Trade Off #4: Sure Bet vs Shot In The Dark

"What are my chances?"
"Not good."
"You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?"
"I'd say more like one out of a million."
[pause]
"So... you're telling me there's a chance."

Whenever we have more than one option to choose between, we have to consider not only the relative value of each option but also the likelihood that we will be able to attain that option if we commit. Now, it makes no sense to choose something that is lower in both prob and value. But, if one option has a higher prob and a lower value, or vice versa, then we will have to rely on our values in deciding between them. Examples:

• In psychology, research describing how people choose based on the relative probability and value of an outcome is extensive. One theory says we are especially risk averse for moderate probability / low value gains and small probability / high value losses. (see here)
• In mate preference, choosing someone who is stable and dependable (sure bet) or someone with better looks and health (shot in the dark) is one of the universal trade offs across cultures. (see here)
• In finance, models of investors trade off between minimizing the variance of their stocks and maximizing their average return. Since individuals have a diminishing marginal return to each add'l dollar, they are risk averse and willing to give up expected returns to take the sure bet over the shot in the dark. (however see here for a critique on the risk premium when people benchmark relatively)

This trade off is deeply ingrained in our thinking. Indeed, in competitive landscapes we often assume an efficient market and use reverse inference to conclude that if something is more difficult to attain then it must be higher quality. Surely no aggregation of trade offs could be complete without this one.

(Above photo and quote from the classic Dumb and Dumber scene)

Trade Off #3: Switching Costs vs Change Gains

Contrary to the myth of The Great Idea, we humans typically have an ample supply of promising ideas. The tricky part is in deciding which of these notions are most worth our finite resources to actually implement. Thus we come to the trade-off: do the costs of switching justify how much we would benefit from this new idea? Examples:

• In genomics, replication errors can be useful when they lead to beneficial mutations and in fact that is how species evolve. But you have to factor in the costs of a harmful mutation as well, which is more likely, and which we can think of as the "switching cost" that keeps the rate of beneficial mutations low. (see here)
• In psychology, keeping your identity small is useful so you minimize the costs of switching your beliefs when something else proves more true, or switching your strategies when something else proves more useful. (see here)
• In behavior analysis, increasing the change over delay time between two reward schedules decreases the probability that pigeons will switch between them. (see here)
• In business, upgrading to the next version of software might not be worth it, given all the work customers have to do to learn the new system. (see here)

Broadly, switching costs can come in the form of time, money, ATP, status within an in-group, psychological energy, and the possibility of messing up the transition. This balancing act is in my mind under-prioritized, and deserves its prominent place in the inventory of axiomatic trade offs.

(Above photo credit goes to SantiMB. Have any suggestions or ideas for the trade off series? Holla acha boy, amckenz at g mail)

Trade Off #2: Offense vs. Defense

This trade off will come about whenever time is limited, there is competition between agents who are all potentially vulnerable to attack, the same resources each agent uses for offense could also be used for defense, and the primary goal of each is to win. There are many examples:

• In botany, plants grow their cells larger in number and size to maximize their exposure to the limited supply of sunlight. But plants also want their cells to be mature and specialized to protect against herbivores and pathogens. Growth (offense) and maturation (defense) rely on the same metabolism, so plants must choose between them. (see here)
• In soccer, Donovan's beautiful late goal against Algeria was not so so surprising, given that Algeria themselves had an incentive to score. This necessarily lowered their defenses, and allowed the US to capitalize with a glorious counter attack.
• In immunology, testosterone both develops sexual characteristics and hinders one's immune system. If you think of reproduction as offense and survival as defense, it is clear why you should be wary of macho guys come flu season. (see here)
• In national politics, war becomes more likely when conquest is easier. Nation states are well aware that by attacking weaker opponents they will still have enough resources available to defend themselves. (see here)

This is a solid and deserving member of the growing trade off canon.

(Above photo credit goes to Lorianne DiSabato.)

Trade Off #1: Efficiency vs Predictability

Efficiency is quite nice when you have no competitors, but when you do it comes with the nasty downside of predictability. If you always make the most efficient choice given your options, then your opponents will be able to predict your choices and wreck you easily. So, agents typically choose to sacrifice some efficiency in return for some much needed unpredictability. Examples:

• In predator-prey interactions, escaping prey typically add random noise to their movements, zigzagging, looping, and bouncing away. Although this is less efficient, it prevents predators from learning a systematic rule to predict exactly how prey will escape. (see here)
• In primate courtship, individuals may have evolved to add random variability to their thoughts and behaviors so as to avoid having their minds read by fellow apes using theory of mind. (see pdf here)
• In game theory, nearly every solution to interesting multi-person games has a mixed rather than pure solution. For example, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma the algorithm "generous tit for tat" cooperates sometimes even after an opponent's defection, but only randomly. Thus it is impossible to exploit, but avoids the infinite cycles of defection you get from pure tit for tat. (see here)

Regarding the necessity of competition, note that a single institution or individual can usually be profitably modeled as the sum of various competing desires. So, even when you are analyzing the actions of only one person in isolation, you should expect to find trade offs between efficiency and predictability.

(I'm hoping to compile a list of all the canonical trade offs, which should be fun for the whole family. Above photo of peregrine falcon chasing a cormorant comes courtesy of flick user Nick Chill.)

Emulating Boyden

It's an open question whether you should listen preferentially to advice from those who are successful. The upside is that they are more likely to employ useful hacks, but the downside is that they might not be especially self-aware.

If you do buy the star emulation approach, then the 30 year old neurobiologist Ed Boyden is someone to listen to, as his resume suggests. So, here is a transcript of a June interview of his, and below are three quotes.

First, on advice:

I have received a lot of good advice over the years, but the best was to figure out how I think and feel when going about solving difficult problems, so that I can approach problems in a fashion that is optimal for the way my mind works, in order to maximize my positive impact on the world.

Second, on our small slice of infinity:

Since there is always an infinite amount of information that we don't know, and an infinite number of things that we don't fully comprehend, there is therefore an infinite number of possible important scientific projects. Since we can only do a finite number of things in our lives, the human act of doing science is obligately an aesthetically-driven act. I spend a lot of time thinking about not just the impact, but about the beauty of what we're doing. A good scientific story has cliffhangers, surprise endings and drama.

Third, on music:

I listen to a lot of Bach and Mozart when my mind is operating in a logical or imaginative fashion, and electronic music or techno when it's time to crank out results.

I'm not surprised that he listens to non-lyrical music, which is awesome for boosting concentration. I am also not surprised to hear that he has a strong utilitarian drive, in his aim to "maximize my positive impact on the world."

I am surprised, however, that he admits to using a narrative approach to science. Maybe thinking about the "plot" of an experiment helps to drive him while remaining willing to change his mind.

You may recall Boyden's excellent (2007) advice on how to manage brain resources in an era of complexity. Contra to the current technophobic haterade movement, Boyden embraces lots of tech-based solutions, even calling his laptop his "brain co-processor." And yes, he is on Twitter, although he only updates seldomly.

Heyman On Alcoholics Anonymous

Brendan Koerner's article on why AA works has kindled a spirited convo in the 'sphere. If you are interested in this discussion, I'd recommend Gene Heyman's thorough 2009 book Addiction: A Disorder Of Choice, which discusses many relevant ideas.

One of his insights, that could answer the question posed by the article, is that choice-oriented rehab programs, like AA, "produce positive outcomes by enhancing the value of activities that compete with drug use and have developed effective techniques for encouraging hope in a brighter future."

To Heyman, one of the key distinguishing features of addicting substances is that using them makes other activities less rewarding. So, initial use leads to an increased preference for repeated use, in a downward cycle.

AA works because "just as heavy drug use initiates a downward spiral of increasingly negative consequences and decreasing options, healthy alternative activities can set in motion an upward spiral of increasingly positive consequences and increasing options."

Heyman also offers one of the most coherent explanations of voluntary behavior I have seen. His three principles for voluntary behavior are that 1) Preferences are dynamic, so that current choices alter the values of future outcomes, 2) Agents can choose between options one at a time or turn one-shot choices into sequences and choose among those (i.e., there are local or global choices), and 3) Individuals choose the best option.

Note that within this theory, certain voluntary choices can be quite self-destructive, as the best option in the short run (local) could be rather hazardous in the long run (global).

The theory has broad explanatory power. For example, consider the common tendency to justify drug use as the "last time." This makes sense because, as Heyman notes, "from a local perspective, the drug is the best choice; but from a global perspective, abstinence is the best choice. The ideal solution is to somehow do both.... If the situation can be framed as the "last time", then the dilemma dissolves. The same reasoning applies to "special occasions.""

Of course this choice theory can't explain all of the individual variance in outcomes, and its explanations break down particularly often when there is co-morbidity with other mental illnesses. But for choice to not get any play in an article like Koerner's is, to me, ridiculous.

If you don't feel like shelling out the $21.56 + S&H for Heyman's book, you might consider perusing an article of his (pdf) that touches on many of the same points, including the crucial local vs. global distinction (figure 4, p 113). But do also consider the book, which Ryan Holiday called "fascinating" and which Tyler Cowen said he "couldn't put down!", although they both ultimately hedged, for reasons which it is their voluntary choice to withhold.

Lessons From FIFA's Ineptitude

Today, two calls in the World Cup (a missed goal here, a missed offside here) were clear mistakes and require us to assign blame. There are a number of ways to respond. The comforting but ultimately misguided tact is to blame the individual refs. It is statistically unlikely that the majority of refs would be so much better than the refs today.

Or, one might blame the goals on FIFA's failure to allow instant replay. Replay definitely would have helped. But that tact also strikes me as not general enough. Instead, I see the problem as yet another example of the status quo bias against new technology. To me, inertia and rationalization are the real culprits.

The only reason that FIFA's decision making seems so dumb is because the games are public enough to allow for constant scrutiny. But imagine if millions of fans were watching as yet another patient's info was copied down by hand instead of being uploaded to a time-saving server. They too would be vitriolic. Or, imagine if announcers called the action as somebody wasted minutes every day by visiting websites individually instead of setting up an RSS reader. They too would be unimpressed.

So, sure, condemn FIFA for its failure to adapt to useful new technology. But be careful not to frame your blame as for a singular case of stupidity. Indeed, we can all fall victim to the status quo bias against adopting new technologies.

Two Forms Of Self Deception

Self-deception can be divided into at least two types:

1) Deluding yourself into thinking that you are better than the median in some particular trait, like driving ability, teaching ability, and etc.

2) Deluding yourself into thinking that the traits you just happen to be good at are considered objectively more virtuous. In this form of self-delusion, you do not actually think of yourself as better or worse at any particular trait, but rather rationalize traits you are good at as especially virtuous, and traits you aren't good at as especially useless or even evil. As Michael Vassar explains, people "delude themselves about what traits a human without specific information about his or her self sees as good, choosing to see many of their own traits as good rather than as bad and failing to notice that people who lack those traits consistently see things otherwise."

If you tested them, I'd bet that people will be more likely to self-deceive using type #1 self-deception for traits about which they cannot plausibly self-deceive using type #2 self-deception. For example, almost everyone in our society agrees that getting along well with others is a virtuous trait, and it would be relatively difficult to come up with a plausible argument otherwise. So, it makes sense that in one study (see pg 11 here), when asked how well they get along with others, all students thought they were above average, 60% thought they were in the top 10%, and 25% thought they were in the top 1%.

In the modern world type #2 self-deception has become especially common due to the desire to find one's own niche. Given arbitrary weights of values for traits and their interactions anyone can delude themselves into believing that they are the most virtuous person in the world.* This also helps explain some of the benefits for being part of an "in" group, as your group will validate your type #2 self-deception about what makes a virtuous person.

* This is provable via Arrow's impossibility theorem.

Is Toy Story 3 The Best Movie Of All Time?

Yesterday it was #8 and currently it is #7 on imdb's top 250 with a weighted average of 8.8. But on its own page it has an unweighted rating of 9.3, meaning that it is currently getting killed on the top 250 due to a low total number of votes. So, if it maintains the score once it has around 100k votes, its weighted average will approach its unweighted average asymptotically and it will take the reigns from Shawshank as The Greatest Of All Time.

However, such an upset is very unlikely. For example, look at the current demographic breakdown:

You'll note that the movie is doing really well with voters under 29. But right now the under 29 bracket represents 78.5% of total voters, and that number is going to drop. For example, if you look at the demographics of Toy Story One and Two, the under 29 bracket only has 51.9% and 49.0% of the overall totals, respectively. Also, US voters are likely to become the minority, which should further push the score down.

But the main problem is that right now, Pixar fanboys are much more likely to have seen the movie, and they are also more likely to enjoy it and rate it high. Once more average moviegoers join the party, they will curb some of the hype.

To give some perspective, The Dark Knight had a 9.6 on its own page and a 9.5 weighted average when it had 69,000 votes. But even The Dark Knight fell out of the top spot less than a month after it came out, and is now #11. So, you expect a rise for the next few weeks, and it may even take the top spot for a very brief time, but then it should fall fairly fast. I'd bet below #15 by this day next year. Toy Story 3 is cute and endearing, but it is certainly not the best movie of all time.

Watching The Top 250

Late last night I finished watched my last of imdb's top 250 movies. As of today, I have watched every damned movie on the list. It's been a wild ride. And since Toy Story 3 comes out this weekend, I need to get a post up documenting the occasion while it's still technically true.

So... thanks to everyone who works at imdb and spends hours configuring their database. In particular, thanks to the nerds who suggested that they run their ratings data through a bayesian filter, whoever you are. Thanks to my mom and dad for subsidizing my video rentals and for not complaining when I was monomaniacal about the netflix queue two summers ago. Thanks to the workers at the reserve desk of the Vassar library, who were kind enough to waive a few late fees for a starving student. Thanks to everyone who ever sat through a weird old movie with me over the past four years. Gratitude. Finally, a shout out to all the playa haters, who never thought I'd make it here. What now, haters?

Among the subset of movies that I watched specifically due to my quasi-compulsive need to finish the list, my faves were On the Waterfront, The Killing, The Seventh Seal, Dial M for Murder, Kind Hearts and Coronets, M, Manhattan, Mulholland Drive, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Thing, Touch of Evil, and Yojimbo. These movies tend to be funny, short, and don't spell out too much for the audience. The movies that I tended to like the least were ones that seemed to be popular for political reasons, like Crash or Gran Torino.

All in all, the top 250 is undoubtedly violence obsessed. Every one of the current top 25 movies has violence as a major crux of the plot. And of the top 100, only 9 movies do not fit this criteria: It's A Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane, Forrest Gump (arguable), Amelie, Wall E, Spirited Away, Elephant Man, All About Eve, and The Apartment. In that sense they are nothing like my daily life.

My quantitative vote history on imdb is here. There is one useful site to track your own progress on the top 250, which, should you choose that path, you can find here. I warn you, it may not always be easy. There will be times you'll want to give up, times when you'll forget why you devoted a precious slice of your time to such a desolate and inhuman list in the first place. All I can say is, get busy living, or get busy dying.

Niche Finding

Holding quality constant, I tend to enjoy movies more the lower my expectations are. This seems like a fairly universal tendency. For example, the main predictor of a student's enjoyment of a class is the extent of positive deviation in their actual grade from their expectations (here).

My explanation for this tendency is as a mechanism to spur niche finding. In this large world, it is hard to stake out our own identity. Thus, we constantly are on the lookout for things that we enjoy more than others to portray our unique values and thus define us.

As evidence for this, consider how much people love to note that some particular work of art is underrated. The next time you hear someone say something is underrated, probe a bit.

If you disagree with how good that work of art objectively is, they may give some playful rebuttals but won't really mind. However, if you disagree with their assumption that the work of art is rated low by the majority, and thus imply that they are not really unique for liking it, they will get rather annoyed. So, it is not the actual quality of the underrated thing that people mostly care about, but rather their own uniqueness in liking it.

Trade Offs Between Status And Interestingness

In a response to Kaj Sotala's post about how to have interesting conversations, HughRistik mentions two problems with asking questions:

1) If you are beginning a conversation with some who you don't know well, they may not give you very extensive or useful answers to your questions. 2) You can only ask so many questions in a row before you are interviewing them. Worse, it looks low status.

Asking questions lowers your relative status. I certainly buy this, as questioning is a sign that you care about the other person's opinion, which the higher status person will tend not to do. But asking questions is also one of the best ways to learn new info, satiate curiosity, and generally expose oneself to interestingness.

A higher status person will tend to be more aggressive, smile less, and act more selfishly. But being aggressive raises everyone's blood pressure, smiling releases endorphins, and being selfish makes it harder to create long lasting friendships of any value.

To me, these qualities that raise status don't seem to be worth it.

On a more macro level, Elena Kagan is now a very high status person and likely to become a supreme court justice. But she sacrificed interestingness along the way. Was it worth it? I'd say no.

As another example, blogging is fairly low status. But lots of people choose to do it anyway, in large part because they find it interesting.

On both a micro and macro level, it seems that there are trade-offs between status and interestingness. So, where do you stand on this widespread trade-off?

Four Distinct Claims In The Web Attention Debate

Claim #1: The internet is changing our brains (e.g., see here). This is a tautology, as everything we experience changes our brains. Even no activity should change the strength of our synaptic connections! Now, the typical connotation is that these brain changes are for the worse, as the assumption is that deviations from normal biology are bad. But from what I can tell, we just don't know enough about systems neuroscience to correctly evaluate the effects of web-induced brain changes. So let's stick to psychology and behavior, which brings us to...

Claim #2: Overall, the internet decreases our attention span and makes us less likely to engage in contemplative deep-reading and thinking (e.g., see here). Carr and Lehrer primarily extrapolate from controlled psyc studies to address this claim, but those do not longitudinally track the same subjects. Instead, Cowen seems more on track in focusing on the "market data." Unfortunately, longitudinal book reading stats are very difficult to come by, although see here for one aggregation of survey stats. Book revenues did not change much from 2002 to 2009 (see here), but that is confounded by pop growth, inflation, and the shrewdness of Amazon. So, we need better data. Another strategy is to look at previous tech advances and how see people's contemplative deep thinking has changed. I would say, not much. For example, introspection habits haven't don't differ drastically between the 150 CE Marcus Aurelius and the internet-era's own Katja Grace.

Claim #3: Developmentally, if one is not forced to focus for long periods of time often during adolescence, one will be less able to focus as an adult (e.g., see here). It is certainly true that teens will on average be more impulsive than adults, which may be because the amygdala and nucleus accumbens develop more quickly than the prefrontal cortex. So, it makes sense that internet multitasking will be particularly tempting to teens. Indeed, teens may lose time that could have been spent studying. But school is largely zero-sum anyways. Plus, once adolescents become adults their focus should improve. This is a very controversial claim though, as people differ both on their beliefs about focus and on their values with respect to paternalism.

Claim #4: The gains we reap from more immediate access to info and more efficient reading are not worth the costs of habitually skimming and a reduced willingness to commit to valuable but demanding texts (e.g., see here). I mostly agree with Steven Pinker's assessment of this claim as bullshit, because the internet is the best / only way to keep up with the exponentially accelerating increase in knowledge. But he also says that deep reflection, thorough research, and rigorous reasoning "must [!] be acquired in universities," to which I call bullshit. The existence of autodidacts and other individuals self-educated primarily on the internet proves the non-necessity of universities.

Full Disclosure: By the end of writing this post, I have 24 tabs open in my Firefox browser. Namaste, cabrónes.

The Neuroplasticity Of Doing Absolutely Nothing

Piggybacking on Vaughan Bell's account of how the word "neuroplasticity" is abused in the public sphere, here's one specific example from to show how fuzzy the picture really is. This particular study by Minerbi et al, available via open access here, measures the structural changes to synapses over a fairly long time frame (~ 5 days) in the presence and absence of electrical input.

The researchers cultured rat neurons in dishes and tethered the genetic expression of a common post synaptic protein (PSD-95) to the expression of green fluorescent protein, in order to measure changes in synapse size over time.

At the population level, increases in electrical network activity (i.e., more action potentials) correlate with increases in post synaptic size, as expected. And at the population level, blocking electrical action potentials with the tetrodotoxin stops the increase in post synaptic size.

But when researchers looked at individual synapses, their simple relationship breaks down. The fluorescence of the post synaptic protein, a measure of the size and thus strength of the synapse, varies somewhat randomly over time. This is true even when the activity blocker tetrodotoxin was applied to the neurons.

If the structure of synapses were constant, there would be little change in the flourescence of the post synaptic protein over time. In the following 8 second video, each circle represents one synaptic puncta, the Y-intercept shows fluorescence, and as you can see, the fluorescence is definitely not constant:

Bottom Line: When marketers and pundits claim that "[something] changes the brain!", what they are saying is technically true. But the connotations are misleading, because any sort of stimulation changes your brain in some way. And moreover, even with no electrical at all stimulation individual synapses are constantly changing their size and configurations and exhibiting "neuroplasticity."