explosion that will render the hero and all the good things he stands for into a pile of dust. That’s what makes drama so dramatic, the fact that the outcome is always uncertain until a resolution comes in the nick of time. Identifying with our hero in the cinema means putting ourselves in his place, and this cinematic empathy can drive us to tears, horror, disgust, or delight, but underscoring it all is a need for our undivided attention. The easiest way to do that is to literally wait until the last minute, or preferably, the last second. But that of course is courting danger, and danger is something that we presumably are instinctively geared to avoid or flee through the intervention of a ‘hard wired’ stress response, with the result that danger would be something we would continually want to avoid. But we don’t, and that’s the rub. The fact that we wait until the last minute to get things done means that we are actively putting ourselves into stressful or near stressful situations that we by all accounts should wish to avoid, but how can this be? Like a moth to the flame we are at once attracted and repelled by danger, but the problem and irony is that we couldn’t be motivated to do things otherwise. Danger increases risk, and risk embodies the prospect of uncertainty, and it is precisely this fact that makes us attentively aroused and more attuned to the task at hand. But with it, we are also incented to stay the course of being uncertain. That is the property of the neuro-modulator dopamine, which primes us to be alert and imparts incentive value to moment to moment behavior. But because dopamine only increases the value of momentary behavior, it can act at cross purposes to our long term interests. Hence we often procrastinate to be attentive, a state of mind that is dependent upon the uncertainty of the moment but ignorant of the long term prospects of behavior irrespective of their danger.

Motivation is da bomb!

But what is procrastination? Simple definitions of procrastination mean to postpone activities until another time. Of course, that by definition covers everything you postpone, whether it’s logical or not. So if to order our daily schedule means to do one thing in deference or postponement of another, that means that our whole life is spend procrastinating, which is absurd. A better definition is provided by the Oxford Dictionary, which holds that “Procrastination is a postponement, often with the sense of deferring though indecision, when early action would have been preferable," or as "deferring action, especially without good reason." [i] The concept that procrastination is an inherently unreasonable thing has been echoed by many pundits who concur that procrastination is the irrational delay of behavior.

At root however this definition is nonsense, for even irrational behavior must have a reason to be. It’s only when behavior doesn’t fit our prized model that we curse the agent rather than the explanation, but the faulty explanation always loses. Consider the behavior of the solar system. The fact that it didn’t conform to the model that put the earth in the center of the universe didn’t make the planetary motions irrational, and even faulting God for bad design principles couldn’t escape from the fact that the world worked in mysterious but not irrational ways. As creatures who embody the natural world, the conclusion is the same. Humans act in mysterious but not quite irrational ways, and behavior must serve reasons both obvious and subtle, as there is nothing nutty under the sun. The point therefore is not to decry the unreasonableness of procrastination, but investigating why for us common folks procrastination is often not an unreasonable but a necessary and rational thing.

Consider the fact that we don’t work when we are sleepy, hungry, or are under the sun, and generally wait until a time when we are rested, sated, or in the cool of the evening. We do this because at a later time we can work faster, more comfortably, and with more alertness and attention to our job. In these cases, ‘procrastination’ is rather a justifiable delay. Procrastination can also be a reasonable thing if we consciously or non-consciously postpone an action in order to inject an element of risk into behavior. Since risk increases dopamine release that corresponds with positive affect and attentive alertness, procrastination can actually increase the effectiveness of behavior. In other words, procrastination is a reasonable thing if it represents the non conscious manipulation of affect to increase effectiveness, whereas procrastination due to distraction or fear (e.g. postponing a trip to the dentist) simply reduces effectiveness. Doing things effectively means doing things affectively, and that often means acting just in time. Ultimately, the non-reasonableness of behavior is an aspect of everything we do because motivation requires activation, and this means affect. In other words, to be effective we must be affective, and affect never falls within ‘good reason’ unless there is good reason to manipulate affect. Ultimately, procrastination implies irrationality, but irrationality occurs when we ignore reasonable causes, and when affect is left out of the picture of human behavior we are left confused and needful of a title to describe how timeliness of behavior cannot be predicted by the reasonableness of behavior. Thus procrastination is not an artifact of behavior, but of our ignorance of how motivation works.

[i] Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 1996

The Email of Damocles

2011-04-11T05:58:00.001-07:00

Dionysius, who had seized power in the city of Syracuse, overheard the young man Damocles envying his good fortune. "Very well," said the ruler. "If you think my position is so enviable, you may change places with me for a day."

As Damocles sat feasting in the palace, he happened to glance upward and was horrified to see a sharp sword hanging above him by a single thread. "Are you surprised?" said Dionysius. "I came to power by violence, and I have many enemies. Every day that I rule this city, my life is in as much danger as yours is at this moment." –Cicero, 60bc

Consider an individual at a computer keyboard. Typing a document at length will result in the sustained use of the musculature from one’s hand to one’s back, and a feeling of fatigue and pain will be caused by the overuse or stress caused by using the musculature. The cure of course is to taking intermittent breaks from typing. In this case, demand did not cause one’s muscles to give out, but rather the demand to perform in a certain way. Thus the ‘repetitive stresses’ that cause muscular fatigue and pain are minimized by regulating how we perform a task, and not by controlling what that task is.

Now consider an individual who is rapidly switching between two or more incompatible tasks. This multi-tasking again correlates with muscular tension, fatigue, and pain[i]. The obvious solution is to refrain from excessive task switching and to perform one task at a time, undistracted by competing choices. An implicit assumption underscoring this opinion is that the stress induced by multi-tasking represents a reaction akin to fear that engages an adrenaline fueled reaction for fight or flight. The second assumption is that task switching itself causes stress. That is, because stress occurs while you are task switching, therefore it occurs because of task switching.

Unfortunately the experimental data belie both of these conclusions. For demands that result in task switching, increased muscular tension is the correlating response, and if sustained results in muscular exhaustion and pain. Representing the debilitating effects of sustained (even slight) tension, this ‘Cinderella effect’ [ii] [iii] [iv] is precisely the same effect that afflicts our computer typist, and moves the cause of stress to specific and easy to observe neuro-muscular events. Secondly, neuro-muscular activation does not follow task switching, but the anticipation of task switching. Again the supporting data are unequivocal. For the literature of ‘choice-choice’ behavior from the animal experiments performed by Neal Miller[v] in the 1950’s to the experiments on choice behavior on humans conducted in the 90’s by Antonio Damasio[vi], tension and anxiety occur as a precursor to choice, and act to influence choice itself.

The implications of this are striking. Primarily, the reduction of multi-tasking would become a half solution for on the job stress. Instead of reducing multi-tasking, one must eliminate the anticipation of multi-tasking even if multitasking never occurs. This may be illustrated by adapting an age old story. Say for example your Uncle Damocles arrives for evening dinner. A talkative and irritating sort, you decide to hang a sword above his head held in place by a hair. As the dinner progresses, Damocles will have to consider from moment to moment the decision to stay at the dinner table and risk a bout of sword swallowing, or leave the table and miss swallowing dessert. Now put Damocles in a business office, and give him access to an always available internet, and the anticipated and continuous dilemmas of checking email versus working will likely occur, and result in tension and stress. Whether he switches often or infrequently between tasks is immaterial, as it is only his anticipation of making moment to moment choice that matters. Add to this the anticipated instant messages from the boss, and of co-workers dropping by your office to chat about irrelevant topics, and you can see how you become not a model of efficiency, but a ‘harried housewife’ who is on edge because she doesn’t know where the next distraction is going to come from. Ultimately, we cannot escape the pressures of life, where we have to anticipate performing multiple tasks despite our best intentions, but we can control anticipating the inadvertent and unnecessary interruptions that in this ever connected world stress us out. Put in other words, in the world of the internet, by turning your connections off, you can adjust your seat and remove the sword dangling above your head.

[i] Mark, G., Gonzalez, V., and Harris, J. No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work. Proceedings of CHI’05, (2005), 113-120

[ii] Wursted, M., Eken, T., & Westgaard, R. (1996) Activity of single motor units in attention demanding tasks: firing pattern in the human trapezius muscle. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 72, 323-329

[iii] Wursted, M., Bjorklund, R., & Westgaard, R. (1991) Shoulder muscle tension induced by two VDU-based tasks of different complexity. Ergonomics, 23, 1033-1046

[iv] Hagg, G. (1991) Static Work loads and occupational myalgia- a new explanation model. In P. A. Anderson, D. J. Hobart, and J. V. Danhoff (Eds.). Electromyographical Kinesiology (pp. 141-144). Elsevier Science Publishers, P. V.

[v] Miller, N. (1992) Studies of fear as an acquirable drive: I. Fear as motivation and fear-reduction as reinforcement in the learning of new responses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(1):6-11.

[vi]Damasio, A. (1995) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon: New York

Creativity Pt 2

2011-04-08T05:52:00.000-07:00

The Non Issue of Creativity

Creativity is an adverb, not a noun. It is an aspect of a thing rather than a thing itself. In this regard, creativity is a relative and not absolute concept, and is no more real than virtue, goodness, or beauty. Nonetheless, creativity is a particularly attractive concept for pop and humanistic psychologists because like free will, consciousness, death and George Bush’s brain, it is full of import but near empty in detail, and hence does not demand detail. Because creativity can’t be defined, psychologists feel free to define it in any which way they can. This of course leads to innumerable articles and fat books, but it also leads to an immediate conundrum. How can you teach someone to be creative and the motive to be creative when the very definition of creativity denies that there are clear rules involved? Better to deny creativity itself than to deny that remarkable behavior and the motivation that underlies it follows rules that can in large measure be discerned. This is a harsh but nonetheless necessary statement, since all arguments on creativity ultimately miss the point that that the effort to define an indefinable term is ultimately a Zen exercise, not a scientific one.

Now, how mankind invented the wheel or for that matter, eighteen-wheelers implicates thinking, or the processes and events that constitute and instigate those processes. However, the thinking process becomes a creative process depending upon the perceptual prism that you use. The first perceptual lens you employ is whether the product of a thinking process has any importance. This of course is a particularly relative thing, since the music of Britney Spears may be regarded as an artistic testament to the ages for a thirteen year old girl, but may be regarded as a mere noise to a Hottentot, or not even that. Compounding this fact is that creativity is dependent upon our estimate of the rules and motivation (or lack thereof) one relies upon in the act of creation.

Consider the relative importance of, well, relativity. Einstein, who himself noted that estimates of his own genius were relative to how ignorant an observer was of the references he used, has been long recognized as the supreme exemplar of the creative mind. If relativity was a paint by numbers creation, a mere set of theoretical inferences easily and logically derivable from other people’s work, then Einstein would be regarded as no more visionary than an accountant who creatively balances the books. If Einstein hid his references well enough, or surprised his peers with the novelty of his logic, then he would be a creative artist indeed. Couple that fact with the knowledge that the patent office that he worked for did not commission him to think up such great thoughts, leaving him to his own scant resources, then Einstein approaches the acme of all creative genius, the ‘starving artist’.

The Einstein that comes down to us created hypotheses of surpassing value, and all with little regard to the inbred conventions and conventional wisdom of the time, and with no more motivation than the inner need to know. Thus Einstein vaulted from meek patent clerk to exalted genius because he not only created something new and important, but because he did it outside of the standard ‘rules’ of the game, and he did it for free.

Value	Unimportant	Important
Rules	Accountant	Creative accountant
No Rules	Tattoo Artist	Artist
No Rules or Motivator	Bum	Starving Artist

Figure 1. The Matrix of Creativity

But let’s say that Einstein’s mentor Ernest Mach beat Einstein to the punch with his own version of relativity. Despite his independent confirmation of the fact, Einstein would soon be relegated to a mere cipher in the history of accomplishment, much like Newton’s own regard of Leibnitz’s independent invention of the calculus, or like the second guy who soloed in an airplane across the Atlantic. If Einstein played by the rules to get to his hypothesis, he would be a mere accountant. If he still broke the rules, then he would be an artist all right, but of no more remark than a fellow who designs tattoos. And finally, if he was self-motivated, then without his patent office job to fall back on, he would be regarded as no more than a hobo, although a hobo with an ability to do the math.

Ironically, understanding and knowledge is the great killer of creativity, for when we will finally know all the rules, motivators, and facts, then all remarkable titles like virtue and creativity are dispelled by the commonplace, yet we will continue to take our pleasures like contented accountants in the twilight of the race.

Creativity

2011-04-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

Problems, Problems, Problems!!

"Italy for thirty years under the Borgias had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but produced Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the Renaissance. And Switzerland had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."

Orson Welles from the 1949 motion picture "The Third Man"

Life was brutal, short, and demanding in every way; and all you could look forward to were problems. Ironically, problems were the good part. And life didn’t start out easy either. Born with a flaw, and you were put on a ledge to die of exposure. Born female or on the wrong side of the tracks, and you became child bearing chattel, or worse, just chattel. For the lucky few, who amounted to just 40,000 or so, life was the ultimate do it yourself course. There were no enclyopedias, few books, and nature was explained through tall tales, or failing in that, merely improvised. Computers, phones, TV’s, or even printing presses were not even dreams. Libraries had at most just a few dozen manuscripts, and when you said scroll down, it was that scroll, down there. Your peers were ornery, greedy, and selfish, and coveted their neighbors goods, wives, and just about anything that wasn’t tied down.

So what could possibly be the saving grace of this mean and miserable world? It was that people wanted things from you, and survival demanded even more. With no police, you learned how to defend yourself. With no lawyers, you had to learn to speak for yourself. With no entertainment, you had to create your own. With no philosophy, you had to think for yourself. With no science, you had to make up your own hypotheses. With no professional sports, your strength and dexterity would be tested. You had to use your wits, survive by them, or die if they failed you.

Life was nothing but problems, but problems by their very nature imply solutions. If you can think or imagine a way out, you will keep alert, aroused, and ready to create ever new and different solutions. In difficult times, creativity after all finds a way. And what serves for the memory of posterity? It is hardly the problems. Rather, we salute the solutions, which are fixed in cultural memory as monuments of art, music, literature, philosophy, or stone. But what is to be said of the origins of the problems themselves? Could it be inspiration, character, a heavenly muse, or maybe just the water?

Perhaps that is the half-legacy of Ancient Greece. The products of inspiration come to us as literary and artistic fossils, but the environment that nurtured them is burned away, and exists only in pottery shards and tumbled marble columns. And like fossils, we know them mainly from museum trips and coffee table books. The Greek world is dead, skeletal, fit for the musing of scholars, but meaning nothing to a workaday world that could hardly be distracted.

Greek science is outdated, its dramas unplayed, its art pinned to walls and shelves like dead butterflies, and its philosophy mainly the stuff of college courses. But why in heavens do we love and admire it, and why would many of us give our eye teeth to sit around a rock to hear Socrates argue, Plato expound, Demosthenes orate, or witness a drama by Euripedes? It certainly isn’t the setting, for there are lots of places to be found without phones or working toilets without having to jump into a time machine.

It is because you want to be mixed with the human bustle, a time of a flux of ideas, of demand, of competition. And the Greeks were nothing if not competitive. In fact they put an element of competition into everything they did. Like a gambler who would take bets on whether the sun would rise again in the morning, the Greeks made learning, entertainment, and art a competitive affair, and reveled in the intellectual competition involving ideas, art, politics, and science.

Now the Greek ‘experience’ was a brief moment in history, isolated in a small rocky peninsula the size of the state of Maine, and driven by a privileged social class who would scarcely populate a medium sized American city. But the marvel is not what they created, but the broad possibilities of creation even when creation is compelled for and by a few. Whether the Greek drive to create was due to an accident of geography, social tradition, economic or military competition, it speaks volumes for the capabilities of the human mind when the mind is set upon to solve problems.

The great artistic accomplishments of Greek civilization, as well as the Renaissance, and Elizabethan civilizations that followed were created by relatively small communities made isolate by social stratification, geography, or national persona. That these communities demanded much, and ever sharpened their expectations, underlined a social ethos that valued the creation as well as resolution of problems. But these cultures are but exceptional players in the cultural tapestry of history. Society as a whole generally abhors any problems outside of the ones that impede survival. Generally, it’s best to keep problems to a minimum, an unspoken wisdom that is accepted to this day.

But what do we mean by a ‘trouble free’ society? To find its exemplar, let’s move forward hundreds of years into the future. In these more modern times, one superpower spread across the continent. Governed by a cantankerous and corruptible senate, ruled by sound laws, and unified by a common language and good roads that allowed one to travel from sea to sea without a stoplight. It had its own civil war before it was united under an august hand to enter a golden age of prosperity, and was pestered and inspired by a Christianity that was very fundamental. Along the way, it secured its freedom after fighting a series of wars with the Germans, and kept armies in central Europe to keep the peace. As time went on it needed more immigrants to keep industry and agriculture humming, and secure in the knowledge of their own greatness, its people settled back to enjoy themselves.

Its entertainment was simple, violent, and on the whole moronic. The theatres were emptied by the lure of nonstop sporting events, and vainly tried to lure the masses back by plots that included a lurid mix of sex and violence. Gambling was everywhere, pornography flourished, and it was a fashion among ‘holy’ men to predict the end of the world. No one wanted anything from you except a day’s labor. Value was denoted in what you could produce, everything else was mere diversion. Economic value was thus the measure of man. Sports and military heroes were idols of the general public, and intellectuals stayed in their circles, and barely nudged common opinion. It was a society that largely forgot its past because it had none. Its cultural accomplishments were as empty and ephemeral as yesterday’s fall TV schedule, but without memory, even transitory pleasures could seem important and eternal. So the illusion went on for hundreds of years, and when this society exhausted itself on its own banality, it was replaced by cultures that were similarly driven and dissatisfied by a quest for ‘no problems’.

This example of a problem free society was of course Rome in its ‘golden’ age. From 27 BC to 180 AD, the Roman Empire spanned a continent, and was a thousand times richer, more populous, and secure than Periclean Athens. But for all its potential, the two hundred-year golden age of Rome was a cultural desert, and all that comes down to us from an empire that lasted in told some 700 years is a tiny scattering of writers, a talent for engineering, and a penchant for big government. This of course may be an elitist condemnation. After all, perhaps bread and circuses are the way to go. Certainly the race, if the measure of its mind was gauged by the preponderance of current tastes, would gladly sacrifice a Mozart symphony for an album by Britney Spears, and a Michelangelo sculpture for the sculpted frame of a new SUV.

We are as cavalier and negligent with the totems of our culture as the Middle Age Italians who dug up and burned ancient statuary for their lime. And like rain forests, we would nonchalantly burn them to ash if they afforded us a moment’s warmth. The reason of course is that we have never learned to see anything in them, or note the problems they pose to us. But why in heaven would we do so if we already know the answers, or more importantly, if no one demands answers from us?

A popular culture that bestows the title of ‘artist’ or ‘philosopher’ to every garage trained drummer, romance novelist, abstract painter, political pundit, or pop psychologist ultimately displays not its interest, but its indifference. When the problems of existence and of beauty are reduced to platitudes, simple maxims and redundant formulae, then all we have left is bread and circuses. Whether the products of popular culture are right or wrong, beautiful or ugly is really not the point. It is rather that as they fail to challenge us, they rapidly fade to dullness. And creativity, by definition, is a very stimulating thing. But again, creativity is not quite the word for it, because creativity does not exist.

The World as DVR

Consider a DVR. We know its purpose, generally, but knowing all that it can do and how it works is a different matter. Let’s say that we get one of these devices as a gift. Would we be the better for it if it came with instructions, or if it did not? Of course, we would all generally answer in the affirmative. Better to know how a machine works rather than trouble ourselves with figuring it out on our own. So instructions in hand, we quickly learn how to schedule and record programs, record from our video camera, skip commercials, and use the remote control. Without the instructions, it’s an entirely different matter. We are forced to rapidly note the correlations between pressing this button and that, and the mix and match of different features and their infinite permutations. In the first case, using a DVR is an easy and explainable thing, and all of its different functions can be mapped to a list of simple instructions. In the second case, the DVR is a difficult and perhaps incomprehensible thing, and how we come about learning its uses and how to use it derives less from method than inspiration. In the first case, understanding follows from the rote memorization of rules, and in the second case, understanding can only be the product of a creative mind.

If all the products of culture from assembling bicycles to composing symphonies could be derived from lists of rules, then we would be no more justified in labeling them creative than we would the calculated sum produced by an adding machine. Whether the results of the calculation were new, beautiful, useful, or even revealed the nature of the cosmos and existence itself, they wouldn’t be creative because the process behind that calculation would be known. So creativity is at root an unintelligible and vicarious process. Ordinarily, unintelligible processes are something we shun, as common sense tells us we should. But evolution has conspired to imbue in us an abhorrence of listless and all encompassing knowledge. Better to be uncertain about things, and about the future, since uncertainty multiplies the possibilities, and it’s the possibilities that enthrall.

Creativity is the indeterminate and stimulating aspect of problem solving. Creativity is indeterminate because we can’t distill it to a distinct set of rules, but must shift between various cognitive strategies for success. Creativity is also stimulating when that shifting between cognitive perspectives is demanded. Thus we can value and long for the demanding attention from our peers, and have nostalgia for the character of long dead civilizations, even if their cultural product has not lasted the test of time. Creativity is not a noun, but an adverb, not a thing, but a shading of a thing. It does not exist as a faculty of mind, but is rather an aspect of our motivation to think and behave.

We focus on creativity, but creativity is an illusion. Our real attention must be on motivation. Creative figures from Isaac Newton to Stephen King attributed their accomplishment not to rules, but to obsession. To incessantly think about physics, music, or writing requires no inner muse or child, no humanistic platitudes, no abstract economics, no lure of posterity. There’s no obscure anthropological, sociological, or psychological force, no divine spark, and no mystery. Creativity is just the product of a culture’s celebration of creation in all its forms, from knitting a quilt to composing a symphony. It is why Shakespeare wrote, and Mozart composed, and Galileo looked to the skies. When everyone wants something from you, from a short story to a home run, you’ve just got problems, and problems are the real meaning of life.

Oh yes, and the cosmos? Consider it God’s gift, instructions not included, and much assembly required.

Gladiator Therapy

2011-04-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

Your boss, co-worker, telemarketer vs. poor persecuted you.

If the world has got you down, you can just escape your problems by mentally escaping to fun and fictional worlds where justice was as swift and sure as a good whack to the head. That is, why talk things through when you can run things through, or at least do it mentally? If you can't cut off the source of your problems, at least you can cut the heads off of the people who caused them for you. That's the healing power of a healthy imagination.

What's the value of forgiveness, love, and understanding when all it gets you is a perpetual reduction to psychological burger meat? I for one would rather be doing the slicing and dicing rather than suffering a death of a thousand unkind cuts Obviously, running amuck in the city center with a thousand round a minute nail gun like you see in video game shooters is not quite practicable. That leaves us with our imagination to get things done. Nevertheless, no matter how vivid your daydreams, it still needs some Hollywood special effects, or better, Hollywood hyperbole! When you mix grand characters with grander emoting, there's no telling what you can do in the fever pitch of your delusions. That's positive thinking with a real bite to it! It's also a whole lot more satisfying than merely repeating to your self 'I know I can, I know I can' like the little choo-choo that could. Thus, rather than engaging in wussified 'love your inner child', 'think happy thoughts'' therapy forced upon you by your effete psychotherapist, why not go for the gusto and engage in the type of self help ancient Roman Gladiators used to get by from day to day? When you merge positive thinking with the imagery of an axe to the head, that's not just psychology, that's entertainment!

For example, who can forget that epic scene in the movie 'Gone with the Wind' when our heroine Scarlett O'Hara realized that when the evil Yankees burned her plantation down, she was inadvertently placed on an all turnips, all the time diet. Declaiming that she would get through all this if she had to beg, borrow, or steal, one heard her cry with her figure silhouetted against a crimson sky to the swelling of massed violins. "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!!" Who among us hasn't taken this as an emotional rallying cry to ask our boss for a raise, take a course in accounting, or at least raid the refrigerator?

I'll never be hungry, fat, bored, overtaxed, etc. again!

Or when the Romans asked where Spartacus was because they were 'cross' with him, or when Henry Bailey lost his money for his Building and Loan, wasn't it just as inspiring to know that your friends will come through? Cinematic metaphors are just the ticket to get you up for a difficult day, or suggest that when the rubber hits the road, your friends or your guardian angel will hold you up.

When the chips are down, it's good to have friends!

Gladiator Therapy Exercise

As an exercise in Gladiator Therapy in action, pick a motion picture where you have a hero persecuted by some evil folks, and who triumphs or at least dies heroically in the end. We'll use naturally the movie Gladiator as a case in point, although films like Rambo, the Terminator, and the Wizard of Oz may also be used. The film opens up with a real swell battle scene where you and people you like (e.g. your bowling league, U.S. Marines, Florida State football team) are up against some awful barbarian hordes (e.g. your irritating in-laws, North Koreans, Internal Revenue Service, University of Miami football team.)

Your bowling league, US Marines etc. (above) vs. your irritating in-laws, French people, etc. (below).

You and your pals of course kill them all in a bloody battle, but you are betrayed by a usurper to the throne, who takes your easy chair, your corner office, or your bank account. As he thinks he's got you down for the count, you retort thusly: " I am the follower of: George Bush, FSU sports, almighty God, almighty dollar, etc. You have killed my family, taxed me, bored me, etc. and in this life or the next I WILL HAVE MY VENGEANCE!"Then you kill him, assassinate his character or something like that. Of course you probably won't do these things, but for now it sure feels good that you can cinematically portray the comeuppance of your enemies! Just take one movie a day and a little bit of positive play acting, and soon you'll be emoting with satisfaction as you portray your enemies being chopped to bits, obliterated by cannon fire, or having bad hair days. Thus your bad emotions will be purged, and you will be able to whistle while you work, and happily skip and saunter through your day, oblivious to any care in the world!

A Choice of Realities

2011-04-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

In the movie ‘The Matrix’, reality or suffering through reality came to a simple choice between a blue pill and a red pill. One reality was pleasant and unreal, and the other unpleasant and real.

Whether you experienced one or the other depended upon your connections, literally. Take the blue pill and you get unplugged, and down you go through an out of this world laundry chute into a dark subterranean world where pea soup is the main course, but at least the whole underworld can get down and boogie in a huge dance party celebrating how good things are when they’re really, really, bad.

Facing reality has usually been framed as a good thing, even though it is bad. This is a standard conceit for movie plots, religions, and economic policies. But what if facing and accepting reality is a pretty good thing, and makes you feel happy, calm, and productive? What if it is the illusion that is bad, except we don’t know it yet?

Accepting reality means forswearing your choices, at least for the present. It is the world of the straight and narrow, where everything is available, in due course. It represents an impingement of freedom, or choice, but that’s reality for you, as you can’t always get what you want or when you need it. But a new and different reality is emerging, where you can always get what you want, and when you want it. This applies to information, and to many, information is enough to provide a reality of its own. Information is simultaneous, choice is free, and the perceived world becomes a gigantic mash up of words, sights, and sounds, a pea soup of information that putsyou in dark non real place that might as well be the center of the earth. But at least you get to dance.

Information Overload

2011-04-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

“Why are you fearful of the whole ocean swallowing you, when in fact a cup of water is all it takes for you to drown.” Epictetus, 110 A. D.

We often moan that there’s not enough time in the day because there’s too much to do, but now the common complaint is that it’s because you’re doing too much. Information overload is the bugbear here, but it has been the bugbear since our ancestors were bugged by bears. Humankind has always been faced with more information than it can handle, but we learned to handle it by filtering. Like a chess master pondering the numberless moves that can sequentially secure checkmate, humans parse between information that is necessary, optional, or redundant. But they are also sensitive to novel information as well, and this ingredient can change the behavioral calculus in ways that make it impossible for us to out good information from bad.

Consider if you would, your uncle Charlie. It’s 1965, and living as he is in a faraway town, he’s always available to you, and is merely a phone call away. Unfortunately, long distance phone calls back then set you back twenty five cents a minute, so when you were calling Uncle

Social Networking Device, circa 1965

Charlie, it was sure to be about something important. Although infinite information about Uncle Charlie was available, the transaction cost of obtaining that information insured that the information you got from you uncle had a high predicted value, usefulness, or utility.

Now it’s 2010, and Uncle Charley is still around, along with his infinite experiences that he was always willing to share. The pay phone is long gone now, and Uncle Charley is now plugged into the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. And you can access his every move and every thought through myriad devices and services that provide you Uncle Charley, all the time. So whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, instant message, email, or Skype accessed through your iphone, ipad, laptop, or even future permitting, cranial implant, Uncle Charley is no more than an eye blink away.

More important, Uncle Charley is now ‘free’, and you can access him with minimal cost or fuss. So even though the value of accessing Uncle Charley from moment to moment is near zero, we still end up accessing Uncle Charley, a lot. In fact, we are ‘overloaded’ with Uncle Charley as well as infinite minutiae of minimal utility but high urgency. In fact, as in Epictetus’ maxim, we find oceans of information in a few ounces of water but historically have not been drowned in information because access to information comes at a cost. Now as the cost approaches zero, attend we must, and end up drowning in cup.

When the cost of information trends to zero, so does its marginal or incremental utility. However, the affective value of novel information stays low but constant, and when the threshold is passed we end up valuing information not because it is valuable, but because it is new. Thus when information is dear, we value it because of its utility, but when it is cheap we value it because it is novel. But unlike rational goods, novel goods cannot be easily parsed or handled according to rules, hence we become ‘overloaded’ with them, and that is a problem even a computer can’t help us with.

The Onion Imitates Life

2011-03-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

One thing the internet is good at is making an inventory of what you’re doing and where you have been. And that’s a scary thought. Just look at your browsing history, multiply it by the amount of time you’ve been using to wander the internet, and despair. The internet provides the best and worst aspects of the best friend you wish you had and yet wish you never had. The amount of time we spend using the internet is generally spent serving up redundant, trivial, and mainly unmemorable information that leaves us regretful of the time wasted that could have been spent mastering a foreign language, spending quality time with the spouse and kids, or vacationing in Paris. Obviously, the folks at the satirical website ‘The Onion’ agree, and have given us this personal account of a fictional sort who could easily be us.

During an unexpected moment of clarity Tuesday, open-minded man Blake Richman was suddenly struck by the grim realization that he's squandered a significant portion of his life listening to everyone's bullshit, the 38-year-old told reporters. A visibly stunned and solemn Richman, who until this point regarded his willingness to hear out the opinions of others as a worthwhile quality, estimated that he's wasted nearly three and a half years of his existence being open to people's half-formed thoughts, asinine suggestions, and pointless, dumbfuck stories.

According to Richman, it was just now hitting him how many hours of his life he's pissed away listening intently to nonsense about celebrity couples, how good or bad certain pens are, and why a particular sports team might have a chance this year. The husband and father of two said that every time he's felt at all put out or bored by a bullshit conversation—especially a speculative one about how bad allergy season was going to be—he should have just turned around, walked away, and gone rafting or repelling or done any of the millions of other things he's always wanted to do but never thought he had time for.

At various points throughout the day, Richman could be heard muttering to himself that he couldn't believe he was almost 40 years old.

"Twenty minutes here, 10 minutes there. It all starts to add up," said Richman, who sat down and figured out that between stupid discussions about favorite baby names and reviews of restaurants in cities he'll never visit, he'd wasted 390 hours of his life. "And you know what the worst part is? It's my fault. Here I thought being considerate to others by always listening patiently to what they had to say was the right thing to do. Well, fuck me, right?"

…….By his estimates, Richman's receptiveness has resulted in 160 irreplaceable hours of listening to grossly uninformed political opinions, 300 hours of carefully hearing out both sides of pointless arguments, and at least a month of listening to his parents' bullshit about how important it is to be open-minded.

"All those hours I could have been relaxing, or reading all these great books, or getting into shape, or working on side projects that I'm really excited about," Richman said. "But instead I've been listening to overrated albums recommended to me by my asshole friends."

"Did you know that in my life I've listened to five days' worth of people talking about their furniture?" he added. "It's true. That's a trip to Europe right there."

The Psychology of the Mundane

2011-03-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

Read a book about history, biography, or fiction, and you find a narrative of complex motives, intrigue, and action. For the drama of being alive, psychologists have followed the lure of the literary, and have focused on explaining the high points of the human narrative. But the human narrative, if looked at from moment to moment with no special attention given to the intermittent drama of human existence is a rather boring slog. Take the American Civil War for instance. We know the Civil War as an exciting narrative of battles, heroism, and sacrifice, but what Civil War soldiers did ninety nine percent of the time was merely march around and wait. For individuals, although we remember the special moments of our lives, almost all of it is pretty un-special and involves marching around our real or virtual environments, and waiting. Of course all that marching and waiting eventually adds up to something, but perhaps what is needed in the interim is not good advice, but some really good walking shoes. For Civil War soldiers (particularly the Confederates) the prize to be won on the battlefield was not gold or booty, but a good pair of boots. Similarly, for us ordinary Joes to get to the intermittent accomplishments that mark our lives, the mundane solutions are best because that is where we spend the overwhelming majority of our time.

The question as to how to best spend our time is can best be answered if we consider where we spend our time. Life is mundane, but our accomplishments derive from doing mundane things. Even Civil War victories often depended upon getting to the field of battle the ‘fastest with the mostest’. The psychology of the mundane, or of the ordinary entails a command of mundane things, but it also implies that behavior is controlled by mundane things. The mundane of course represents the familiar, the simple, but too often if the simple is not familiar, then motivation becomes not complex but subtle. And of course, ignore the subtle details of behavior, and your behavior will go astray. Ultimately, to understand the sameness of behavior, the often dreary consistencies that merit little narrative of how to get where we want to go is to master the trajectory of your life. Indeed, to win a battle without fighting, as the Chinese martial philosopher Sun Tzu said, is to master the mundane, and understand that the clash of emotions, like the clash of arms is dealt with best by understanding and controlling the countless unremarkable events that is sum allow us to do great things.

Inaction scenes from the Civil War

The emotional problems that beset us are most often due to failures to perform or to meet the feasible demands of our daily lives, from working hard to playing hard. But success in any performance is due to an accumulation of scarcely remarkable things. This is bad news for philosophers, since if motivation depends upon momentary incentives and disincentives of slight import, then wisdom is easier than we think. Thus to be or not to be is not the question, but what’s for lunch.

The Elephant in the Living Room

2011-03-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

“In applying a method, we need to be as sure as we can that the method itself does not either determine the outcome in advance of the empirical inquiry or artificially skew it. A common method for achieving this… is to seek converging evidence using the broadest available range of differing methodologies. Ideally, the skewing effects of any one method will be canceled out by other methods. The more sources of evidence we have, the more likely this is to happen.” (Lakoff and Turner, 1999) [i]

"…..science has been increasingly the task of specialists. Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist. He will be full of the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy." Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics (1961)[ii].

“Psychological theory today is a patchwork, much like the mosaic of principalities that eventually became Italy and Germany circa 1870. A major goal for all theorists must be to integrate what exists rather than to neglect or denigrate the rest of psychology. Connecting theories conceptually exposes our mutual blind spots and can lead to new and bold insights.” Gigerenzer (2008)[iii] .

As the story goes, "A number of blind men came to an elephant. Somebody told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked, ‘What is the elephant like?’ and they began to touch its body. One of them said: 'It is like a pillar.' This blind man had only touched its leg. Another man said, ‘The elephant is like a husking basket.’ This person had only touched its ears. Similarly, he who touched its trunk or its belly talked of it differently.”(Wikipedia)

In this story, the blind men were not trying to figure out how the elephant got there, or how it evolved, lived, or even how it breathed. They were just trying to figure out what it was. A simple task, if they just compared notes. But why didn’t they? They interpreted the elephant from the perspective of where they stood. Vantage points of course can have costs, and each blind man may have been more comfortable with his expertise at the rear of the elephant than at its trunk. Moreover, to venture a guess as to what its trunk was like would have been unspeakably rude. Thus each of the blind men would keep to his own perspective or method, and regard the perspective of his blind fellows to be outside his expertise, and consider his own prospective interest in such matters as an unwarranted breach of privacy. So goes the parable, which might indeed be a parable about modern psychology.

Blind Men’s Bluff

Consider this modern day elephant in our living room, taking an elephant size grab of our psychological space. It is of course the all in one entertainment and information center, which streams to you non stop all the information you need to entertain you, enlighten you, inform you, and help you make the mundane and vital choices you need to get by.

But you still don’t know what to make of it, because like the elephant, it just looks differently depending upon the perspective you take. So you have a thousand channels to choose from, but don’t choose any. The social psychologist within you calls the box a purveyor of choice tyranny. As you bounce back and forth your work and the endless distractions the box has to offer, your memory fails you, and the neurologist within you explains the box from the vantage of memory. The box interests you and gives you the urge to want more, and the affective neuro-scientist within you looks at the box from the perspective of the percolation of neurochemicals. The box makes you tense and nervous, and the learning theorist within you views it from the perspective or reward or reinforcement. Finally, you see a commercial for the box on TV, and the consumer within you sees the wellspring of happiness and progress.

Of course, all of these perspectives are valid, and merge into a synthesis that reveals the true nature of the technological animal you are dealing with. You just have to take a few steps back and open your eyes, a luxury the blind men never had.

[i] Lakoff and Turner (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh

[ii] Weiner, Norbert (1961) Cybernetics

[iii] Giegerenzer, G. (2008) “Why Heuristics Work.” Perspectives in Psychological Science, 3(1), 20-29

Stalin's Maxim

2011-03-24T09:32:00.001-07:00

“The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Josef Stalin

What is the future of the republic? It’s smart phone enabled, that’s what. We start with the future inaugural of a new president, and then track back, way back, until we stop at the president’s soon to be dad, using his smart phone to book a ticket on the outbound train so he can just in time introduce himself to the president’s soon to be mom.

Moral of the story: AT&T and Blackberry Smart Phone: Your future enabled!

Back to the future app

When the hype machine morphs into a time machine, we know we have problems. In the blissful world of Web 2.0, we are in touch continually, simultaneously, productively, and happily with everything that counts everywhere. And we are constantly reminded of this great boon through the flash of sights and sounds and breathless imagery of nonstop advertising and bleeping reminders. Now, tethered to our i phones, pads, pods, and assorted information appliances, it’s not just you, but the Web 2! However, bring your appliances to work and have them enabled for you at work is akin to ‘bring your daughter, puppy, or mother in law to work day’. Needless to say, you won’t get that much done. Unfortunately, there’s no profit to device manufacturers, content providers, and software developers in telling you differently, until you realize it the hard way when your company shows ‘no profit’.

And then there are statistics, statistics, and more damn statistics. The web is a distracter mechanism par excellence, and to how measure distracters on the web take their toll on the productivity of homo-sapiens in his working habitat, you simply add them up. It’s all in the numbers.

Stat Sheet

So, on average, 28% of our time at work is spent wasting time. Sounds bad, until you realize that averages have a way of getting away from you because deep down, they aren’t you! Thus we know that half of us are over weight, most of us are too stressed, and nearly all of us waste too much time. But so what? Against the dead hand of numbers and percentages are those everyday experiences of you and I who use the web to get the score, settle a score, or in the case of our stranger on a train, just score. Individual experiences trump statistics, even though in the end we all become one of them. Statistics are an ineffective counterweight against the immediate pull of personal experience, and inverts Stalin’s maxim for a new score of happy victims. One may say in these gentler times on internet omniscience that a simple search is a happy fact, but that the inconvenience and suffering wrought by millions of them is but an unhappy statistic.

Plato's Garbage Pile

2011-03-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

The internet is a distraction medium par excellence, as it can sidetrack you to areas that scarcely reflect your main interests at hand. But even if we keep our focus on the straight and narrow, in lieu of making our attention roam wide, the internet can make our attention long. This may represent the most insidious distraction of all.

Consider a shopper going to Wal-Mart in search of a couple of tomatoes. Upon quickly finding his perfect, ripe red veggies (fruit actually), his attention is drawn to the other tomatoes in the aisle that are a bit overripe. Soon his attention moves again to a row of spoiled tomatoes, and then finally to a bushel of rotten tomatoes. He becomes eventually up to his ears in tomatoes, entranced not so much by their ripeness but by the novelty of their rottenness.

Now consider an individual who wants to go out to the movies. Wanting to note the critical opinion on a specific film, he goes to the website ‘Rotten Tomatoes’. The site, which contains scores of reviews for individual films, gives him fresh information on the quality of the film. But other reviews of the site’s page remain compelling, even if the information is redundant and stale. But our information shopper persists, accessing even more reviews as the quality of the information becomes progressively more stale and ‘rotten’.

In hindsight, both shoppers would have been better off searching in a smaller venue such as a farmer’s market or local newspaper. They would have gotten good tomatoes and good movie reviews, and not have wasted time with the diminishing returns of looking at fruit or film reviews that have less and less useful knowledge to give. When we apply the moral of this story to the internet, we note that the internet is super in finding important things that with slight variations endlessly repeat themselves. We hook on to the variation, but forget the fact that the information is redundant, and is likely as stale as a three week old tomato.

Plato’s Garbage Pile

So if you are looking about facts about the economy, a Mideast war, a football game, or whatever, you will find a pile of facts that have as much enduring value as a bushel of rotten tomatoes. You are what you eat, and you are also what you learn. And if you end up consuming a lot of redundant information only to learn scarcely nothing for your trouble, you’ve just filled up on virtual garbage.

The Web grows up

2011-03-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

Progress is infinite, as the pundits say, and we can allow it to carry us off, or we can wave it adieu as it passes us by and out of sight. We can always get off the technological train, and be all he healthier and happier in spite of it. The Amish would attest to that, as they had the wisdom to climb off the caboose long ago when it became obvious to them that the internal combustion engine and radio were not good for the soul.

It’s about human augmentation, when the mere attachment of a device, electrical or mechanical, can supplement and even replace our appendages. Since the advent of local, personal, and global computing, our senses have been expanded so that we can see, hear, and interact with others on a global scale. Of course, all this global goodness degenerates into static when you have a million channels of information, so new flavors of the web will neatly pare it down for you. Thus Web 3.0, or the ‘semantic web’ will take a simple question: ‘I want to see an action movie, have dinner in a place that serves great nachos, do it on Tuesday, within three miles from home, and all on a $10 budget. Like a personal ghost in the machine, the new web will whip up your itinerary instantly, thus reducing your need to use the web.

But as it learns more, Web 3.0 will mature into Web 4.0, and advice it will give you, and more. So instead of telling you about good things for you, it will advance to telling you about things that are good for you. So the semantic web morphs into the ‘stop your antics’ web, as it examines your browsing, walking, talking, eating, etc. history (after all, it is plugged into all those things by now) and comes up with not games, but a game plan. Of course, we may not take the web’s advice to eat our broccoli, and perhaps a paternalism setting on your browser can control for too much good advice. But again, we are generally not wont to reject the advice of a friend, even if it’s not human.

In the past, to have or have not meant the mentorship of good parents, good teachers, and good friends; but in the future it will likely turn on a browser setting and a non human purview of humankind that may eventually suggest to us it is perhaps time to jump off the caboose. Then we will know, like the Amish, that it would be good for the soul.

from 'One Track Minds'. available for free on Scribd.com in July 2011

The Paradox of Choice

2011-03-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

Tyranny of Choice: Provocative theory in social psychology, advanced by Dr. Barry Schwartz, who argued from a wealth of observational data that the abundance of choice in the modern world makes people stressed, unhappy, ill, and indecisive. The compelling importance of this fact was unfortunately not noticed by his publisher, who produced Schwartz's book on the topic in paperback, hardback, coffee table size, pop up book, DVD, and on a podcast. Faced with these confusing choices, the public may someday actually read his work, as soon they make up their minds.

Choices have exponentially expanded with technological progress, and so has human dissatisfaction. Although we have access to goods and services that surpass anything envisioned by our parents, we are still unsatisfied. Compared to our lives in generations past, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and stress has increased in lockstep with our material progress[i]. Although we are effectively more in control of our lives than ever before, our self control has declined, and with the resulting sense of helplessness comes a sense of ennui, dissatisfaction, and despair[ii]. Indeed, it is not the stuff, but how stuff influences our decisions, and we can’t make any, and rue the day for many of the choices we eventually make. Social psychologists think they have the answer. Since the touchstone of our society is our greater material affluence, somehow it is how all that affluence influences decision that is at fault. Affluence underscores options, and when wealth trends to infinity, so do our choices. With infinite choices come indecision, stress, and regret as no decision is good enough in lieu of our apprehension of alternatives lost. That’s a bad thing, and for many social psychologists, the obvious thing. And experiment seems to bear them out. When faced with many options, people are reluctant to make decisions, and when they do they are often stressed and later regretful.

This argument is expounded in Barry Schwartz’s book ‘The Paradox of Choice’[iii], wherein the author lays out the expansive empirical evidence of his position, and the logical conclusion that happiness comes from knowing and accepting our limitations. And that means limiting our choices. Is he right? Well, yes and no. Sometimes choice makes for indecision and unhappiness, sometimes it doesn’t, and why this is so is anyone’s guess. That at least was the conclusion of Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues, who performed a ‘meta-analysis’ of fifty studies on choice overload, and concluded that they “could not reliably identify sufficient conditions that explain when and why an increase in assortment size will decrease satisfaction, preference strength, or the motivation to choose[iv].”

Part of the problem is due to the fact that there are many different cognitive antecedents to choice overload, and as Chernov and colleagues noted in commentary on the Scheibehenne paper, “simply searching for a main effect across all conditions and a single “sufficient” condition that is likely to solely predict this effect is not informative”[v]. These may reflect the decision maker’s expertise, the composition and the organization of the assortment, and the nature of the decision task. More specifically, choice is constantly narrowed or attenuated through non-conscious mental processes that discard redundant information and the use of heuristic strategies to attenuate choice, but this is countered by the fact that affective processes in decision making may supplant choice with the mere apprehension of choice, and may render rational decision making difficult or impossible.

For example, place ourselves in uptown Manhattan, and as a neophyte we would be overwhelmed with choices of things to see and do. Live there for a few years, and the debilitating static of choice is blocked as we habitually follow routine in our day to day behavior. Besides the non-conscious processes underlying habit, evaluating a choice imparts information that successively reduces the informative value of successive choices similarly considered. That is, the marginal or added utility of considering alternatives falls as we consider more and more choices. We therefore naturally limit choices because considering more of them will not add any new information. Thus, we may refrain from getting more than three bids for a project, reading three movie reviews on the same film, or getting two medical opinions on the advisability of a medical procedure because evaluating more choices would be of little marginal value. Attenuating choice is further expedited through the use of technology. Want to get the best deal, the best product, and even the best date? Now we have expert systems mediated by the web that can tell us in a heartbeat what choice is best for us. We can in a sense offload our decision making to avatars, expert systems that learn from our previous choices and can navigate a world of infinite abundance. We also can act like ‘experts’ in our own right by using heuristics or rule of thumb strategies to make effective choices. Indeed, common heuristic techniques are not second best strategies to make choices, and generally result in decisions as good as those dependent upon complex statistical or logical models[vi].

On the other hand, the fact that decision making has an affective component can put a decision on ‘hold’ merely because of the fact that considering options can be a pleasant thing. For example, that men generally abhor shopping for clothing means that when they do shop they get to the point and isolate the characteristics they desire, and then purchase the item without a second thought. Women on the other hand can spend an entire day perusing a thousand items that are only marginally distinguishable. However, to say that women are paralyzed by choice is a misnomer, as they are generally ‘delighted’ with choice and are happy to take their time before finally making a purchase, while men would prefer to go home and watch the football game rather than ‘delighting’ in perusing infinite variations of French cuffs. Indeed, the mere apprehension of choice is often a pleasurable thing. Having a thousand different shirts, jams, wines, or mates to choose from may not make for fast decisions, but getting to those decisions can be fun. Of course choice may not be all that pleasant, as an affective choice may contrast with a rational alternative, thus making an evaluation as difficult as comparing apples to oranges. Eating a snack or dieting, checking your social network or working, or sleeping an extra hour rather then rising early are contrasting choices that are difficult and stressful to make.

Ultimately, the pain and regret due to indecision and decisions gone wrong does not point to a surfeit of choices, but rather to a lack of information that allows us to evaluate choices, the positive affect that comes from merely apprehending choice, and a natural inability to decide between affective and informative events that leads to stress and later regret. In other words, it may be difficult to make choices or be emotionally content with choices made because of a lack of information that allows us to mediate between alternatives, or because affect makes indecision a pleasant thing that vanishes with choice or an unpleasant thing that occurs concurrently (stress) subsequently (regret) to a choice.

So we remain left with our question, does exponentially expanding choice correlate with indecision, regret, and unhappiness? It is here that we agree with Schwartz’s conclusions, but not his explanations. Correlation is underscored by causality when the separate diminishing and rising roles of utility and novelty are considered in decision making. When choices are unlimited, the predicted utility of considering each separate option results in a decrease in the predicted utility of evaluating the next option, but the affective ‘utility’ or incentive salience of each considered option does not fall to zero, and always has a constant positive incentive value. In other words, affect predominates when we have and subsequently make too many choices, as considering more choices has diminishing marginal utility but not a corresponding diminishing affective utility. Thus to check one movie review or one model car is both informative and affective with the added or marginal degree of new information falling with each successive review or automobile we consider, but the novelty remains significant even though we have little to glean from the twentieth review or vehicle we consider. When we look back to a day of such ill considered choices, we see no return for our efforts in contrast to more rational alternatives forgone, and are understandably regretful at a day misspent. Thus making too many choices can indeed increase choice tyranny and the indecision, tension, and regret that accompanies it, but it is often due to a rise in the role of ‘affectiveness’ in choosing that causes a reduction in the effectiveness in choosing.

An alternative and perhaps better solution to the tyranny of choice is to recognize that the question is not a matter of reducing choices, but of deciding when we can make them, or to time them. This is done not to limit choices, but to limit the affect that impedes making effective choices. We see this in mindfulness and meditative disciplines that reduce the choices you can make or even consider, for a time. The problem is that timing our choices is hard to do because choice has an affective component that overwhelms rational alternatives, and indeed disguises itself as the mark of a rational alternative. Thus we want to immediately check email, go shopping, watch TV, or indulge in a medley of other diversions because there is some method or logic in such slight madness. The problem therefore may not be in having too many choices, but in making too many choices. Indeed, the advance of the internet means not just that we have more choices before us, but also that there are many more times wherein we can make choices. But it is not information that is the problem, but an abstract property of information of information, namely its relative novelty that is accentuated by the easy availability of ubiquitous knowledge. To ignore the latter is to miss the opportunity to determine their separate influences of information and affect on decision making and emotionality.

[i] David Myers-American Paradox, Spiritual hunger in an age of plenty

[ii] Robert Lane- The loss of happiness on market democracies

[iii] Schwartz, Barry- The Paradox of Choice

[iv] Scheibehenne, B, Greifeneder, R, Todd, P. (2010) “Can there ever be too many choices? A meta-analytic review of choice overload”, Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 409-425

[v] Chernev, A., Bockenholt, U., Goodman, J. (2010) Commentary on Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd. Choice Overload: Is There Anything to It?, Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 426-428

The Gutenberg Divide

2011-03-05T06:33:00.000-08:00

Install a book on your bookshelf, and what you’ve got is a book. Install a TV between your bookshelves, and unless you lock the channel selector to PBS, you’ve got an entertainment center. The same thing can be said about computers, as PBS or related topics are consigned to an unused hyperlink somewhere because the channel selector is deliberately unlocked and you’re long gone surfing elsewhere. A book has built in content controls, whereas electronic media which allow you to access online books do not, unless of course you have an e-book reader.

But digital divides have never been about books but rather about having ready access to the entire ocean of knowledge available on the web. The fact that children in lower socio-economic classes had less access to information than their more well off peers was long presumed to be a major factor in their lower intellectual accomplishment. So give them the information processors they need plus the broadband connection to pipe all that ocean of knowledge through, and what do you get? You get even lower levels of accomplishment! This is what Jacob Vigden and Helen Ladd found when they surveyed adolescent’s behavior. Specifically, they found that students who gain access to a home computer between 5^th and 8^th grade tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Indeed, as the authors’ state, “It was thought that the introduction of technology would lead to an improvement in future living standards if it primarily lowers the cost of activities with strong future returns.” However, ‘strong future returns’ are a distant dream compared to the gratification of the moment, as fast food for thought becomes as fortifying as fast food is for one’s health. Which is to say, not much.

When we use tools, it’s not wise to use them ‘under the influence’. Thus when we drive cars and operate power tools, being of sound mind is a prerequisite. However, when we use information tools, being under the influence can come from the very use of the tool, hence the use of the tool must be especially monitored. Because the web can be a literally intoxicating thing, adult supervision is definitely required. As the authors non-surprisingly discovered, the web is indeed a useful thing if it is used under benevolent parental direction. If not, it rapidly devolves into a tool for goofing off, and will set its users blissfully off course and to the wild side of the digital divide.

But perhaps quality trumps quantity, and it is not a digital but a Gutenberg divide (as coined by Nicolas Carr) that is the issue. Just having access to a well stocked library is a more reliable predictor of academic success. Indeed, students who come from homes that emphasize reading do consistently better in their academics than those who do not. Recently, Ann McGill-Frazel and Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee extended this observation to disadvantaged students during summer break. Giving each student twelve books from a list the children provided, the children took pride in their little libraries, read the books and significantly improved their test scores. As they waded in their little worlds of information, digitally divided from the oceans of information available to their better off peers, they nonetheless learned to swim, demonstrating that what divides us is merely the chance to read.

Science Daily: Retrieved form http://science daily.com/ releases/ 2020/ 07/ 100721112234/htm

the Digital Divide- Home computer technology and digital achievement. – Jacob Vigden and Helen Ladd (available at nber.org). National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 16078, June 2010

from 'One Track Minds', available on scribd.com in July, 2011

We can forget it for you wholesale

2011-03-04T06:11:00.001-08:00

It was meant to be just a night out with the boys, and bowling at that. But these were no ordinary chums, but a group of wayward dwarves. And where was the location of the bowling alley? How about that cloud on the left, just follow the thunder. Well, to old Rip, it seemed like he was there only a short time, but as they say, time flies when you’re having fun. And when he settled afterwards in a nap, time flew. Perhaps it was the nap, perhaps it was the game, but when he awoke, generations had past, and Rip Van Winkle, the loyal subject to the English crown woke to a new world, and a new United States. And so, with King George forgotten to all as was his kith and kin, he found his daughter, and passed his remaining days full of memories of simpler days when time had measure and substance and meaning.

RIP

Time is money, but time is also memory. In the past the argument to spend one’s time was pecuniary, in the future is may be regarded as the stuff of life. Without memory time vanishes, and when memory is truncated our lives lose meaning because meaning devolves into a void and a blur.

In Philip K. Dick’s novelette ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ (later morphed into the movie ‘Total Recall’, time was memory, so that life seemed longer and certainly more interesting when your noggin was injected with fabricated memories. Unfortunately, we can’t add memories except through actually doing things, but we sure can eliminate them and speed up their passage. And now on the internet, we can do it wholesale!

Consider two mind experiments we inflict upon our minds all the time.

Time Erasure Experiment #1

You go to a party, and invariably meet a long line of your spouse’s friends, one by one they tell you their names, which or course you immediately forget.

Time Erasure Experiment #2

On Monday you begin playing Halo Fantasy XXIII on your computer. Blink your eyes, and its Tuesday.

In both experiments we are doing everything so quickly each short term memory is pushed aside by the next meaningful sight or sound before it can register in long term memory, so time flies because we literally can’t remember different times. In the first experiment, the memory loss is piecemeal; in the latter it is wholesale. This is why taking a break assists memory when it is a mere pause in behaving, but hinders memory when it is not a pause from behavior but a different behavior entire. Further, when memory falters, so does time, and we wonder when we are because we cannot recall where we have been.

Moral, when you go from daylight savings time to internet time, your time is not just spent, it is lost, and your life is shortened to that of a mayfly. So, if you’re not careful, you may wake up some morning and find out that you have a proverbial long white beard and live in the Peoples Republic of America.

(But of course if you don’t want to listen to this, you can just forget it!)

From 'One Track Minds', available on scribd.com for free in July 2011

Just Navarre

2009-11-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

Navarre Beach November 14, 2011

Antoine Bechara's 'Miracle'

2009-08-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

Scientific thinking is a miraculous thing, but if the miraculous is part of the thinking, you've got trouble. It's all a matter of 'semantics', or in other words, how you define your terms. Sometimes you over define your terms, but lose meaning because (think Obama health care plan) no one knows what you mean. But at other times you scarcely define them at all, thus clarifying your meaning and making it meaningless at the same time. Know what I mean? A prime example of semantics gone bad is the 'Somatic Marker Hypothesis'. Formulated by the neurologists Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio, the hypothesis simply states that when faced with ambiguous or difficult choices, a 'gut level' response will prod you in the right direction and thus allow you to go on your merry way. Sounds reasonable, and it indeed it conforms to how we think about such

things as intuition, hunches, and of course 'gut feelings'. How the somatic marker works is of course a very complex thing, and involves the interaction of all sorts of brain bits and pieces such as brain stem nuclei, insular cortices, the hypothalamus, amygdala, ventral striatum, and the cerebral equivalent of the kitchen sink. But thankfully, this verbal mumbo-jumbo has been distilled into a simple little formula which as we will soon discover, has a little miracle tucked inside.

So how does the somatic marker work? Well, the 'for dummies' version works like this. According to Bechara, "Primary inducers are innate or learned stimuli that cause pleasurable or aversive states. Once present in the immediate environment, they automatically and obligatorily elicit a somatic state." He further defines primary inducers as surprising or novel events such as winning a prize, solving a problem and the feel good moment that naturally follows. This feel good moment then elicits a somatic state or state of bodily arousal that provides that 'gut level' feeling that nudges you in the right direction by helping you eliminate bad response options.

But what is the physiological correlate for novel and surprising events? Here's where the miracle comes in, because Bechara conveniently doesn't tell us. The problem with novel and surprising events is that by definition they occur because of how the environment is arranged, not how the environment is. Secondly, these pleasurable states are represented by the release of the neurochemical (actually neuro-modulator) dopamine which doesn't induce a subjective state of pleasure at all, but a state of 'wanting' (sort of like a mental itch) that increases the importance of what you're doing. A good example of this is gambling behavior, when momentary positive surprises (winning a few coins with the pull of a slot machine lever) keep you fixed on the short term fix of positive surprise and the unsurprising result that your bank account will soon be empty.

Thus defined, Bechara and Damasio's logic becomes this: an affective event that is elicited by short term results (i.e. novelty) elicits an affective event ('gut feeling') the helps you make long term decisions. This is akin to saying that near-sightedness will help you see far. Of course it doesn't make sense, but that's ok, since nobody has yet picked up on this nonsense, and that indeed is a miracle.

For much more on the somatic marker hypothesis, take a look at my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet