What I learned in 2011

At the end of a year, people like to make lists of top movies, books, etc.  What I plan to do instead is write about the things I learned each year. So, here are some brief highlights of things I learned in 2011:

• Epigenetics, toolkit genes, genetic switches and how most conversations about heritability are flawed.  I learned a lot about imprinted genes from Charlene Lewis (especially BDNF), about toolkit genes from reading Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful (which I highly recommend) and about all of these topics from (some of) Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on human behavioral biology (which are fantastic, and free on youtube and itunes).
• Social belonging sits atop the hierarchy of needs.  Sister Y introduced this idea with her blog here: “the need for social belonging is more pressing than the need for food.”  I have noticed that people are far more likely to want to kill (themselves or someone else) when they have been socially shamed, rejected, or ostracized.  NYU Psychology Professor James Gilligan noted:”The emotional cause that I have found just universal among people who commit serious violence, lethal violence is the phenomenon of feeling overwhelmed by feelings of shame and humiliation. I’ve worked with the most violent people our society produces who tend to wind up in our prisons. I’ve been astonished by how almost always I get the same answer when I ask the question—why did you assault or even kill that person? And the answer I would get back in one set of words or another but almost always meaning exactly the same thing would be, ‘Because he disrespected me,’ or ‘He disrespected my mother,’ or my wife, my girlfriend, whatever.”

  In the same program, Pieter Spierenburg pointed out that murder in defense of your reputation used to be viewed as a pretty minor offense: “Originally around 1300 the regular punishment for an honourable killing would be a fine or perhaps a banishment, whereas punishment for a treacherous murder would be execution.”

• Evidence in favor of our promiscuous past, the most interesting of which is sperm competition.  I was introduced to this topic in Sex at Dawn.
• Life cycles of parasites.  I learned about this from Robert Sapolsky and This Week in Parasitism.  I particularly love Toxoplasma and fish tapeworm.
• Lead and crime.  There are a lot of theories about why crime has declined since the 1990s.  These theories include:  legalization of abortion, tougher sentencing, end of crack epidemic, etc.  But I think the most interesting one is the reduction in lead exposure.  Total lead exposure was a non-decreasing function  from 1900 to 1970.  Lead exposure from gasoline increased sharply from 1930 to 1970.   We know that lead exposure, especially chronic exposure, has neurotoxic effects.  It can be particularly damaging to the frontal lobe.  Thus, we would expect that kids who were exposed to lead would be more likely to engage in impulse crimes when they are young adults.   Jessica Reyes documented the link between lead exposure and crime in the US in this paper.   The graph below, taken from her paper, overlays the lead exposure curve and crime rate curve (with a 22 year lag for lead exposure, because 22 is the average age at which violent crimes are committed, so we would expect childhood exposure to lead to have the largest impact approximately 20 years later):
  
  I think this is pretty compelling, and a fascinating story.  The League of Nations banned lead pain in 1922, but the US failed to adopt the measure.  The US didn’t take serious action until the 1970s.  To this day, lead paint exposure is a serious problem for people living in old homes in large cities.  I would love to see the lead exposure / crime link investigated using data from other countries.
• Religion. I learned about the history of god, its relation to changes in civilization (how transitions from polytheism to monotheism paralleled changes from foraging to farming, egalitarianism to hierarchy), lots of cool, related neuroscience, etc.  This is work in progress.  Hopefully I will have more to say about it next year.
• I found Sister Y’s views on nature very insightful.

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Purpose of life

Nihilists often sound depressed about life having no meaning or purpose.

Religious folks often say that, without god, life would have no purpose (i.e., God saves them from the state of depression that some nihilists find themselves in).

What could purpose look like?

Suppose a conscious intelligent designer (let’s call it ‘god’) creates a conscious being and gives it a specific purpose.   God might say “I created you because I wanted to see if you can get to the end of this corn maze.”   Suppose this being was even created with a very strong desire to get through the maze.  This being was created with a purpose.

But is that really objective meaning?

You could ask the meta question, “what is the purpose of the purpose?”  I conjecture that in any possible world you can find a meta-purpose question for which the answer is ‘there is none.’  Thus, there is no possible world in which life could have objective purpose or meaning (at every meta-level).

Why be depressed that we don’t live in a world that couldn’t exist?

It seems strange to be disappointed because something didn’t happen that couldn’t happen.  It seems strange to be disappointed by something having no purpose that couldn’t have a purpose.

Humans have as much purpose as any living thing in any world could have.  There are better possible worlds for sure, but I cannot imagine one with more meaning or purpose.

Complaining that life has no purpose is like complaining that salt is composed primarily of sodium chloride.

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sunk costs — when to count them

Whether or not you should weigh past expenditures in your judgment depends on the question you want to answer.

Sometimes you should ignore sunk costs, like when deciding whether to continue playing Farmville (link):

The urge to stay the course and keep your farm flourishing gets more powerful the more you invest in it, the more you ask others for help, the more time you spend thinking about it. People set alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to keep their farm alive. You continue to play Farmville not to have fun, but to avoid negative emotions. It isn’t the crop you are harvesting, but your fallacies. You return and click to patch cracks in a dam holding back something icky in your mind – the sense you wasted something you can never get back.

…

Farmville players are mired in a pit of sunk costs. They can never get back the time or the money they’ve spent, but they keep playing to avoid feeling the pain of loss and the ugly sensation waste creates.

However, when assessing whether effort was ‘worth it’, you should take into account the pain and suffering (or benefit — sunk benefit is a concept too) that you have already experienced.  For example, suppose you slaved away at a job you hated for decades and were miserable the whole time, but now you are enjoying a nice retirement.  It would be easy to feel like it was worth it now, because you are no longer suffering.   But if you are advising a young person about whether they should follow your path, you need to take that cost into account.

Similarly, if you are an adult and thinking about whether you are glad you were brought into the world (and whether we should liberally add people to the world), it’s easy to discount the suffering you might have experienced as a teenager (since it’s in the past).

My impression is that people weigh past cost more heavily in the former scenario (farmville) than in the latter scenarios.

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Perfectionist parent?

If we choose to create a life — a life that is capable of both joy and suffering — then it is our obligation as parents to help our offspring have happy, fulfilling lives.  Our children do not owe us.  They did not choose to be brought into the world.

Not surprisingly, when a parent makes a child feel unworthy of love, society thinks poorly of that parent.  One example of this is perfectionist parents, who pressure their kids and set unreachable standards.  The general consensus is that children who feel undeserving of love need therapy to learn to love and accept themselves.

I have noticed that many people who believe in God feel unworthy of the love that they believe God has for them.   Religious folks often say things such as “what did I do to deserve God’s love?”

So, is God like a perfectionist parent to them? Is God raising or lowering their self esteem?

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More on appraisal bias preferences

We seem to prefer people who err on the side of underestimating the likelihood of their own success.  Modesty is a virtue; conceit is not.

However, if someone is appraising us, we prefer that they are biased in the opposite direction.  We would like them to tell us how talented we are.

Consider the book example from the previous post.  If someone is talking about their own manuscript, we might be annoyed if they tell us it’s probably going to be a bestseller.  However, if they were talking about our manuscript, we’d feel pretty good if they thought so highly of it.

Similarly, if someone is talking about the prospects of success of our in-group, then we prefer optimistic language.  For example, we like politicians who tell us how great our local economy will be.   It is similar to self-appraisal, if you think of self as the community that that politician represents.  However, we would benefit if the prediction came true, so we do not have the same negative reaction.

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Self-appraisal bias preferences

I’ve argued previously that we were less happy in real time than we believe we were in retrospect.  I’ve also argued that we like optimists better than pessimists.  Thus, it would appear that we like people (including ourselves) to be biased towards a more favorable outlook of the world.  However, I think this theory needs refining, because a favorable outlook for one person might be unfavorable to another.

Self-deprecating vs self-aggrandizing

A friend pointed out that it is more enjoyable to spend time with someone who is more self-deprecating than self-aggrandizing.

Consider the following example.  Suppose we read a manuscript that an acquaintance of ours would like to publish.  Suppose we thought the book was good enough so that it was likely to get published, but not good enough to be a best seller or make the person famous.  Consider three possible attitudes of the acquaintance:

1. they make it clear to you that they fully expect to get rejected by every publisher;
2. they believe the book will likely get published, but will not be a best seller or make them famous;
3. they believe the book will be a best seller, and they believe they will end up discussing it on shows like Oprah and Good Morning America

Which attitude is preferable?  Is modesty a virtue, even above accuracy (i.e., do we prefer 1 over 2?)?  If we have to choose between the two inaccurate views (from our perspective), which do we prefer? I think we would prefer attitude 1 over attitude 3, even though both are inaccurate (in our opinion).

If we like people who have an optimistic view of the world, then why do we not prefer attitude 3?

Paraphrasing my friend:  we worry that overconfident people will have no problem trying to overtly gain resources that we want.  We worry that others will be fooled and give them the money or fame or whatever we want for ourselves.

We do not like to hear about how great someone is, because we do not believe they are better than us, but we worry that other people might. Perhaps that’s why we even view boasting as worse than violence in some circumstances.

This is related to status welfare: status matters and is relative;  if a peer becomes successful our status might lower.  What is optimistic for our acquaintance might be pessimistic for our future status prospects.  Hearing about someone else’s prospects for future success is hearing about a future where we do not measure up to them.

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Trolleyology

Joshua Greene gave a very interesting talk at Penn recently.  He discussed variants of the trolley problem, neuroscience and moral intuitions.

Trolley problems involve an out-of-control trolley that will kill 5 people who are on the track in its way, unless you do something about it.  However, doing something about it will mean killing someone else (not one of the 5 people).

Original problem:  Joe can flip a switch which will send the trolley down a different track (which happens to have a person tied to the track).    The majority of people surveyed think it’s morally acceptable to flip the switch.

Footbridge version:  Joe is on a bridge above the trolley.  Joe can stop it by pushing the large man who is in front of him off of the bridge and onto the track.  Most people surveyed do not find this morally acceptable.

Pole version:  rather than using his hands, Joe can push the man with a pole.  Most people find this unacceptable

Remote footbridge version:  Joe has a remote control some distance away from the footbridge.  It controls a trap door that could drop the man onto the track and stop the trolley.  The majority of people find this morally acceptable

Footbridge switch version:  This is the same as the remote footbridge version, except the trap door switch is on the bridge (so that Joe is in very close proximity to the trap door).  Most people found this morally acceptable.

The contribution of science is not in telling us what the right answer is in each case.  The purpose  is to isolate factors (such as spatial proximity and physical force).  If varying a factor (such as spatial proximity) causes a change in our moral intuitions, then we need to decide if that factor should matter.  If we do not think it should matter, then we have evidence that our moral intuitions are untrustworthy.

I was thinking about some new variations of the problem (hey, it’s fun to think about!).

Robot version:  there is a robot on the bridge.  Joe can use his remote control to make the robot push the man off of the bridge.  Morally acceptable? Here Joe is not using physical force, so it is like the trap door.  However, I wonder if people picture a robot that looks human (with a head, arms and legs) and associate it too closely with a human pushing the man off of the bridge.  Or perhaps it makes people think of evil, mindless robots, which makes them uncomfortable.

Lion version:  Joe is a lion trainer and his lion, Whiskers, is on the bridge.   If Joe gives the command “Whiskers, PUSH,” Whiskers  will push the man off of the bridge.  Morally acceptable?  Here Joe is not using direct force, but perhaps most people would not like it that he is making the animal do his dirty work.

Name variation:  For any of the above problems, would people respond differently if instead of Joe we called him “Damien” or “Jamal”?

Gender variation:  Would people have different moral feelings if instead of Joe we talked about Mary?  I suspect that people would be even more uncomfortable with a woman making a decision to sacrifice the bridge man.

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Not surprising

Unlike Robin Hanson, I am not surprised by who I am.   Sure, most things that exist are not alive, are not human and are not statisticians, but that doesn’t make it surprising that I am.  What I am is the only thing I could have been.

It’s true that Robin is smarter than most people, and most people don’t write a popular blog.  So should he be surprised that he is those things?   The only reason he noted those particular features is because those features already exist.  The question was generated by the result.  Everyone has things about them that are unusual.  Should we all be surprised?  For example, Brenda might be one of the few left-handed female plumbers in Texas.  Should she be surprised?  If everyone has unique things they can point to, then shouldn’t that fail to surprise us?

Consider the t-shirt experiment:

20 t-shirts, each a unique color, are placed in a box.  You are blindfolded.  A shirt is randomly selected from the box and placed on you.  You then remove the blindfold.

Suppose you participate in the experiment, and after you remove the blindfold you observe that your t-shirt is blue.  Your reaction could be: “I’m surprised to be wearing a blue t-shirt.  Only 1 out of 20 shirts was blue.”  But of course, you could say the same thing no matter which t-shirt was selected.  There was a probability of 1 that a shirt that was unlike the other 19 would be selected.  We see the result and then start thinking about how unique that result is.

This kind of reasoning leads to bad inference, such as the self-indication assumption or the doomsday argument.  The wikipedia version of the doomsday argument is: “supposing the humans alive today are in a random place in the whole human history timeline, chances are we are about halfway through it.”  In other words, if there was a time-traveling stork that selects humans from all humans that will ever exist, and randomly places them at various places in the human history timeline, then we are probably about halfway through human existence.  People then debate whether the doomsday conclusion is correct, but do not challenge the assumption that we know is wrong.   The doomsday argument can be rejected by simply noting that the assumption is bad (we are not in a random place in the human history timeline).

We shouldn’t be surprised that we exist, since we had to exist to notice that we exist and ask questions about our existence.  It would be more surprising if we noticed that we didn’t exist.

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Social skills are manipulation skills

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.  -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

We value social skills

Yesterday David Brooks gave a talk at Penn.  He said that he tries to interview 3 politicians a day.  He said one thing that stands out in talking with them is how extraordinary their social skills are.  I’m sure this does not come as a surprise.

It’s clear that we not only value those social skills, but we punish people who do not have them.

Bob Somerby commented:

People frequently make extemporaneous remarks which sound imperfect, odd or unfortunate. If you want to play the fool, you will wait until some such remark is uttered by some pol[itician] you aren’t supporting. You will then rise up in outrage. You will begin to paraphrase freely, mind-reading the speaker’s motive and outlook. You will thus establish yourself as a fool—and you may win a top spot on cable.

One unfortunate extemporaneous remark can ruin a career.  We expect politicians’ social skills to be perfect.  If they ever make a mistake, we mock them until they hide in shame.

Similarly, people with poor social skills are often laughed at and/or taken advantage of, regardless of how honest and talented they might be.  As Robin Hanson theorized, people pretend

“to mainly value overtly useful skills, while really greatly valuing covert conniving skills. Nerds tend to be much better at the former than the latter, and are often unaware that the latter skills exist. So the fact that nerds think well of themselves for their overt skills, but are largely unaware of how poor they are at covert conniving, is just hilarious.”

So, given that people value social skills so much, perhaps we should emphasize the importance of social skills to children.  However, an alternative to the we need to teach kids more social skills movement is to teach kids to value social skills a little less.  Perhaps valuing social skills to the extent we do has been to our detriment.

But should we?

One of my friends says she prefers socially awkward people, because she tends to not trust people who are too polished socially.  People with poor social skills are probably not skilled enough to be successfully manipulative.

The same skills are involved with both positive and negative social contact:

negative social contact takes skill, too. Do you want to intimidate someone? Insult them where it hurts? Figure out what they’re feeling, and how to use that to make them feel horrible? Seduce them into your car and murder them in your basement? You’re still going to need social skills. My stepfather, for example, who is a textbook sociopath…, knows exactly how to “push people’s buttons” to create a great deal of misery in the people around him, to intimidate people. When I lived at home, he was very perceptive that I was frightened of being worthless; so he called me worthless a great deal. When he wanted to be liked, he was. The neighbors thought he was a great guy, because he wanted them to think that. His social skills are highly refined; his morality is not.

Sure, you can accidentally say something that hurts someone. You can accidentally say something amusing that makes them laugh; you can accidentally say something that confuses them, frightens them, or comforts them. I’ve done all of those, purely accidentally. But, if you have clumsy, unpracticed social skills, you’ll have just as much trouble intimidating people deliberately as you have trouble deliberately charming them.

As a society, we seem to not like it when attractive people with fewer job-related skills are hired over less attractive people with more skills.  We know that we are biased in favor of attractive people, and, to some extent, actively try to prevent it.  I don’t see much difference between attractiveness and social skills.   It’s clear to me that we are very strongly biased in favor of people with strong social skills.  Maybe we should actively try to fight that bias.

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Rosy retrospection as fitness

Real time experience vs. recollection

Imagine that every hour people had to record what their last hour was like on a misery – happiness scale.  Were they stressed, anxious, sad, having fun, happy?  Now, imagine that hourly data of this type accumulated over years.

Alternatively, suppose we only asked people every year (or maybe even 5 or 10 years) about their misery-happiness rating.  We ask them what their last year (or 5 years or 10 years) was like?  Were they mostly happy, sad, anxious, etc.?

I think it’s been well documented that people tend to selectively remember the good things, and have an overall rosier view of their
life.

So, I expect that, if you look at someone’s hourly happiness data, you’d get a much different picture about what their life was like than if you look at people’s perceived happiness based on longer recall.  In real time their experience was worse than they think it was when they look back at it a year or more later.  Maybe that’s why we are nostalgic and yearn for the good ol’ days.

Genetic fitness

This seems quite useful from a fitness perspective.

If we were relaxed, happy, and carefree most of the time, we wouldn’t be vigilant enough.  Anxiety about status and protecting our families probably helps us and our offspring survive.

However, if we had an accurate memory and realized that most of our life we were stressed, worried, anxious and/or sad, we might think that live is too hard and miserable of a place.  We might not want to bring kids into the world.  We might not want to exist ourselves.

So, if we are worried and anxious in real time, but think that most of the time life is wonderful, we have a strong desire to live and reproduce, and also are always fighting for more security.

Depression and suicide

Is it possible that people who are depressed and/or suicidal have more accurate memories of their life experience and do not enjoy the benefits of rosy retrospection?

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