Psychology – a sibilant intake of breath

Waiting for America’s decision

These past eleven months of working and slowly recovering from the PhD have altered my stress responses a great deal.

Literally for years, I was in a constant state of such anxiety that it interfered every day with both productivity and sleep. During the worst parts, all I could do was alternate between trying to focus on other things and jumping back to the news to see if there had been an act of mass violence.

Today’s US election is as stressful a thing as has ever happened in my life, perhaps more so because literally all of the predictions I have heard (from political experts to my brother Mica who is much better at handicapping elections than me) have been for a Trump win.

It’s staggering, distressing, and disturbing to me that this election could even be close, given Trump’s obvious incompetence and the danger he poses. The January 6th insurrection left me with a terrific fear that the forces tearing America apart are stronger than those holding it together. If America makes another sociopathic and self-destructive choice today, that breakdown will accelerate.

I fear that the dynamic which now dominates the democratic world is this: as our fossil fuel addiction keeps damaging the climate, more and more societal systems which were previously able to cope will begin to fail instead. As people notice this breakdown, they give up on conventional political candidates willing to do the slow incremental work of changing policy in favour of ideological blowhards who promise drastic changes for the benefit of the masses but who are really controlled by self-interested cadres of extremists and the ultra-wealthy. While all this is happening, there is too much drama and emotional turmoil to properly diagnose what is putting society under such strain, along with no willingness to act on abolishing fossil fuels. Our broken politics are breaking the world.

None of these worries are new, and I suppose what is striking me most right now is how subjectively OK I feel despite my extreme anxiety and terror. I think perhaps it’s the difference between confronting a potential tragedy after being awake 24 hours on a forced march versus on a day after decent sleep. The fear is just as intense, but with at least the stability of housing and employment it seems less like a constant personal catastrophe than it did during the PhD.

Good luck to us all tonight.

Self-deception prevents learning

A deliberate deception (misleading one’s colleagues, or a patient, or a boss) has at least one clear benefit. The person doing the deceiving will, by definition, recognize the deceit and will inwardly acknowledge the failure. Perhaps he will amend the way he does his job to avoid such a failure in the future. Self-justification is more insidious. Lying to oneself destroys the very possibility of learning. How can one learn from failure if one has convinced oneself —through endlessly subtle means of self-justification, narrative manipulation, and the wider psychological arsenal of dissonance-reduction — that a failure didn’t actually occur?

Syed, Matthew. Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do. Portfolio, 2015.

Milan Ilnyckyj Policy on Sincere Invitations

Please believe that this post is not prompted by any recent incident, but rather by something I have long observed and recently had some clarifying conversations about.

I have always been vexed and perplexed by insincere invitations of all kinds, when done out of politeness or as a kind of social reflex: “You must come to the house for lunch sometime…”

I do not like not knowing if a sincere offer is being made, and I do not like following up to have the offering party just awkwardly never get to the point of saying that an invitation had not been sincere.

For the benefit of my friends, colleagues, and relations, I will briefly and simply enunciate my own policy so that you may understand what an invitation from me means:

My invitations are sincere.

Specifically, they are not insincere in that I am not actually proposing to do the thing suggested. If I suggest having lunch sometime, I do really mean to break out calendars and arrange and execute such a plan. If you say yes and the fates allow, there will be lunch.

They are also not insincere in the sense of being a coded signal for something else. I am curious about a limitless number of things, so if I suggest we take a walk sometime and have a detailed discussion on some subject, or take a bike ride around the city, or whatever – I do actually, literally, specifically mean we should do those things.

Thank you for your attention.

Conformity versus competence

[I]n most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Ordinary incompetence, as we have seen, is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy, and thereby violates the first commandment of hierarchal life: the hierarchy must be preserved.

…

Employees in the two extreme classes—the super-competent and the super-incompetent—are alike subject to dismissal. They are usually fired soon after being hired, for the same reason: that they tend to disrupt the hierarchy.

Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. The Peter Principle. Buccaneer Books, 1969. p. 45-6

Monbiot on alienation and politics

When politics, bereft of relevant stories, cannot connect with the lives of those it claims to represent, it contributes to the dominant condition of our age: alienation.

Alienation means many things. Among them are people’s loss of control over the work they do; their loss of connection with community and society; their loss of trust in political institutions and in the future; their loss of a sense of meaning and power over their own lives; and a convergence of these fissures into psychic rupture. In the political sphere, alienation leads to disengagement, and disengagement opens the way for demagogues.

Monbiot, George. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Verso, 2017. p. 54

Combinatorial math and the impossibility of rationality

A perfectly rational entity maximizes the expected satisfaction of its preferences over all possible future lives it could choose to lead. I cannot begin to write down a number that describes the complexity of this decision problem, but I find the following thought experiment helpful. First, note that the number of motor control choices that a human makes in a lifetime is about twenty trillion… Next, let’s see how far brute force will get us with the aid of Seth Lloyd’s ultimate-physics laptop, which is one billion trillion trillion times faster than the world’s fastest computer. We’ll give it the task of enumerating all possible sequences of English words (perhaps as a warmup for Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel), and we’ll let it run for a year. How long are the sequences that it can enumerate in that time? A thousand pages of text? A million pages? No. Eleven words. This tells you something about the difficulty of designing the best possible life of twenty trillion actions. In short, we are much further from being rational than a slug is from overtaking the starship Enterprise traveling at warp nine. We have absolutely no idea what a rationally chosen life would be like.

Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. 2019. p. 232 (italics in original)

Group bike rides build community

I have been getting a lot of satisfaction lately from group bike rides. Community emerges naturally when people ride bikes in groups. The contrast underscores how automobile culture is a death cult: every driver gets their own sarcophagus for the living to move them through places while keeping the driver sealed apart. The driver is isolated from nature, from community, and from life at a human scale. They begin to live at a car scale where our instincts and experiences no longer bind us to our neighbours. The car is built to move at 60, 80, 100 km per hour, and to be indifferent to anything it might need to kill to do so.

Group bike rides provide a tangible vision for an idealized future without private cars. That’s a world where people who take the same routes and live in the same neighbourhoods know each other and talk: where they are neighbours. That’s a world with flower fairy girls on lavishly decorated cruiser bikes, and with guys in motorcycle helmets and body armour riding on zippy electric unicycles.

On a bike in the city, you live with the constant awareness of being killed. When riding alone, the great majority of my attention is always directed to nearby drivers and what abrupt, dangerous, or illegal thing they may do next. For drivers in the city, they may live with a mild awareness that their every careless action threatens to kill others, but they are distracted by bluetooth calls and streaming media, alienated from their fellow residents by socially atomized affluence, and shielded by public opinion and a legal system where killing someone with your car through simple carelessness is a minor and unimportant oversight which ought not to impede your happy motoring.

Game theory and the limits of reason

I myself suffer from a morbid sense of despair, and even now, decades after I worked with von Neumann, I still find myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann. Normal people are not like that at all. Yes, they lie, they cheat, deceive, connive, and conspire, but they also cooperate, they can sacrifice themselves for others, or simply make decisions on a whim. Men and women follow their guts. They heed hunches and make careless mistakes. Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced. And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off all the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason.

Labatut, Benjamin. The MANIAC. Penguin Random House, 2023. p. 144-5. (italics in original)

Reading Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow recently, at several points I was struck by what seemed like the unjustified assumption that people are competent at mental arithmetic. Specifically, that you can give a person a list of probabilities and payouts and then find it legitimately surprising that they can’t or don’t pick the best one. For people constantly immersed in calculation this may be puzzling, but I also have personal experience of highly intelligent and knowledgeable people struggling at (or being unwilling to even try) calculating what a certain percentage of a number is, like for a tip. Studies on the numerical literacy of the general public reveal a worrisome inability to properly gauge millions against billions.

When mathematicians, logicians, and game theorists forget that much of the population cannot or will not calculate, they miss the obvious cause of deviations from their predictions and theories.

Lonely, frustrated, angry, and despairing

Lately, I have been feeling dejected and wildly alienated from the rest of humanity. It seems like basically nobody wants to avoid catastrophic climate change. Among those who purport to care, the superficiality the commitment is quickly revealed when they prioritize other objectives ahead of avoiding climate disaster. Government agencies work to defend the status quo: at best, they pretend to take action in order to avoid doing anything that would really make a difference. At worst, governments are the armed wing of the fossil fuel industry itself. Every country with fossil fuel reserves is rushing to develop more production. Even climate change activists care more, in practice, for imposing their social and economic preferences on society than about abolishing fossil fuels.

At times over the last 18 years, working on climate change has felt like a lonely journey but at least one where eventually the world will come around. As each year goes by now, it seems more that humanity is content to fly our plane straight into the ground, while the passengers cheer as they set ever-higher speed records and the captain assures everyone over the intercom that our present course ensures a happy arrival at a welcoming destination.

Hale on why climate stability advocates are often confounded

The combination of uncertainty and low salience, in turn, enables obstructionism, the ability of interests tied to the status quo to maintain their interests. Consider the hurdles of a policy entrepreneur would have to overcome to create and implement a policy addressing a problem with distant effects like climate change. First, that policy entrepreneur would have to herself see value in pursuing an obscure issue, one that is unlikely to garner her a quick win and the associated political benefits. Few will have incentives to pursue such causes. Second, she would have to mobilize a sufficient coalition of interests to be able to influence policy. This would require each of those interests choosing to focus on a distant topic over their more urgent priorities. Third, this interest coalition would need to force the issue onto the broader political agenda, competing for limited space with numerous immediate priorities. Fourth, the coalition would need to somehow overcome, compensate, or neutralize political opponents.

To the extent those opponents are worried about the short-term costs of action, everything that is hard for the long-sighted policy entrepreneur will be easy for them. Opposing long-sighted policy—that is, promoting short-term outcomes—will give them the opportunity for quick wins on issues that are relatively easy to mobilize interests around. And even if the long-term-oriented policy entrepreneur wins a battle, she must preserve and maintain those gains permanently, as opponents will seek to reverse any defeats they face. A one-off victory may be important, but long problems often require sustained policies over time, while it only takes one victory by opponents to block them. The longer a problem’s effects reach into the future, the more friction the policy entrepreneur will face at every stage, and, should she get a win, the more enduring her victories will need to be.

Hale, Thomas. Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time. Princeton University Press, 2024.