Psychology – Page 3 – a sibilant intake of breath

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.

Shrugging our way through the breakdown of a stable world

Lately, in observing our politics and dealing with our society, I feel like a time traveller who has been sent back to before the forthcoming collapse. There is no success to be had in warning people though. They sense and feel that the collapse is coming, and that they are unwilling to make the changes that might avoid it. It’s not that people don’t believe the warning; they do. Apocalypse has become the leitmotif of our culture. People are just too corrupted by self-interest and too pessimistic about the ability of our society to solve problems to believe that anything can be done.

Kahneman on risks from excess confidence and optimism

Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences. The study of CFOs showed that those who were most confident and optimistic about the S&P index were also overconfident and optimistic about the prospects of their own firm, which went on to take more risk than others. As Nassim Taleb has argued, inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

The social and economic pressures that favor overconfidence are not restricted to financial forecasting. Other professionals must deal with the fact that an expert worthy of the name is expected to display high confidence. Philip Tetlock observed that the most overconfident experts were the most likely to be invited to strut their stuff in news shows. Overconfidence also appears to be endemic in medicine. A study of patients who died in the ICU compared autopsy results with the diagnosis that physicians had provided when the patients were still alive. Physicians also reported their confidence. The result: “clinicians who were ‘completely certain’ of the diagnosis antemortem were wrong 40% of the time.” Here again, expert overconfidence is encouraged by their clients: “Generally, it is considered a weakness and a sign of vulnerability for clinicians to appear unsure. Confidence is valued over uncertainty and there is a prevailing censure against disclosing uncertainty to patients.” Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Random House Canada, 2011. p. 262–3

The nuclear razor’s edge

I listened to the audiobook of Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War. Having followed the subject and read a lot about it over the years, it nonetheless had a lot of new information inside of a compellingly presented, plausible, and chlling story.

Our whole world can end in a couple of hours; live life accordingly.

Rate matching in personal communication

One element of human interaction which I have always found perplexing and frustrating is when people lie with the expectation that you will understand that they are lying and also what they are really trying to say. For example, there is a kind of upper class reflex to say something like: “You will have to come visit the house sometime!” when they mean: “We will never see each other again, but please keep treating me like an aristocrat”.

One place where people frequently try this “I’ll be dishonest but assume they’ll understand what I mean” trick is with regard to volume of communication. For whatever reason, people are often dishonest about hearing from you too little or too much, and will even lie about it when directly asked, even if the volume of communication is really annoying them.

What I have learned to do in this arena is to ignore what people explicitly say and focus on rate matching. If someone responds to me promptly, I speed up the pace of my messages to keep the average time between my messages similar to the average time between theirs. Similarly, if someone is slow to respond to me (or never responds), I regulate down the frequency of my communication to be more closely matched. For example, if I send a text and get an immediate response, it’s OK to write back immediately. If it takes an hour, or five hours, or a day, or three days to get a response — it’s best to copy the length of the delay when responding.

The system doesn’t cover everything. One notable consideration is the division of labour. Perhaps because I am a lot keener than most to stay in touch with most people, I tend to be the person to establish and maintain communication. Once that behaviour has become a norm in the relationship, it can produce a dynamic where they rarely or never initiate contact because they now expect me to do it. Still, perhaps even here it would be sensible to rate match; if someone never ever reaches out to you, its probably an unspoken sign that they prefer to do other things with their time.

Whose agenda are you devoted to?

I have never seen George Monbiot’s bettered as career advice, though it will not lead to an easy life. For instance:

What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution. You can do what you believe only if that belief happens to coincide with the aims of the corporation, not just once, but consistently, across the years

Also:

How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?

What he cheers for and takes satisfaction from is inspiring too:

Most countries have a number of small alternative papers and broadcasters, run voluntarily by people making their living by other means: part time jobs, grants or social security. These are, on the whole, people of tremendous courage and determination, who have placed their beliefs ahead of their comforts. To work with them can be a privilege and inspiration, for the simple reason that they – and, by implication, you – are free while others are not. All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.

Autonomy, not authority, is the only way to escape the many traps of the status quo.

The affect heuristic

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives. If you are a hawk in your attitude toward other nations, you probably think they are relatively weak and likely to submit to your country’s will. If you are a dove, you probably think they are strong and will not be easily coerced. Your emotional attitude to such things as irradiated food, red meat, nuclear power, tattoos, or motorcycles drives your beliefs about their benefits and their risks. If you dislike any of these things, you probably believe its risks are high and its benefits negligible.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Random House Canada, 2011. p. 103