Psychology – Page 32 – a sibilant intake of breath

Encouraging re-gifting

I don’t think it is appropriate that our society has a general stigma against ‘re-gifting‘: the practice of giving away something that was itself received as a gift.

In many ways, re-gifting is a rational response to the fundamental problem of gift-giving, namely that gift-givers are not necessarily able to pick things that gift-recipients will want. Very often, the cost to the giver will substantially exceed the benefit to the recipient. For example, you might get an inferior version of something you already own, and which nobody needs more than one of. There are also clothes that don’t fit or do not fit your style, books you will never read, foods you do not enjoy, and so on.

Allowing the recipient to give the gift to somebody who may like it more reduces the odds that it will sit unused and unappreciated in a corner or a closet somewhere.

I wonder if there is any concrete way in which the tolerance for re-gifting within society can be increased. Perhaps there should be a designated day, sometime after Christmas, on which people are encouraged to re-gift. In particular, they should be encouraged to give away anything that has little or no value to them, but which they know will be valued by somebody else.

For the record, as a utilitarian I encourage people to re-gift unwanted things that I have given to them at various times. I can’t promise that I won’t be a bit disappointed to learn that I have chosen something for you that has no value, but I will be glad at least that it is going to somebody who will have a use for it.

Two more books

Unable to help myself, I have added two volumes to my substantial assortment of unread and partially read books.

I got the biography of Graham Chapman, of Monty Python fame: A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI.

Intrigued by an ongoing series of discussions on iTunes University, I also got a book on ‘mindfulness’ as a means for reducing anxiety: Mindfulness: An Eight Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. The approach is apparently related to cognitive behavioural therapy.

Remembrance for victims and objectors

Every year, I see the militarism and nationalism that are linked to Remembrance Day, and every year I find them at least partly objectionable. The twentieth century should be taken as a comprehensive demonstration of the immorality of war, and how dangerous it is when people adopt nationalist and militarist ideologies. Putting on a poppy and saluting the people who fought for ‘our’ side in various conflicts seems to be missing the point.

Rather than celebrate the people who happened to fight on ‘our’ side, it seems more suitable to recognize that virtually all wars have involved appalling crimes committed by the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. We need only think about the firebombing of German and Japanese cities during the second world war (to say nothing of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to realize that nobody comes away from major conflicts with an unblemished moral record. The only justification for such crimes is that it seemed necessary at the time to avert a still-greater evil.

Of course, many histories of war are written with retroactive justifications that do not accord well with a dispassionate examination of the historical evidence. Germany is the only country in Europe where the role of the state in perpetuating the Holocaust is unambiguously recognized and taught. People in many other countries were complicit. The trains to the death camps originated in many places, and everyone who was involved in the system bears some guilt for it. The same is true with regard to the atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – in Russia, and China, and Congo, and every other place where human beings have engaged in or tolerated the systematic abuse and slaughter of their fellows. I personally find it deeply troubling that there are so many people who remain unapologetic about the crimes committed by ‘their side’ in the course of wars in which they participated. ‘My country right or wrong’ is one of the most damaging and dangerous mindsets people can adopt.

I think it would be much more appropriate to devote Remembrance Day to marking the suffering of all the civilians who have been caught up in wars. That includes people who were the incidental victims of military campaigns, dying either directly from weapons or indirectly from starvation or disease. It also includes the millions of victims of the intentional genocides of the twentieth century and before – crimes that could not possibly have been committed without the willingness of human beings to commit acts of violence upon the orders of their states. We should feel disgusted and angry about how easily people can be convinced to fight for states that are undertaking such programs, and actively involved in building institutional and cultural defences against such things happening again.

In that spirit, I think it would also be suitable to use Remembrance Day to celebrate those unpopular figures who have had the courage to refuse to fight – and those who had the even greater courage to speak out publicly against unjust wars. Conscientious objectors are people who have had the moral insight necessary to realize what an appalling thing wars are, and who have had the personal courage to refuse to fight. They have done so even when that choice has been harshly criticized by the other members of their societies and frequently punished by prison or worse. This has sometimes been equally true for people who have taken a public stance against war, at a time when their societies have been progressing toward it. Soldiers may deserve praise for their courage, but so do people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a German clergyman who spoke out against Nazism and paid for it with his life.

The world would surely be a better place if more people refused to get caught up in the drumbeat and euphoria of war. People are dangerously quick to do so, and that is something we must all guard against.

An alternative Turing Test

During a recent discussion with Tristan, the subject of the Turing Test arose. For those who are unfamiliar, the test is intended as a way to determine if a machine has intelligence. You set it up so that it can converse with a human being – for instance, through a text-based instant message type conversation – and if the person thinks they are talking with another human, it can be taken as evidence that the machine is intelligent.

Setting aside the question of how good an intelligence test this really is (a computer could pretty easily trawl a database of human conversations to produce convincing conversation), it seems like there is another sort of test that would be demonstrative of a different kind of intelligence. Namely, it would be when a machine or a computer program first becomes aware of itself as being a machine or computer program.

It is possible that no machine made by humans will ever develop that level of self awareness. Perhaps it is impossible to replicate whatever trick our brains use to turn flesh into consciousness. If it did happen, however, it seems like it could help to illuminate what self-understanding means, and what sort of mechanisms it requires.

No iPhone 5, reduced gadget envy

Apple shareholders and gadget geeks are lamenting how an iPhone 5 was not announced.

One thing that occurs to me is that owners of the iPhone 4 probably benefit. Nobody is going to feel left out or insecure because they have an iPhone 4 rather than the marginally improved 4S. A real iPhone 5, however, would have made a lot of people feel inadequate for having the ‘old’ model.

Of course, it is exactly that pattern of new gadget envy that has allowed Apple to charge such premium prices for their gear and derive such substantial profits.

What’s important and earning a living

Maybe the idea that you should seek a career doing what you really care about is flawed. Doing anything for money tends to involve many compromises and sacrifices of principle or aesthetics.

Perhaps it is wiser to earn your money in a field that you don’t really care about at all, so that you can be able to act freely in the areas that are really important to you.

Gravity without air resistance

I am glad someone actually went out and did this:

Among other things, it shows how our intuitions are often based on the limited range of conditions experienced by our ancestors on Earth, and thus reflective of only a subset of what is true about the universe generally. We expect air resistance to exist everywhere, despite the airless character of many stellar bodies.

Of course, science fiction authors seem to expect all moons and planets to not only have atmospheres, but have atmospheres that Kirk and company can breathe unaided, but that is a different misplaced assumption.

Playing the lottery is not necessarily irrational

People sometimes describe lotteries as a tax on those who are bad at math. The tickets are worth less than their face value, given the size of the payout and your odds of winning.

That is all true enough. At the same time, it bears remembering that we each get to live a single very finite life. Used well, the winnings from a lottery could improve that one and only life a lot – particularly if the money is used to advance a particular cause that is important to you, rather than used hedonistically.

Losing the cost of a bunch of lottery tickets is irrational if your aim is to maximize how much money you are likely to have in your life. At the same time, betting on a long shot can be rational in the sense that there is a large amount of upside that you have no hope whatsoever of capturing if you do not play.

Expressed another way, the problem with lotteries is that you basically pay $5 for a one-in-a-million shot of winning $1,000,000. The ticket is overpriced and the money is probably wasted. At the same time, there is probably no other way in which you are going to get $1,000,000. At least playing the lottery gives you some chance, however infinitesimal.

The logic is similar to that of buying insurance against your house burning down. If you had a huge number of houses, you would be better off not paying premiums and just dealing with the cost of fires yourself. Because you only have one house, however, you overpay on premiums in order to avoid a catastrophic outcome.

All that said, and as I have argued before, I don’t think lotteries and casinos should be allowed to advertise. It is better for the state to keep gambling legal and regulated, rather than allowing it to become one more racket for organized crime along with drugs and prostitution. At the same time, neither the state nor private companies should be permitted to take advantage of the weak understanding of probability in the general public through advertising a profoundly false promise that winning is likely. Casinos also should not be allowed to serve alcohol.

To sum up, winning the lottery is an extreme long shot, but when you only have a single chance to try something it can be a rational strategy to accept a set risk (the near certainty that the money spent on a ticket is wasted) in exchange for a chance at a large benefit.

Loyalty

Tristan recently wrote a post on loyalty, arguing that there are a lot of ‘loyal’ behaviours that are positive and socially important. That’s fair enough, but I still think loyalty is seriously over-valued as a virtue, and that it is always at risk of becoming unethical. Loyalty blends easily into nepotism, corruption, cover-ups, and conspiracies.

The kind of people who really need die-hard supporters are those whose private actions would not be supported by many members of the population at large or by the authorities in power. Occasionally, that is not a sign that those behaviours are unethical. For example, the French resistance during WWII was undertaken by a small part of the total population. In situations where you are waging a noble fight under conditions of oppression, loyalty may be both admirable and necessary.

More often, though, activities that need to be kept secret are dubious or damaging. Loyal little bands can get ahead together largely because they conspire to flatter one another, cover up their mistakes, and general put the collective interests of their inner circle ahead of the interests of humanity as a whole. Politicians who favour loyalty over competence within their staff seem to end up making the most egregious and dramatic mistakes.

People need die-hard supporters when they lack the respect of people who disagree with them. Perhaps that is the definition of being a political moderate: having the respect of intelligent people who hold very different views.

Who respects fancy degrees?

Apparently, attending a top-tier law school is more useful if you want to become a professor at a top-tier school than if you want to work for a top-tier firm. Quite plausibly, academics are impressed by people who have attended institutions they themselves respect, while law firms may be more focused on a person’s actual performance than the name at the top of their diploma.

I wonder if something like that is true about academia generally: that a doctorate from Harvard is more impressive to the hiring boards of universities than to the governance boards of major non- and inter-governmental organizations, charities, think tanks, governments, etc.

Previously:

The value of a doctorate

On recession and the value of graduate school