Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: November 2010 (page 1 of 3)

“Free will is not an illusion”

November 28, 2010 / / Comments Off on “Free will is not an illusion”

This 2007 Raymond Tallis essay declaring that “free will is not an illusion” can join the Chabris and Simons piece arguing against neuro-determinism, or more generally arguments that rest on the “because fMRI shows that our brains do X when we’re doing this thing that I’m interested in/think is bad, this thing/bad thing is really important:”

There are several strands of thought woven into neuro-determinism. The first is that we are essentially our brains: our consciousness, our belief in ourselves as free agents, and so on, is neural activity in certain parts of the brain. Secondly, these brains have evolved in such a way as to maximise the likelihood of our genetic material being able to replicate…. Thirdly, for a brain to work effectively, it is not necessary for us to be aware of what it is doing. Cognitive psychologists have, over the last few decades, particularly since the advent of neuro-imaging which reveals activity in the living brain, shown how we are unconscious of many things that influence what is going on in our brain and, it is inferred, the perceptions we form and the decisions we make….

[But] Neuro-determinism, though seemingly self-evident, is also wrong.

The first line of attack is to remove the hype from the neuroscience of consciousness and remind ourselves how little we know…. [T]here is not even the beginning of an explanation of our fundamental sense that we are subjects transcended by objects that are ‘out there’, that exist independently of us and have their own intrinsic properties. From its simplest to its most elaborated forms, intentionality – the property of consciousness of being ‘about’ something - remains mysterious….

Secondly, we should question the focus on the stand-alone brain. The world we live in is not one of sparks of isolated sentience cast amid a rubble of material objects. We live in a world that is collectively constructed. Our consciousness is collectivised…. It is no use, therefore, looking for human being, and its free actions, in isolated brains…. We also need a body (which, too, lights up in different ways when we are presented with stimuli); and that body has to be environed; and the environment consists not of bare, material objects but of nexuses of signification that have two kinds of temporal depth – that which comes from personal memory and the explicit sense of our private past; and that which comes from our collective history, insofar as we have internalised it. As Ortega y Gasset said, unlike other animals ‘Man is an inheritor, not a mere descendent’.

Bye bye link posts

November 28, 2010 / / Comments Off on Bye bye link posts

At a friend’s suggestion, I’ve eliminated the Delicious links blogs posts, and replaced them with a list of recent bookmarks in the sidebar. Back to just prose here.

Models as self-defeating prophecies

November 28, 2010 / / Comments Off on Models as self-defeating prophecies

Alex Pollock at the American Enterprise Institute writes about the role of models in economic science (or what "would be" a science "if it weren’t for the people") and financial decision-making. He argues that the widespread use of models tends to lead to their obsolecence:

Perversely, the more everyone believes the model, and the more everyone uses the same model, the more likely it is to induce changes in the market that make it cease to work.

In this cycle, the market and the regulators became enamored of the statistical treatments of risk, whereas the most important issue is always the human sources of risk. These human sources include short memories and the inclination to convince ourselves that we are experiencing "innovation" and "creativity," when all that is happening is a lowering of credit standards by new names.

As I understand his argument, there are a couple reasons for this. Some models- ones that deal with very specific pieces of the future- only work if they're obscure: if everyone "knows" that the price of magnesium is definitely going to rise, and everyone buys magnesium futures, the future price of magnesium changes. Models reinforce the belief that "this time it's different," and help people unlearn old, hard-won lessons. (As Pollock puts it elsewhere, one of the differences between science and finance is that scientists don't forget previous errors- astronomers haven't gone back to geocentrism, and old ideas tend to die with old scientists- while generational change in finance tends to wipe away wisdom, leaving only hubris and a belief in one's own youthful invincibility.) Models also tend to obscure the continued, lurking presence of uncertainty:

Because uncertainty is fundamental, sometimes disastrous mistakes will continue to be made by entrepreneurs, bankers, borrowers, central bankers, government agencies, politicians, and by the interaction of all of the above.

[Economics Frank] Knight wrote: "If the law of change is known, no [economic] profits can arise." Likewise: "If the law of change is known, no financial crises can arise." But in economics and finance, the law of change is never known. So change reflecting uncertainty goes on, bringing booms and busts periodically, and Adam Smith’s "progress of opulence" on the trend.

Have economists have tried to measure the impact of the popularity of models on markets? The Knight quote comes from his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, and I have to assume that economists have tried to measure (a model, if you will) how widespread use of, say, a statistical model affects markets and either increases or decreases the reliability of that model. It seems to me that this would be one of those things that people would have tried to study, but I don't know enough about the field to know.

The full quote from Knight's book is:

It cannot, then, be change, which is the cause of profit, since if the law of change is known, as in fact is largely the case, no profit can arise. The connection between change and profit is uncertain and always indirect. Change may cause a situation out of which profit will be made, if it brings about ignorance of the future. Without change of some sort there would, it is true, be no profits, for if everything moved along in a an absolutely uniform way, the future would be completely foreknown in the present and competition would certainly adjust things to the ideal state where all prices would equal costs. It is this fact that change is a necessary condition of our being ignorant of the future (though ignorance need not follow from the fact of change and only to a limited extent does so) that has given rise to the error that change is the cause of profit…. It is not dynamic change, nor any change, as such, which causes profit, but the divergence of actual conditions from those which have been expected on the basis of which business arrangements have been made. (38-39)

PowerPoint doesn’t make you stupid, and LOLcats doesn’t rewire your brain

November 23, 2010 / / Comments Off on PowerPoint doesn’t make you stupid, and LOLcats doesn’t rewire your brain

Via Duke professor Cathy Davidson, I just came across this L. A. Times piece by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. (They’re authors of The Invisible Gorilla. The essay aim at “digital alarmism,” the argument that the Internet is making us stupider by “trap[ping] us in a shallow culture of constant interruption as we frenetically tweet, text and e-mail,” both leaving us less time to read Proust, and rewiring our brains so we’re incapable of paying serious attention to… anything.

More at Contemplative Computing.

One reason airline food is lousy: being in an airplane dulls your sense of taste

November 23, 2010 / / Comments Off on One reason airline food is lousy: being in an airplane dulls your sense of taste

One of the things I read a lot about when I was researching weight loss is the physiology of hunger. On one hand, hunger is so simple, elemental and familiar at first blush it seems impossible that you could study it (much less learn to adjust it, which was my ultimate goal).

But one of the most important things i learned is that hunger is a psychological state as well as a physiological one: we can be distracted from hunger by excitement or fear, or conditioned to be hungry at particular times of day regardless of our blood sugar. We can be made hungry by proximity to foods with attractive smell, packaging, texture (what chefs and food designers call “mouthfeel”); we can be made hungry by foods that we’ve at a notable times, with friends, or in memorable and pleasant places. We misinterpret fatigue, stress, and thirst as hunger. Proximity to food, or the smell of something delicious, triggers hunger.

In fact, our appetite is so malleable it can be disconnected from a need for calories: in his book The End of Overeating, former FDA commissioner David Kessler argues that food designers—manufacturers, retailers, and restaurants— have become geniuses at creating foods that are not just tasty, but so addictive they stimulate desire among people who are full. Further, obesity appears to have some of the same properties of a communicable disease: it is influenced by large environmental factors, as well as the influence of one’s social circle.

Today, via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this piece by Peter Smith in Good about airline food, and research on the effects of airline environments on taste:

even under optimal conditions, cooked to the exact specifications of the latest celebrity chefs hired to reinvigorate flaccid airline fare, the taste of food changes when you’re inside a parched, hypobaric metal tube that’s vibrating and humming along at 550 miles per hour.

Recently, Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines conducted research inside a stationary Airbus A310 designed to replicate flying conditions. Deutche Welle reported that flyers said their taste buds felt dulled, requiring 20 percent more sugar and salt (explaining the particular appeal of V-8 or a Bloody Mary). In another study published this fall, British and Dutch researchers outfitted volunteers with headphones playing loud background noises and found that the noise made foods appear less salty and sweet. Loud noise did make crunchy foods appear crunchier—more Munchie Mix, anyone?

Really interesting. Though I would argue that there’s a big difference between eating sea bass in Singapore Airlines business class, and eating chips on Ryan Air.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, “Unrequited,” from the album Metheny Mehldau (a 1-star song, imo).]

Mindfulness and contemplation in weight loss, futures, and computing

November 22, 2010 / / Comments Off on Mindfulness and contemplation in weight loss, futures, and computing

Over the last couple years I’ve lost about fifty pounds. As nerdy as this will sound, while I was a fat kid and spent my adult life overweight, it was only in the last two years, when 1) I started to worry that it was now or never- that my condition in my 40s would determine how long I would live and what kind of life I would have, and 2) I could make it into as much a cerebral challenge as a physical one, that I managed to take off the weight.

By cerebral I mean this: in order to get past the various things that had kept me from losing weight in the past, it was necessary for me to read a lot about nutrition and dieting, dive into the literature on obseity and satiety, and think about how what I’d learned from behavioral economics could be applied to weight loss. At a certain point, I realized that the challenge of losing weight was a classic futures problem: complex, uncertain, requiring all kinds of near-term tradeoffs for long-term benefits, and hard to sustain. Maybe, I wondered, my training as a futurist help me lose weight? Conversely, could I learn something about futures problems through the experience of losing weight?

I think the answer to both is yes, and I’ve written an article- available as a PDF— that explains those answers in detail.

The piece is also kind of personal because it’s a bit of an intellectual pivot. On one hand, it’s the first article that draws on my reading on mindfulness and contemplative practices, and tries to applies that work to futures. There are lots of futurists who have been interested in meditation and Eastern religions- it’s at least as common among Bay Area futurists as 5.11 Tactical shirts— but not much explicit use of the idea of mindfulness as a tool for thinking about the future. Partly, I think, it reflects a certain suspicion that writers on contemplative practice display toward thinking about the future, a suspicion that I try to argue is misplaced. But I’ve come to believe that mindfulness and attention to the now is an essential starting-point for seeing how the future could unfold.

On the other hand, mindfulness and contemplation is a big part of what I’m going to be working on next year at Microsoft Research. I’m going there to start a project on contemplative computing, a form of computing that doesn’t fracture your attention and capacity to think long thoughts, but protects and supports it. It’s become clear that, in our headlong rush to become more connected and accessible, we’re accidentally eroding our capacity to think about complicated problems for long periods. For stockbrokers, pundits, ER doctors, elementary school teachers, and other people whose lives are all about speed and instant reaction, this may not be an issue at all; but for people who are creative for a living, the destruction of our ability to concentrate is a great loss.

Some people have tried to deal with the problem by going off Facebook, taking “digital sabbaths,” and otherwise taking a break from digital devices and the digital world. While I certainly understand the impulse, I don’t like it, for a few reasons. First, in the long run it’s impractical: a movement designed to give us a break from our mobile devices and laptops is going to have trouble dealing with a hyperconnected world of pervasive computing. Second, I actually like being connected, and don’t want to live without my digital augmentarium. Third, while I’m as much in danger of being distracted by the Web and Facebook as anyone, there are also times when I can use devices to be creative and reach that mental state of “flow.” Finally, the digital sabbath movement implicitly accepts the idea that information technologies have to be this way, and that humans and tools are opposites. In contrast, I buy Andy Clark’s idea that we’re natural born cyborgs, and my instinct is that the future will offer great opportunities to design information technologies that are better able to support concentration and contemplation- in other words, to learn how to create tools that help us be better, more focused cyborgs. Figuring out what those tools could look like, and how to design them, is the big task I’ll be taking up in Cambridge.

Weight loss and the challenges of reaching long-term future goals

November 22, 2010 / / Comments Off on Weight loss and the challenges of reaching long-term future goals

As I've mentioned a couple times, over the last couple years I've lost about fifty pounds, and am in the best physical condition of my entire life. For someone who grew up as a fat kid and fluctuated between being kind of overweight and really needing to take some serious weight off, and who had a stereotypical academic's contempt for all things seriously athletic, this is no small feat.

Of course, for me it was both a physical endeavor, and an extremely cerebral one: in order to get past the various things that had kept me from losing weight in the past, it was necessary for me to read a lot about nutrition and dieting, dive into the literature on obseity and satiety, and think about how what I'd learned from behavioral economics could be applied to weight loss.

At a certain point, I realized that the challenge of losing weight was a classic futures problem: complex, uncertain, requiring all kinds of near-term tradeoffs for long-term benefits, and hard to sustain. So could what I learned as a futurist help me lose weight? And could the experience of losing weight teach me anything about dealing with futures-related problems?

I think the answer to both is yes, and I've laid out my answers in an article that I just sent into one of those frighteningly efficient online editorial systems. We'll see if the piece is accepted- it may be too first person to qualify as serious research- but in the meantime I've put a copy of the draft online, and it's available as a PDF. The introduction is in the extended post.

Naturally, comments are welcome.

Introduction, Using Futures 2.0 to Manage Intractable Futures

Since its emergence several decades ago, the discipline of futures has concerned itself with describing the forces shaping the future, while also revealing the future's contingency and open-endedness. We futurists have devoted less energy to studying how futures are actually made: how people act on ideas about the future in the present—or just as interesting, why people or organizations fail to act on them. There are several reasons for this. Few of us have opportunities to follow our ideas into client organizations and see how they’re used. We want to avoid the appearance of advocating for particular futures, and thus compromising our objectivity. Finally, we have assumed that people are rational actors, who when presented with a variety of future choices can be counted on to make a self-interested decision. This is a default assumption among financial planners, policymakers, and others who advise on long-term strategic issues, and it reflects and complements the self-perception of our clients, who usually see themselves this way.

In this world-view, implementation isn’t unimportant; it’s just not very interesting. But research in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics has shown that clear-eyed, calculating rationality is in short supply outside economics textbooks and treatises on Realpolitik. What this literature teaches us is that there are deep, interesting reasons why people fail to act in their own long-term self-interest. For futurists, this work presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to understand how a behavioral economics understanding of decision-making should inform futures research; this is the subject I took up in a previous article. The opportunity is to expand the domain of futures out of research and facilitation, and to help clients design tools that help them act in the present with the future in mind.

That opportunity is the subject of this article. It focuses on applying behavioral economics and tools to personal futures, a subject that has attracted several writers. In the futures community, Jessica Charlesworth has explored the future of self-knowledge and personal futures. Jarno Koponen has described the architecture of a "personal future simulation system." Verne Wheelwright has advocated applying scenario planning and other traditional forecasting techniques to individuals. There is also work on personal futures outside the futures world. Alexandra Carmichael, Kevin Kelly, and Gary Wolf and others have advocated self-monitoring as a tool for improving personal health. Disabilities advocates use a collaborative process of "personal futures planning" to "develop strategies for success for a person with disabilities… [and] take action to accomplish positive changes for the person."

For the sake of clarity, I will explore the opportunity through a case study involving a simple personal futures-oriented challenge. The case is an example of an intractable future: it is difficult but not impossible to realize, it requires persistent effort for an extended period, and it can be subverted by biases, instincts, and our willingness to let rationalization trump rationality. The case reveals how we can design tools to counter them, and what intellectual instruments we can use when doing so. This intractable future also has the virtue of being exceptionally easy to describe and familiar to many readers.

My case is weight loss. I have lost about 50 pounds (22.7 kilograms) over the last two years; taken up running, cycling and weightlifting; and today am in the best physical shape of my life. For a profession accustomed to thinking about big issues and megatrends like nanotechnology, global warming, and Peak Oil, losing weight may seem trivial and beneath its interest. But it shouldn't be, for two reasons. First, by any objective measure, in much of the developed world obesity is a substantial public health problem: it affects the lives of tens of millions of people, increases chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes, and costs governments hundreds of billions of dollars. Second, despite the inevitable specificities of personal experience, weight loss illustrates at a human scale the kinds of complex, interconnected problems that characterize life in the 21st century, and for which we are poorly-adapted to deal.

On risk, stories, and self-evaluation

November 22, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Mike Deri Smith has a smart piece about 127 Hours:

Since I was child rappelling down the stairs with my father’s climbing equipment, I’ve been taught the importance of outdoor safety and about being well prepared. The adventure tales on my dad’s bookshelves are vastly outnumbered by his mountain guides, maps, and instructional books about mountain leadership, swimming safety, advanced canoe technique, etc….

Even a part-time outdoorsman like myself can recognize the almost-fatal mistakes Ralston made.

These kinds of accidents are usually due to human error rather than lightning-strike bad luck. Despite many years of climbing experience, Ralston made the near-fatal error of failing to tell anyone where he was going. Had he told someone his plans, he may not have lost his hand and would have had a better chance of being rescued. Ralston’s idiocy should be condemned in equal measure to the extent that his heroics are applauded. After all, the heroics were in response to a self-inflicted predicament.

Unfortunately, stories like these may encourage people to be unsafe:

The initial Outside magazine account of Ralston’s tale, written by Mark Jenkins, concludes, “It’s the survivors’ ingenuity—not their errors—that leaves the most lasting impression.” But it’s their errors we should learn from, not miraculous survival that promotes the myth that those who take risks are bulletproof supermen. We remember only one or two incredible tales of survival from a decade, rather than 250 climbers killed unspectacularly in North America between 1996-2006. That’s not forgetting the 1,260 documented mountaineering injuries in the U.S. over the same period.

I’m not saying people should stop climbing, but stories glamorizing risk increase the chance of future disaster.

What could behavioral economists make of the Sarah Palin phenomenon?

November 21, 2010 / / Comments Off on What could behavioral economists make of the Sarah Palin phenomenon?

Frank Rich has this nice line:

If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a “Star Wars” bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers…

But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

I’m not sure I’ll ever watch Star Wars quite the same way again, and if someone doesn’t have a YouTube video of this in the next 36 hours I’ll lose all faith in the hive mind. But Rich raises a good question: what is it about the dynamic of Palin that makes her thrive off personal scandal and unnecessary self-created chaos? Or more to the point, what is it about her fans’ relationship with Palin that lets them take all this and see it as strength?

[To the tune of Van Morrison, “I’ll Take Care Of You/It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” from the album A Night In San Francisco (a 3-star song, imo).]

links for 2010-11-21

November 21, 2010 / / Comments Off on links for 2010-11-21
  • nsf.gov - SES - Funding - Innovation and Organizational Sciences - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
    The Innovation and Organizational Sciences (IOS) program supports scientific research directed at advancing understanding of innovation and organizational phenomena. Levels of analysis may include (but are not limited to) individuals, groups and/or institutional arrangements. Disciplinary perspectives may include (but are not limited to) organization theory, organizational behavior, organizational sociology, social and industrial psychology, public administration, computer and information sciences, complexity sciences, decision and management sciences. Research methods may span a broad variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including (but not limited to) archival analyses, surveys, simulation studies, experiments, comparative case studies, and network analyses. Research may involve industrial, educational, service, government, not-for-profits, voluntary organizations or interorganizational arrangements.
    (tags: funding nsf innovation organizations)
  • nsf.gov - SES - Funding - Decision, Risk and Management Sciences - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
    The Decision, Risk and Management Sciences program supports scientific research directed at increasing the understanding and effectiveness of decision making by individuals, groups, organizations, and society. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, doctoral dissertation research, and workshops are funded in the areas of judgment and decision making; decision analysis and decision aids; risk analysis, perception, and communication; societal and public policy decision making; management science and organizational design.
    (tags: funding nsf research management decision-making)
Older posts

Meta

© 2017 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑