Self Deception Is Vague

From a forthcoming study [pdf] in Cognition (HT Vaughan Bell):

We hypothesized that such self-deception depends on imprecision in the environment that allows leeway to represent one’s own actions as either observations or interventions. Four experiments tested this idea using a dot-tracking task... Precision was manipulated by varying the vagueness in feedback about performance. As predicted, self-deception was observed only when feedback on the task used vague terms rather than precise values ...

Self-deception requires imprecise feedback on performance. Simply having vague terms (‘fast’, ‘slow,’ or ‘average’) is sufficient to satisfy this requirement. Precise feedback makes it too obvious that the agent is intervening.

The more precision you seek, the more you honestly want to know the truth. That's instead of just wanting to seem like you want to know the truth, to others or to yourself. But before you go all rational-fu on me, recall Mezulis et al:

The self-serving attributional bias has been associated with greater self-reported trait happiness, less depression, more positive mood states, better problem solving, better immune functioning, and lower mortality and morbidity longitudinally. By contrast, an attenuated or absent self-serving attributional bias has been associated with depression; worse physical health; and worse academic, work, and athletic performance.

It may or may not be worth it to excommunicate your self-serving biases. There's a good chance you won't be able to do so even if you try. If you can, you'd probably like to be able to turn on the precision-seeking for topics you care about and remain vague on topics about which you don't particularly care for the truth. Unfortunately, it might not be that easy. As David Foster Wallace wrote, the truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

Ref: doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.12.017, pdf here. And doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.130.5.711, abstract. here.

Testing Short Run / Long Run Coolness

It's time for me to put my theory on coolness to the test. I've tried to determine some traits / behaviors that are fun / helpful in the long run as opposed to the short. Here are a few of them:

• Flossing on a consistent basis
  
• Extreme sports (i.e. bungee jumping)
  
• Doing something else instead of doing your assigned school work
• Opening a bottle with your teeth
  

I've tried googling "cool activities" to get ideas but it's mostly just propaganda. Adults trying to say that things are cool in the hope that they will magically become cool, when in the reality the opposite is probably more likely. I'll hopefully end up with 5 that I think of generally as in the "cool" category and 5 that I think of generally as in the "not cool" category.

What I want to do is to run two tests. In the first one people will rate whether the given trait / behavior is more fun or smart in the short run or the long run, and to what degree. In the second one people will simply say how "cool" the given trait / behavior is. There should be a correlation between how fun / smart the trait / behavior is in the short run as opposed to the long run and how cool that trait / behavior is. Granted, it won't be causation but it'll be a start. E-mail me if you have any ideas for traits / behaviors you think might mess up the theory and that I should therefore test. I'm game for whatever.

Subsdize Earnestness

Incentives today pressure people to drastically downplay how hard they've worked on a given project. For example, I bet Malcolm Gladwell is vexed about telling FT columnist Gideon Rachman that he memorizes all of his speeches. It hurts his free-wheeling, effortless speaking persona. Another is example is how Jack Kerouac's supporters love to play up how he wrote up On The Road in just three caffeine-fueled weeks, even though that spontaneity is probably overstated.

But man, how counter-productive is all of this posturing? It confuses people, making their estimates of how long a given project will take less accurate. And it places an unruly emphasis on intrinsic qualities like intelligence, instead of controllable things like the total number of focused minutes spent.

So to get away from our counter-productive status quo, let's subsidize earnestness, at the expense of mysteriousness. I see two paths towards a more earnest culture:

1) Glorify the revision process. The goal would be to illuminate the messy middle steps that underly successful endeavors. For example, in his interview with Ben Casnocha, Colin Marshall suggested a museum of rough drafts that would emphasize how most everyone's first draft sucks. This applies particularly well to art but generalizes, as we could include first business plans, first lines of code, and first experimental designs. If these messy middle steps are glorified then people will be more willing to share them.

2) Shun those who act mysteriously. Mysteriousness is cool because it emphasizes the short run over the long run. In the short run your onlookers will think of your success as effortless, which will raise your status. But in the long run, nobody knows how to help you or whether they can offer you advice, because you haven't made your plans transparent. So we should punish mysteriousness and unabashedly pressure people to open up.

What Does Honesty Require?

Robin Hanson made a useful distinction in his interview with Colin Marshall (text here) between sincerity and honesty:

That's the hard thing, looking inside ourselves to realize that, even when we're very sincere, we're rarely honest, in the sense that we're not being very careful to be accurate. But is sure feels sincere to us....

Honesty is when you're really trying hard to be accurate. To be honest, you have to think about possible criticisms and take them seriously. You have to ask what the evidence on the other side would be. You have to wonder who has supported which sides of a position. If you're going to be honest about something, there's a set of considerations you're supposed to look at. We all pretty much know what they are. But when we're sincere, that doesn't mean we've done those sorts of things.

Do we all pretty much know what the requirements of honesty are? Just to be sure, let's spell a few of them out:

1) If there are "opponents" that ostensibly hold beliefs inconsistent to yours, you should seek them out and see where they falter. Be sure to "pick on people your own size"--don't focus on the weak arguments of the opposition or invent straw men. If you can't identify exactly how they falter but still have an intuition that they're wrong, then OK (see #11): admit that. Don't rationalize more complicated explanations. But if you can't point to the exact reason why your opponents are wrong and back up your claim, then be extra wary of your own unconscious biases.

2) At any given point, your honest beliefs all should be consistent with one another. This holds for analogous situations to an extent. For example, if you honestly believe that most people behave a certain way, then you need a good reason to argue that you yourself don't follow that trend too. Reversal: This doesn't mean that you can't change your mind on beliefs from one moment to the next! In fact that's the appropriate response when your knowledge of the facts change. What it means is that at any one moment your honest beliefs must be consistent.

3) In order to be honest, you should consider what predictions your belief implies. If there is any way you can test those predictions at low cost, you should do so. If this is a belief that you profess to really care about, then you should be actively trying to test those predictions even at moderate cost (of your own time, for instance). And if there are no predictions of your belief, then you should admit that maybe your belief doesn't really matter.

4) ... ?

Blog Slow Homie

Nick Carr points to a Pew Study on blogging trends:

[The study] put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It's even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging than they used to.

Let's analyze the coolness of blogging with my long run / short run theory. As more old people start to blog, blogging should become more socially acceptable, because those with more power tend to define social customs. This will emphasize the long run aspects of blogging, like personal development and positioning. It will also de-emphasize the short run aspects of blogging, like rebelling against those with power over you.

Cooler blogs should be ones where people eschew the long run attributes of blogging. Instead, cooler blogs should focus on short run activities and do less personal branding / marketing. If cool blogs do do personal branding, it should be in a roundabout, counter-signaling way. For example, it should be cooler to write under a pseudonym.

I admit my theory can't explain why Unhappy Hipsters is so cool. But I think it can explain a lot about the sphere.

(Thanks to Bonnie for the idea)

Eleven CMRHMOI Thoughts

Robin Hanson was the most recent guest of Colin Marshall's on the Marketplace of Ideas. You can find the dialogue mp3 here. It's fifty-six minutes and, unless you're like saving the world or something, worth every femtosecond of your time. Colin probes Robin on many of his major themes: disagreement, signaling, near-far, academia, the future, and the dearth of objectivity. He did his homework. Here are my thoughts:

1) One of Robin's creeds is that we should be able to take other people's opinions seriously. He strives for methods that will make this possible; thus, the fixation with prediction markets. To identify which people are actually experts, you must put a price tag on uninformed opinions. The cost need not necessarily be paid in currency. If pundits were pressured to make predictions consistent and objective, and the public cared, that too would subsidize a markedly less noisy marketplace of beliefs.

2) The two frequently engage in pretend-tongue-in-check meta talk, colloquially known as "going there," to great success. For example, at one point Colin talks about how he is showing off his impressive interviewing skills while simultaneously showing off his impressive interviewing skills.

3) Colin keeps offering Robin the opportunity to gloat for a moment about the blog he's built and the following he's developed. Robin parries these advances amicably, re-framing his success as a byproduct of the inevitability of niche markets on the web and the desires of competing groups to have new tools--cognitive biases--to accuse their opponents of falling victim to. In so doing, he places too much emphasis on intentions. Since he is a ruthless universalizer, he must now admit that his own intentions are probably not so noble. He is right to apply his principles freely to himself, but overly pessimistic in hardly allowing for good actions by humans. Is this professed pessimism about all people's intentions in part influenced by a desire to maintain his aura of humility? If it is, then it is actually an example of one way in which Robin does bias his opinions via signaling, because being humble is high status. So in this case his pessimism is on point. But if this pessimism doesn't impact his belief about people's intentions, then I sincerely can't identify anything he is biased about, in which case he's wrong about his own intentions. So, he's either right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reasons. I will now throw up on my keyboard from dizziness due to all this circular reasoning.

4) We're back.

5) In discussing academia, Robin mentions how sexy innovations are often not as important as we think they are. In fact our richness as a species probably has little to do with our capacity for abstract thought. This is my favorite quote by him, and one that I think about all the time: "The truth is that the artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking 'creativity' matter little for economic growth. Instead, most of the innovations that matter are the tiny changes we constantly make to the millions of procedures and methods we use." True and immensely useful as a mental hack: Worshiping and waiting for the big idea only leads to deep procrastination. Instead, focus on the various puzzles you can solve now, cutting what you perceive as big, important tasks into smaller, less important ones. The small tasks are where you are more likely to actually make useful contributions, anyways.

6) There is a deficiency of neutral analysis for determining who exactly is rational and truth-seeking. Robin keeps commenting on LW about how gathering data and developing a such a neutral test would be a very useful project for someone to undertake (see here, here, here, and here), so someone should get on that already!

7) Rationalist-oriented people on the internet are ultimately most interested in talking about rationality. This makes in terms of the relevant selection biases for ending up at Robin's blog or on Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. Moreover, most RSS feeds are read by folks procrastinating at work and OB is probably not much of an exception. So, there's a huge filter between passively reading about rationality and actually acting on it.

8) One's intellectual history should be composed of viewquakes, the ideas that change your conception of the world dramatically. Robin's intellectual viewquakes: relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, managing complexity in comp sci, supply and demand, incentives, rationality (!), and Aumann's theory of disagreement. Also, the idea that the future might be different from the present to a similar degree that the past is different from the present.

9) Robin says it's hard for him to specialize because he is naturally curious about lots of things, but he forces himself to do it anyway. He also says that most intellectual failures, people who are smart but still don't succeed, tend to be underspecialized. They can't figure out how to focus on just a few topics. This reminds me of some of Taleb's wisdom, sic, "Here is a quote by Paul Valery. He met Einstein at a party in the 1920s, and he asked him 'Do you carry a notebook' around? Einstein asked,'Why?', and Valeria said 'To write down your ideas, to put them down,' and Einstein said, 'I only have one idea.' To succeed, you only have to have one idea—two ideas, you’re dead." The intense division of labor is a very new idea--for most of the world less than 100 years old, and it's one that conventional wisdom is so far from understanding it's not even funny.

10) The main folks who will correctly apply the ideas they read about are those who care even more about the outcome of a particular event than their own status. But once you begin a quest for the truth on one particular subject and learn techniques to aid you in that quest, is it possible to turn your new skills "off" for less relevant subjects? Can you still let that which does not matter truly slide? David Foster Wallace argues no with respect to grammar. In his mind, once you learn grammar rules you are compelled to notice flaws in the grammar of others and be annoyed by them. I actually think that it is possible to learn about biases without overly applying them. But some of my friends might disagree! In fact I have been openly criticized for "talking about psychology too much" at least once. Good thing I have you guys.

11) I was going to end at ten thoughts but I didn't want to be yet another data point in Ben Casnocha's lonely crusade against round-numbered lists. So this is the bonus thought. Enjoy.

Cognitive Dissonance And Time Perception In Harry Potter

In Sep '08 I wrote that readers rate longer books as better, often ignoring opportunity cost, because they "spend so much time and energy reading the book that they come to believe it must have been good." Today the BPS Digest reports that "participants who'd experienced the sense of the time flying rated the task as far more enjoyable than did the participants who'd experienced the sense of time dragging." These two factors help to explain my pet theory about the success of the Harry Potter books. Here goes:

1) Readers are initially intimidated by the page number length. How could they ever get through that? Yet most start anyway, perhaps looking forward to the challenge.

2) What most readers don't consciously recognize is that there's so much dialogue and there's so little text per page that in reality the books aren't all that long. So when they get to the end, both cognitive dissonance ("wow, I read this whole long book --> I must have liked it") and time perception ("wow, I don't remember this long book taking such a long time to read --> time flew by --> I must have liked it"), increase their opinion of the book. Add in some decently funny jokes, ensure the approval of the liberal intelligentsia, stir with a dollop of teen angst, and viola, you can explain the success of Harry Potter.

3) Note that the books didn't really take off until the 3rd and especially the 4th were published, when they started to look abnormally long:

Book 1 = 320 pages
Book 2 = 352 pages
Book 3 = 448 pages
Book 4 = 752 pages
Book 5 = 870 pages
Book 6 = 652 pages
Book 7 = 784 pages

4) My recommendation to authors is to write plenty of dialogue and pressure the publisher to include lots of numbered fluff pages at the front. Also check out my advice on how to make a paper look longer than it really is, which may turn out to be more profound than I had anticipated.

PS Wow, you just read a fairly long post with three links, four numbered points, and a ton of analysis --> You must have liked it --> You must have agreed with the theory.

Why College Goes By Fast

Among high school and college seniors it's common to claim that "the past four years have gone by so fast!," and make similar declarations of outright shock at the objectively standardized passage of time. Let's assume that they're telling the truth about the subjective time expansion, as opposed to merely taking a roundabout route to say that they care about their friends and will miss them. Why might the time expansion occur? There's plenty of research on this, explained by three competing theories:

Lack of Attention: We seem to recall events that we pay more attention to as being longer. For example, adding white static noise in an auditory detection task causes people to pay more attention to those intervals, and they are judged as lasting longer (see here). This one is a little controversial; some studies have found opposite effects. However, it is plausible that if students don't pay attention to what's going on, time may be perceived as passing more quickly.

Predictability: Novelty causes time perception to increase. For example, the first time a moving dot is shown to people for 480 milliseconds, they consider it to be visible for ~120 milliseconds longer, an increase of ~25% (see here). So if students get into a routine, they might consider time to be passing faster because they don't get this novelty effect.

Causality: The feeling of control makes events seem longer. For example, when people press a button to cause a 900 millisecond tone to start, they perceive the interval as lasting ~ 30 milliseconds longer than if the tone is started without their control (see here). So, if students make something happen at school of their own doing, they might remember it as lasting longer.

On this basis, if you want to extend your perceived tenure in college, you should attend more interesting classes, expose yourself to more randomness, and throw more of your own parties.

In fact, compared to "the workplace" (scare quotes emphasized), college has lots of time perception extending advantages: many new people to meet and new things to do. So if you think that these four years went by fast, get ready for the next four to go even faster.

Arguing to Authority

John Cochrane dismisses Richard Posner in a interview posted Jan 13:

I don’t want to comment on Posner. He’s a nice guy. But I spend my life trying to understand this stuff. My last two papers, which took me three years, were on determinacy conditions in New-Keynesian models. It took me a lot of time and a lot of math. If Posner can keep with that and with Law and Economics, good for him.

It reminds me of congressman Pete Stark telling Jan Henfeld that his opinions weren't relevant because he hadn't taken econ classes at a prestigious enough school. Eric Falkenstein explains the crux of the debate:

That we don't have enough data to say what optimal monetary policy is only an abstruse concept if you are being disingenuous. Every technical debate in economics comes down to a pretty common sensical debate, and if you can't articulate it in such a way, you are either an idiot-savant who does not understand what the models really mean, or you are trying to brow-beat outsiders via intellectual intimidation.

Folks arguing to authority always come off very poorly, and I wonder why. We often judge people by their relevant expertise, but for the expert to mention this specifically is usually considered poor form.

One explanation is that arguing to authority doesn't add anything to the debate. It's more efficient to let the viewers judge your expertise on their own time and instead use their attention to make your actual case. This is especially true in the era of the internet when everyone's personal info is only a google search away.

The Inevitability of Modernity

Razib Khan offers up a subtle and fascinating look at the indicative equilibrium shifts in human history. He concludes that agriculture was basically inevitable and that capitalism probably was too. The inevitability of modernity has lots of anthropic implications. If getting from "intelligent, social species traveling and gathering resources in small groups" to "social species gathering resources in fixed location" to "massively specialized and coordinated resource producing across nation-states" was inevitable, then either "creating life" or "evolving intelligence" or "nation-states surviving and advancing to galactic space colonization" must be really unlikely, because last I checked I haven't seen any alien space ships consorting in the troposphere lately. Let's hope that the surviving and developing space tech option is not the relevant bottleneck.

It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

Bryan Caplan presents four alternative worlds in which raising the cost of driving might not be the most effective way to curb congestion:

[I]f drivers were unselfish in the right way, all of the following would be equally economically plausible solutions: 1. Ask everyone to drive less "because they're inconveniencing others." 2. Tell people they're contributing to global warming. 3. Announce that if traffic doesn't fall by 20%, we'll abolish foreign aid to Senegal. 4. Denounce materialism so people quit their jobs and stop commuting.

Purely a priori these are plausible, but based on human behavior in the past we should predict that they will be far less helpful than appealing to driver's economic self-interest.

Bryan's false hypothetical is great way to get his point across and now strikes me as the most potent counter-argument to the distillation of ideas, a counter-argument which Tyler Cowen doesn't mention in his post against distillation. As opposed to the primary literature, summaries like Wikipedia usually don't articulate the ways that the world could be--they just state our current best guess for the way the world is. For example, the Wiki article for the citric acid cycle explains the steps very well, but doesn't explicate some of the other possible ways the cycle could occur.

Hindsight bias often causes people to be unsurprised when you explain the consensus best guess for how the world works. This lack of surprise will most likely lead to a deficit in deep understanding of the idea. Usually, given our time constraints, this deep understanding isn't necessary and trust in the consensus makers is enough. But on topics where deep understanding is critical, try to explain not only why that one fact is our best guess, but also why other possible alternatives are less likely.

Friend or Algorithm?

Mark Sisson poses a question:

Quick. How’d you hear about your favorite book or album of all time? Did you let an online algorithm determine what genre/artist/author/etc you’d prefer? Or did a trusted friend, colleague, or family member make a recommendation? I dunno about you, but I’ll take personal recommendations from people I trust over what some impersonal line of code thinks I should like, given the choice between the two.

This is a pervasive yet ultimately false dichotomy. Rating systems aren't based on what computer algorithms reverse engineer from the raw electromagnetic waves.* They're either based on the average ratings of other average people (like imdb) or the preferences of specific people who share some of your average characteristics (like netflix). That's the reality. Now, can you not trust these because you consider yourself too special to agree with the plebeian majority? You're free to be elitist, but at least admit it.

What's the other main reason to prefer a "trusted" friend over "impersonal line[s] of code"? To signal loyalty to your group or clique. People signal loyalty all the time** so you shouldn't necessarily feel bad about this, but again you might as well admit the truth to yourself and others before you perpetuate the information cascade.

Even though it is a false dichotomy, if I had to choose I'd still take the algorithm all day. Aggregating more opinions leads to less noise in opinion markets! What about you?

####

* Although that would be outrageously baller.
** I don't want to make it seem like I consider myself above this. In fact this very disclaimer is an example of signaling my loyalty to fellow lovers of transparency, as is this one, this one, etc.

Mark McGwire and the Self Serving Bias

He's admitted to steroid use but denies that they helped his performance:

McGwire insisted the performance-enhancing drugs he used did not actually enhance his performance. The dosages were too low and his physical ability too divine, turns out, for the drugs to have an impact on his body, particularly as it related to his hitting. “I was given the gift,” he told Costas, “to hit home runs.” He said he would have hit every single one of them had he never injected a drop of anything. “Absolutely,” he said. “I truly believe so.”

Some sportscasters are calling him out for lying in order to boost his chances of getting into the HOF, or something. I do not believe that he is consciously lying, in part because I have read about how powerful the self-serving bias can be. For example, children given methylphenidate attribute their success on impulsivity tests to effort and ability much more so than to medication, even when a double blind design ensures that in fact the medication leads to significantly fewer errors than placebo.

This is clearly adaptive--attributing success to internal factors builds your confidence and helps you perform better the next time. In the case of McGwire, it allowed him to use steroids off and on while minimizing anxiety that he'd perform worse without them.

As with Kobe, I wonder: Is McGwire's profligate self-serving bias merely an aberration? Or is it in fact one of the main reasons that he was able to have so much success in the first place?

The Internet Echo Chamber?

Some of the comments on Charlie Hoehn's recent post focused on whether the internet is merely an echo chamber or if intrinsic quality plays a larger role. As always in these "nature / nurture proxy" debates the winning answer is "somewhere in the middle," and the more useful question is how much each variable can explain.

To the extent that folk's behavior in listening to and downloading music is indicative of folk's propensity to e-mail, re-blog, or re-tweet articles*, then Mathew Salganik and Duncan Watts's two studies of web-based music listens and downloads, here and here, may be helpful in resolving this debate.

The researchers created a music downloading web site and uploaded 48 songs by unknown bands. They then recruited somewhat tech-savvy individuals to listen to, rate, and possibly download the songs. Folks downloaded on average 1 out of 7 songs they listened to, indicating some modicum of selectivity.

In one study, the researchers assigned all incoming visitors to either the "social influence" condition, in which they could see the rating and downloading behavior of others, or the "independent" condition in which they could not. Within the "social influence" condition, visitors were also assigned to one of a few identical "worlds," which should have different rating and downloading trends due to random chance.

When the songs were presented to visitors in a single column sorted by popularity, social influence was at its highest. Participants listened to the most downloaded song about ~45% of the time and the second and third most downloaded songs ~30% of the time, while they only listened to songs downloaded an average number of times ~5% of the time.

Salganik and Watts then used the download trends of individuals in the independent condition to predict download trends of individuals in the social condition. In experiment 2, knowledge of the independent data decreased naive prediction errors for the social influence condition by 16%. In experiment 3, with older and more international demographics, knowledge of the independent data decreased naive prediction errors for the social influence condition by 38%. This averages out to 27% as a rough proxy for the usefulness of independent appeal data for predicting which songs will be succesful in the social influence condition. Not great, but not that bad!

In the next study, the researchers had similar set up but in two of their social influence conditions they used an intervention: inverting the download rankings after 752 visitors (~27% of the overall number) had visited the site. This immediately increases the number of downloads for the previously lower rated songs, but eventually some of the top rated ones begin to climb back:
This study also included a non-inverted social influence condition to compare and an independent condition to measure intrinsic appeal. The r correlation between download ranks in the non-inverted social influence condition and independent condition is a strikingly high 0.82, corresponding to an explained variance of 67%. The inverted social influence conditions have much weaker correlations of 0.40 and 0.45 (corresponding to explained variances of 16% and 20%), but these show that even when social influence is directly manipulated against what folks independently prefer, there is still a positive trend between intrinsic appeal and downloading trends.

Salganik and Watts also mention the rating incompleteness theorem (see here): "On the one hand, by revealing the existing popularity of songs to individuals, the market provides them with real, and often useful, information; but on the other hand, if they actually use this information, the market inevitably aggregates less useful information." So, it's hard to prevent people from becoming biased by other's preferences because looking at them is is often a rational choice designed to save precious time. In other words, it's hard to nudge away from a Nash equilibrium.

* This is not necessarily an apt comparison. Music downloading is much more private and personal, whereas what you choose to blog or tweet about is much more visible and thus will subject you to more public judging. On the other hand, reading and discussing articles on the internet is much nerdier than music listening and thus participants may have less emotional attachment, leading to more quality-driven preferences. I don't know of any more applicable experiments but please get at me if you do.

Bottom Line: To say that "the internet is an echo chamber, full stop" is foolhardy. Based on these music download experiments, it seems that around 25 to 70% of folk's decisions to are based on the intrinsic appeal of the material. There is also reason to expect that this percentage would be higher if the download data were less public and estimates of popularity were more noisy, as they are in real life.