Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Pinker on language

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. p. 3 (hardcover)

Love and counterintelligence

But here’s the point. He had made another choice too. He had decided to cast himself as the victim, the wronged, the deceived, the rightly furious. He had persuaded himself that he had said nothing to me about the laundry basket. The memory had been erased, and for a purpose. But now he didn’t even know he’d erased it. He wasn’t even pretending. He actually believed in his disappointment. He really did think that I had done something devious and mean. He was protecting himself from the idea that he’d had a choice. Weak, self-deluding, pompous? All those, but above all, a failure of reasoning. High table, monographs, government commissions – meaningless. His reasoning had deserted him. As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction.

McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. 2012. p. 31 (emphasis in original)

Related: Self Deception

The policy garbage can

“March and Olsen… began with the assumption that both the rational and incremental models presumed a level of intentionality, comprehension of problems, and predictability among actors that simply did not obtain in reality. In their view, decision-making was a highly ambiguous and unpredictable process only distantly related to searching for means to achieve goals. Rejecting the instrumentalism that characterized most other models, Cohen, March, and Olsen (1989) argued that most decision opportunities were:

‘a garbage can into which various problems and solutions are dumped by participants. The mix of garbage in a single can depends partly on the labels attached to the alternative cans; but it also depends on what garbage is being produced at the moment, or the mix of cans available, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene.’

Cohen, March, and Olsen deliberately used the garbage-can metaphor to strip away the aura of scientific authority attributed to decision-making by earlier theorists. They sought to drive home the point that goals are often unknown to policy-makers, as are causal relationships. In their view, actors simply define goals and choose means as they go along in a policy process that is necessarily contingent and unpredictable.”

Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh, and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles & Political Subsytems: Third Edition. 2009. p. 152 (paperback)

See also: The Thick of It

Stone on political ideas

This model of policy making as rational problem solving can’t explain why sometimes policy solutions go looking for problems. It can’t tell us why solutions such as deregulation turn into problems for the very groups they were meant to help. Most important, the production model fails to capture what I see as the essence of policy making in political communities: the struggle over ideas. Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money and votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to action and meld individual striving into collective action. All political conflict revolves around ideas. Policy making, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave.

Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making: Third Edition. 2012. p. 13 (paperback)

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Rationality and the compatibility of preferences

In political science, there are a huge number of models of individual and group behaviour that are predicated on the assumption of rationality: basically, that people have a set of preferences about how the world and their lives should be and they make choices that raise the odds of outcomes they favour while reducing the odds of outcomes they oppose.

There is probably an even larger literature pointing out the flaws in this categorization. People don’t know everything, and even the information they do have is costly to acquire. It can be empirically demonstrated that people sometimes have sets of preferences that are not neatly ordered (they may prefer A to B and B to C, yet somehow prefer C to A). Many quirks of human psychology have been demonstrated, in which small or irrelevant details affect the choices people make.

Another important challenge to rational accounts is uncertainty about the compatibility of objectives. Wanting to live an open and flamboyantly homosexual lifestyle may be obviously incompatible with wanting to run for office as a conservative Republican in some jurisdictions, but there are many possible preferences for which it isn’t clear if achieving objective X necessarily requires sacrificing objective Y. That uncertainty is overlaid upon uncertainty about which objectives you actually can achieve (you may be unable to become an international swimming champion, even if you do sacrifice your aspiration to go the medical school in order to raise the odds). In many cases, outcomes could go either way. Maybe implementing an ambitious climate change agenda will doom your odds of re-election… or maybe it will improve them.

None of this is to say that rational models of decision-making are necessarily useless, or that they have no place in political analysis. Nonetheless, bearing these limitations in mind may contribute to a useful form of humility.

Anything but comp prep

Partly because of its supposed effectiveness in countering stress, spending moderate amounts of time at the gym falls within what I consider acceptable procrastination. It certainly helps that the Hart House gym has pretty good hours and is only a four minute walk from my bedroom (as well as the libraries where I should generally be embedded for the next month).

Generally, I do 25 minutes of cardio on an elliptical machine, run a lap, do another 25 minutes of cardio, run another lap, and then row for 2000 metres. Even with my new glasses, I don’t find that I can effectively read during any of these activities, so it’s also a chance to catch up on Planet Money, This American Life, The Current (I tend to avoid the most depressing stories), and the Savage Lovecast (abrasive, but a useful source of perspective – like his long-running column). I wish Stephen Fry released his podgrams much more often (the one on language is wonderful, and an antidote to pedantry).

When working on exceptionally daunting and unpleasant tasks, I have to suspend the rules of my normal procrastination flowchart, since following it would easily allow me to cut study time to nothing. Beyond the gym, a few forms of acceptable non-study activity include corresponding with friends and family members (though I am still well behind); dealing with especially time-sensitive 350.org tasks; purchasing, cooking, and eating brain-sustaining food; taking and posting photos of the day; and doing a quantity of paid work that reduces the rate at which my savings are depleting.

Less justifiable activities that sometimes sneak in are the occasional ladder game of Starcraft II (seems to raise wakefulness as much as a large cup of coffee, without insomniac side-effects), reading materials unrelated to the comp, and ongoing endless correspondence with the Canada Revenue Agency.