Random Notes from a Crank

Some people get obsessed with how their lawns look. I don't. There are already too many herbicides polluting the hell out of our waterways. This time of the year my lawn is sprouting lots of clover, which I find appealing. I like the way it looks ~ this little white sprouts dotting the lawn. Also, honeybees like clover, and honeybees need all the help they can get these days. 

MoscowDon pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Here's the op-ed piece by the co-director of the MIT Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. He basically calls the current president on his bullshit and lies: "Trump Used Our Research to Justify Pulling out of the Paris Agreement: He Got It Wrong." 

I'm currently watching the Comey Hearing. Some of these dipsticks are really going to run with the wording of "I hope..." Stop the bullshit. MoscowDon was asking Comey to gut the Russia investigation. That is obvious morons.

Stay Positive: Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow

One of the best books I've read in a while is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. 

It's a book that synthesizes all kinds of important research from psychology, economics, and other social sciences, much of it connecting to decision making and what college professors might call "critical thinking." I'm interested in what he says about our "System 1" and "System 2" thinking, and the research makes you question how "rational" and open-minded you really are. If you work in any kind of organization, Kahneman's book is a must-read. 

I'm not doing a book review, but what I want to do here is present a litany of quotations (without the marks) from the book that are going to make it into my commonplace book:

• The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
• We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to easily overloaded working memory. We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort. 
• Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. 
• ...many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. 
• Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions. 
• Studies of priming effect have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.
• Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. 
• How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. 
• Robert Zajonc dedicated much of his career to the study of the link between the repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection people eventually have for it. Zajonc called it mere exposure effect. 
• "Familiarity breeds liking. This is mere exposure effect." 
• The operations of associative memory contribute to a general confirmation bias. 
• The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person--including things you have not observed--is known as the halo effect. 
• Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend. 
• We are pattern seekers, believers in coherent world, in which regularities ... appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention. 
• "The emotional tail wags the dog." ~Jonathan Haidt
• There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. 
• ... it is natural for System 1 to generate overconfident judgments, because confidence, as we have seen, is determined by the coherence of the best story you can tell from the evidence at hand. Be warned: your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them. 
• The tendency to revise the history of one's beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion. 
• The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. 
• Facts that challenge such basic assumptions--and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem--are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. 
• We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. 
• Emotional learning may be quick, but what we consider as "expertise" usually takes a long time to develop.
• The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story.
• In other words, do not trust anyone--including yourself--to tell you how much you should trust their judgment. 
• ...the two basic conditions for acquiring a skill: an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable and an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice.
• Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others. 
• The planning fallacy is only one of the manifestations of pervasive optimistic bias. Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which foster optimistic overconfidence. 
• The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. 
• The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it. 
• He [Gary Klein] labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster."
• The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction. As a team converges on a decision--and especially when the leaders tips her hand--public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team and its leaders. The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts. Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier. 
• The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes. 
• I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. 
• The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
• Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains. In the world of territorial animals, this principle explains the success of defenders. 
• Amos [Tversky] had little patience for these efforts; he called the theorists who tried to rationalize violations of utility theory "lawyers for the misguided." We went in another direction. We retained utility theory as a logic of rational choice but abandoned the idea that people are perfectly rational choosers. We took on the task of developing a psychological theory that would describe the choices people make, regardless of whether they are rational. In prospect theory, decision weights would not be identical to probabilities.
• ...people expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. 
• The most "rational" subjects--those who were the least susceptible to framing effects--showed enhanced activity in the frontal area of the brain that is implicated in combining emotion and reasoning to guide decisions. 
• Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong. The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. 
• Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one's life than on the experience of living. Educational attainment is an example. More education is associated with higher evaluation of one's life, but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress.
• The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.

Random Notes from a Crank

I've had John Brereton's The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925: A Documentary History for a long time, and I finally got around to reading it the other day. I usually enjoy examining writing from the 19th century because it's fun to read an older style of writing. I was reading a report by Adams Sherman Hill, and here's a passage that demands attention: "Awkward attitudes, ungrammatical or obscure sentences, provincial or vulgar locutions, fanciful analogies, far-fetched illustrations, ingenious sophisms, pettifogging subtleties, ineffective arrangement--all come in for animadversion; and corresponding merits for praise." It reads exactly as you would expect the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard to write, but I like the word pettifogging, which is a derivation of pettifogger, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as a "petty, quibbling, unscrupulous lawyer" or "one who quibbles over trivia." I want to work that word into my vocabulary, and I may get a chance soon since tomorrow is Election Day.

I recently read "Ecosystems on the Brink" by Carl Zimmer in Scientific American. SA only gives you a preview unless you're a subscriber, but the upshot is that researchers are using mathematical models and empirical research to create early warning systems to try to stop ecosystems from crashing. The research is interesting and important, but what I'm more concerned about is whether homo sapiens really gives a damn about the environment and if  we're willing to actually do something about tipping points and the results of data-driven, scientific research. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Within a span of thirty minutes this Tuesday, my five-year old son was crying and telling me that "I'm always mean" to him and I "don't like" him and I don't "trust him," and then he was stating this: "I'm sexy, and I know it." Stupid hormones and commercials, respectively.

I know I've said variations of this before, but I don't think I've ever posted it on the blog. Regardless, to me it seems like people think they can make themselves look intelligent by being sarcastic. All being sarcastic shows is that you're being sarcastic, not necessarily intelligent. Sarcasm does not equal intelligence. Sarcasm = Sarcasm.

One of the presents my son got for his birthday in June is an adjustable basketball hoop. Because he's only five, we keep it at the lowest setting, which is 8 feet. I have to say, I'm a damn fine basketball player on a basket at only eight feet. I can even dunk. Shooting around on this hoop got me thinking. There needs to be a league for the shorter folks in the world. I hereby propose a co-ed basketball league that only permits players who are 5'10" and below, and they get to play on a 8 foot rim. If you're 6', Hell no! If you're 5'11," that's too bad. I could have a future in that league.

The article "How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God" is an interesting article from Scientific American, and I'm sure people will question the research methodologies used, but what about agnostics? They only worked with religious people and atheists. Harumph!

Just when you think the self-replicating code of Starbuck's has eased, there's this: one's going into a funeral home. Thinking about this analytically though, wouldn't a bar turn a better profit?

Random Notes from a Crank

I judge books by their covers. Literally. We all do it. If a book has an interesting cover, we're enticed. Admit it. So let's stop using that damn cliche.

I recently read one of the best arguments against the "whole-language approach" to reading and "the adoption of an unhealthy compromise called 'mixed' or 'balanced reading' instruction" (221). It's Chapter 5--Learning to Read" in Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene. If you have young children or care about the literacy of young children, I highly recommend the chapter, if not the whole book.

This weekend, we got to watching the Back to the Future trilogy. As movie trilogies go, it's not a very good one. But my daughter found it funny and hopeful that in Part 2, which is set in 2015, the Cubs win the World Series.

One of the few reality TV shows that I watch is Food Network Star. I'm rooting for Team Alton, particularly Justin and Emily, to beat Teams Bobby and Giada. If there's someone from a different team I'd like to see win, it's Malcolm from Team Bobby. The dark part of this whole televised exercise in stress is that from what I recall of past "stars" who won the competition, besides the ubiquitous Guy Fieri, their shows don't seem to have the highest profile slots. Then again, I didn't watch the last two seasons because I got bored with the program.

With all this talk about finally implementing a playoff system for college football, I propose a system not discussed yet. It's not the current BCS system. It's not a final four of best four teams based on BCS standings and/or a selection committee. It's not a plus one system. It's not a system that rewards teams that won their conference while showing off a record sporting two or three losses. I propose the top four teams  in the SEC play the best four teams outside the SEC in a eight-round, seeded playoff.

Random Notes from a Crank

Listening to radio on the way back from our trip to Iowa today, I surfed through a few classic rock stations. That moniker is getting stretched mighty thin. In the wake of a thirty minutes, I listened to a smattering of tunes from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I get why the stations are including songs from the 80s and 90s, but after a while, the pseudo-genre of classic rock is going to bust. I just don't think it's elastic enough to afford The Cult's "Fire Woman,""Ohio," Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero," and Beatles' tunes. Aside from the work of Foreigner, I like all three of those groups, but it seems to me that considering the demographics, lovers of music from the 80s and 90s might not want stuff from the 60s and 70s mixed in. Thus, the niche stations of satellite radio.

One radio station that has gotten it right though is KFMW Rock 108, the station that started exclusively purveying in hard rock/metal when I was in high school. 

I have finally started reading Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene, a book written by a cognitive neuroscientist that I bought over a year ago. It's damn interesting stuff. One tidbit that I thought I'd share goes out to the poets. In the chapter titled "The Brain's Letterbox," there's this nugget that might be pertinent to writing verse. It relates to the fixation which, for purposes here, would be the center of the page. Dehaene provides these points to ponder: "Letters that appear on the right side of our gaze are at a clear advantage: they go straight into the left hemisphere [where the "brain's letterbox" resides] and do not have to travel any distance to reach the letterbox area [where reading initially happens in the brain]. Letters that appear on the left, however, first reach the right hemisphere and must then move across the two hemispheres through several centimeters of callosal cable. As a result, even in normal readers, reading is always a bit slower and more error-prone when words appear on the left side of fixation rather than on the right. The increased length of transfer and, perhaps most crucially, the reduced flow of information transmitted through the corpus callosum are costly for word recognition. Thus, in the human brain, positional invariance is incomplete: not all zones of the retina are equally efficient at reading, and, like AC [a person used as an example], we all see [comprehend, understand] words somewhat better on our right." Now, I'm no poet, but I've dabbled in writing verse some and read a bit about the craft of poetry through blogs and two books mainly -- A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns -- but the research provided here coheres with half of the advice I've gotten about writing poetry: the advice that the start and the end of the lines are the most important parts of the lines. But what I think people might need to consider is that the end of the line may have the most impact if what Dehaene relates is true, and it seems to be with the bevy of neuroscience he has backing him up. The neuroscience research might also seem to advise poets to use easier images/words to grasp at the start of the line and then employ the more complex/difficult poetical diction at the end of the lines because the brain apparently has a better chance of "getting it" if the gaze is turned toward rightward. 

And by the way, I heard one song on Rock 108 today that could compete with Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" for the rock song with the most cliches. That was some bad, bad poetry. Just horrible. 

Possession

Today was one of those days that could get me going on a pretty good rant. Initially, I thought about critiquing our over-reliance on technology and people's (myself included) lack of mindfulness, which is one of the concepts I've been focusing on over the past few years through reading various books and articles.

[And in this spot you can now grin or roll our eyes about how someone would write a blog post railing against technology.]

However, what I think I'm really focused on -- at the basic level -- is what Thoreau states in Walden about how our possessions possess us.

One of the books I'm reading right now is an edited collection from New Society Publishers called Less is More: Embracing Simplicity for a Healthy Planet, a Caring Economy, and Lasting Happiness.

What many of the authors in the collection are promoting is living with lighter ecological footprints while embracing Thoreau's aphorism of "Simplify, simplify." Many of the authors are in or are influenced by the Slow Movement, and they're trying to persuade readers to live more simple, less hectic, and more meaningful lives by focusing more on our inner lives than outward possessions. In other words, they want folks to fully enjoy their lives instead of what Wordsworth refers to in "The World Is Too Much With Us" as "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;"

Some of the selections venture toward the whiny liberal variety of changing the world for the greater good of all and the planet. I like that message in general but not the whiny, unassertive tone of the some pieces. And I say all this as someone who would be considered a political "liberal" (on most issues) even though I see both American political parties as screwed up and usually spewing hokum backed by corporate interests. Or, put another way, I see some truth to how Lewis Black describes them--that the Democrats are a "party of no ideas" and Republicans are a "party of shitty ideas." And when they "work together," one guy says he has a bad idea, and the other collaborates to make the idea even "shittier."

But now I've gotten on a political tangent/rant. Back to what I'm supposed to be doing...

Okay, so one of my favorite essays in the book so far is co-authored by two Professors of Psychology, Tim Kasser (Knox College) and Kirk Warren Brown (Virginia Commonwealth). In their "A Scientific Approach to Voluntary Simplicity," they inform readers of their social-scientific study comparing two different sets of Americans (200 people per set), folks who lead lives of "voluntary simplicity"--people who "had voluntarily chosen to earn less than they could earn and had voluntarily chosen to spend less than they could spend" (37)--and mainstream Americans. Both groups took a survey that asked them about how happy they were and their environmental choices along with the Ecological Footprint Questionnaire. In addition, they "also measured two variables that past research found were associated with happiness and sustainability: mindfulness and values" (38).

But the results were a little surprising since the book is called Less Is More, a tome about simplicity after all. They found that happiness and sustainable lifestyle choices "were indeed compatible" (39). However, as the professors relate, "While there is some evidence that Voluntary Simplifiers were happier than mainstream Americans and were living more sustainable lives, ultimately our statistical analyses showed that identifying as a Voluntary Simplifier (versus a mainstream American) was not as important as being mindful and being oriented toward intrinsic values (relative to materialistic values)" (39).

So you're probably asking what the heck does being "mindful" mean, right? Earlier in the article, they talk about the "growing body of research on mindfulness shows that people vary considerably in the level attention they give to their thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and that to the extent they are more mindful, they report a higher sense of well-being" (38).

As Kasser and Brown conclude, the findings show that "living more happily and more lightly on the Earth is not as much about whether people think of themselves as Voluntary Simplifiers, but instead is more about their inner life -- that is, whether they are living in a conscious, mindful way and with a set of values organized around intrinsic fulfillment" (40).

So what this essay takes me to is another comedian, George Carlin, who satirized the American "getting and spending" long ago.

Be sure to take care of your "Stuff." And you're supposed to get more of it, especially that newer stuff.

And while you're at it, buy some Thneeds, "which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!"

Stay Positive Wednesday: Laughter

I've read articles that talk about how laughter is good for you. It increases your heart rate, reduces stress, etc.

But it's just good to laugh. I guess I haven't watched a good comedy in a while since I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud when watching a movie. Any suggestions, folks?

But I have guffawed out loud a few times recently as I've been reading. Good ole Montaigne offers some sound advice about raising kids: "To return to my subject, there is nothing like arousing appetite and affection [for learning]; otherwise all you make out of them is asses loaded with books."

The best laughter in my life is laughing at what my kids say or hearing the laughter of my children. And that's good enough for me.

Fun Size

When I was observing graduate students do their work the other day, I noticed in my place of work that someone had brought in some Valentine's Day candy, chocolate that is now described as "fun size."

The term reminds of the great song by Howlin' Wolf where he sings, "I'm built for comfort, not for speed." 

Regardless, the candy makers are ingenious. You reduce the size of the candy bar and market it as "fun," and we all probably eat more than we should. Since they're tiny, we think, "Hey, I can have a couple more of those," and pretty soon you've eaten the equivalent of a couple of candy bars. 

Yes, yes, I know. You folks in the personal responsibility crowd will tell us that it's our personal choice, which it is. But I find it interesting that by reducing the size it might make us eat more.

Researchers have done all kinds of research about serving sizes and how people tend to eat all of the meal regardless of whether it's a gianormous or reasonable amount of food. In fact, there was an experiment where they had people eat soup, and the experimental group's bowls of soup kept refilling through a tube underneath the table. That group kept slurping and slurping because they wanted to get to the bottom of that bowl. 

Fun size, although different than that experiment, challenges the assumption that smaller serving sizes curb overeating.

Thorstein Veblen Was Right and Somewhat Wrong

Linked HERE is an article that talks about consumption patterns and tendencies depending on race and class. It's an interesting read that relates recent research by economists and plays with Veblen's famous hypothesis of "conspicuous consumption."

If you see cars with really expensive rims or you see a high-schooler wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister t-shirt (isn't Hollister the new Ocean Pacific?), this article might explain some things.

Not a Surprise

A recent study has corroborated what many level-headed folks already know: global warming skeptics have been aided and heavily influenced by those who fund their research--conservative think tanks.

Their voices, paraded by the MSM and abetted by journalists' simple-minded mantra of presenting "both sides" of the global warming "debate," created a rhetoric of scientific uncertainty that has stalled any substantial work on global warming, especially in America.

Click HERE for the link.