On Opinions

I subscribe to a mailing list of birders, people who spend a lot of time in the Real World looking at What Is There, with the express purpose of identifying the species of the individual birds they encounter. While on one level, birding has far more to do with learning human taxonomy than with individual birds, on another level, it represents a scientific act. As birders, we don't get much benefit from saying what a bird "should be". The vast majority of birders will only count the ones they can unequivocally identify. This requires observation, comparison with references, attention to detail, etc.

But more importantly, it involves cognitive accuracy--the willingness to accept the answer that the evidence and analysis leads to rather than derailing the evidence to get to the desired answer. Everyone who has birded seriously, meaning, those who get up at 3 am to get out to the field before dawn, or who stand motionless in a cloud of mosquitoes so as to not startle the snipe at their feet--every serious birder has tried, at least once, to turn a run-of-the-mill sparrow into an exotic visitor, or to turn a white rock into a snowy owl. But rarely do we stick to these wishful misidentifications. At the end of the day, we tally up the "hits" and leave the puzzlers in the field for another day.

If we have only an ambiguous glimpse to go by, then we can each have an opinion, but we may never get to agreement because none of us has sufficient information to make an unequivocal case. But when we have enough information to make an identification, opinion no longer applies. We may have to work to make the case, but if the case can be made, then we have an answer.

As one poster said in a recent exchange about the identification of a Chipping Sparrow:

It is a Chipping Sparrow not because Dave says so or because Craig is from Virginia. It is not a Chipping Sparrow because the majority of respondents called it that. It is a Chipping Sparrow because an examination of the whole bird eliminates other choices. Had the picture been more ambiguous, we quite possibly would not have been able to identify it. Sometimes "We don't know" is the best identification....We should use the opinions of other to re-examine our own, but bird ID is not a democratic process.

Much as we all revere the democratic process in our government, when it comes to the identification of something in the Real World, we do better with cognitive accuracy, in my view.

Cognitively Accurate Body Language

Do we control what we say with our body language? Does body language have a "grammar" and rules that influence how we interact? This article from the Huffinton Post examines the body language of the two presidential candidates as they interact with their wives. The authors, Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, identify some aspects of verbal/emotional/cognitive aspects of a relationship and the body language of the partners.

While I find their specific conclusions about the presidential candidates illuminating, I wanted to highlight the bigger message in the article:

There are three major factors that determine the health of any relationship: Authenticity, responsibility and appreciation. The following discoveries apply to relationships at home, at work, and in the world at large:

•A relationship thrives only when people speak honestly to each other about the significant matters in the relationship.

•A relationship thrives only when people take responsibility, instead of blaming each other, for the issues that arise in the relationship.

•A relationship thrives only when people express abundant appreciation for each other.

These factors line up pretty precisely with the basic assumptions of cognitive accuracy: that we have flaws and often act fallibly; that we do best when we take responsibility for our actions and attitudes; that we achieve our preferred outcomes more reliably when we use up-to-date information and process it effectively and rationally.

I also wanted to especially draw your attention to the conclusion of the article, an insight I find refreshing and significant:

We've seen real magic happen when those three rules of relationship are applied, both in our own lives and the lives of people with whom we've worked. We feel strongly that it's time to apply them to the world of politics....

If enough of us demand authenticity, responsibility and appreciation from our political leaders, maybe they'll stop clogging the airwaves and our national consciousness with lies and blame. The McCain campaign is the first one in our lifetimes to be based entirely on blame and fear. If enough of us mobilize, perhaps it will be the last.

A campaign in favor of cognitive accuracy...now that's something I can get behind!

Novelty Search in Presidential Politics

In this New York Times article about Barack Obama's 50-state strategy for winning the presidency, I came across this:

For Obama’s political advisers, expanding the electoral map is not about making a philosophical statement; it is simply a strategic imperative. Presidential campaigns, after all, are about getting to 270 — the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win. In relying on the same 20 or so winnable states over the past few elections, Democratic nominees have given themselves almost no margin for error. By contrast, Obama’s campaign, in addition to fighting for the usual complement of about a dozen swing states, has shifted considerable resources into a group of states — the list has, at one time or another, included Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Georgia — that haven’t been strongly contested for at least three elections, if not longer. (Alaska was on the list, too, until McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.) The idea here is that the more states you put in play, the more permutations there are that lead to victory.

Sounds like the man who will likely win the presidency has some solid understanding of novelty search and the value of open-ended approaches to problem-solving.

The article continues with this quote from David Axelrod, Obama’s lead strategist:

If you expand the map, you improve your chances.

A simple idea, but not easy, as we like to say about this cognitive accuracy stuff. And not at all common, and thus even more impressive and welcome.

I must say I feel a great deal of optimism about the possibility of a president who thinks like this and has people like this around him.

The Meaning of Words in the Speech of Presidential Candidates

WordWatchers offers an extensive and articulate linguistic analysis of the speech of the two US presidential candidates here: The Meaning of Words: Obama versus McCain.

I would have liked to see more about prescriptives. It appears that McCain (and Palin, as described in other posts on the site) both use "should" more the Obama and Biden, but WordWatchers ascribes this to "more social thinking", which I don't entirely understand.

Perhaps we can do a similar analysis on these speeches looking for prescriptives and rigid vs flexible word choice, etc.

A Story for Our Times about Cognitive Accuracy

When you hear a political candidate label himself, you might wonder what purpose he has in mind, and whether he has done what you think would qualify him for that label.

John Schwartz of the New York Times has a history lesson for Senator McCain which makes a solid case for the claim that the senator does not practice cognitive accuracy when it comes to self-labeling.

Terry Pratchett: I'm slipping away a bit at a time...

Author Terry Pratchett writes about his experiences with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a rare form of Alzheimer's, with moving frankness. Because his rare form of Alzheimer's largely focuses on the loss of physical skills, he remains articulate and reasoned in his view. He strikes an important blow for cognitive accuracy in facing the world as it is and not as we wish it could be.

It is a strange life when you ‘come out’. People get embarrassed, lower their voices, get lost for words. Part of the report I’m helping to launch today reveals that 50 per cent of Britons think there is a stigma surrounding dementia. Only 25 per cent think there is still a stigma associated with cancer.

The stories in the report - of people being told they were too young or intelligent to have dementia; of neighbours crossing the street and friends abandoning them - are like something from a horror novel.

We can't find a cure for something we are afraid to talk about, right?

Pratchett's article seems to me like it could come straight out of a coursebook on cognitive accuracy:

What is needed is will and determination. The first step is to talk openly about dementia because it’s a fact, well enshrined in folklore, that if we are to kill the demon then first we have to say its name.

Pratchett has given $1 million pounds to help push research on Alzheimer's forward, and to break through the superstitious prejudice that most people still feel about this very physical disease.

To see the full report, Dementia: Out Of The Shadows go to www.alzheimers.org.uk, or the Alzheimer’s Research Trust www.alzheimers-research.org.uk

A More Accurate Definition of "can be"

We in America grow up with numerous cultural fantasies and beliefs. One, heard in many corners these days, is that "Anyone can be president." While reading the comments on a wonderful piece by Dick Cavett on the issue of experience, specifically, Sarah Palin's experience (or lack thereof), I suddenly realized a potentially fatal flaw in the way most people think about the slogan used to encourage women and other minorities: what exactly do we mean by "can be"?

When I say "any book can be read by someone who can read the language of that book", I mean that it is POSSIBLE for a reader to read it. I do not mean that every book has equal interest for the reader.

When I say "any one can be president", I mean that it is POSSIBLE for any one to become president. I mean that the laws and cultural norms of this country no longer automatically prevent women or African-Americans or Asian-Americans or Hispanics from holding office. I mean that these groups have grown numerous enough and politically savvy enough to know how to organize their members sufficiently well to put one into high office.

I DO NOT mean "every person is equally qualified to become president", nor do I mean that "it doesn't take any experience, knowledge, education, or wisdom to become president." Indeed, it occurs to me that some might make this claim precisely to stubbornly imply the addendum "even if I don't have qualifications".

Cognitive accuracy tells us that, regardless of our cultural beliefs about the RIGHTS of people to aspire to great things, presidents face complex issues, with deep and long historical contexts, and they make decisions that affect millions, even billions of people, for a long time in many cases. Having the RIGHT to take that office has little to do with having the SKILLS and EXPERIENCE to take that office. A cognitively accurate view suggests that we would do best to find someone who does not find it dazzling to be invited into the office, but rather to seek someone who has worked hard to study complex subjects, to serve in a variety of roles, to travel around the world, to encounter diverse perspectives, to seek balance and a rational approach, to use critical thinking and a scientific understanding of cause and effect, etc.

So we can define "anyone can be president" as referring to the RIGHT to aspire to the office, but NOT to the equality of all possible candidates. As rational adult humans, with operating executive function, we CAN distinguish between entities, and we CAN value some traits over others. For the best outcome, I recommend looking for political candidates that show some sign of valuing cognitive accuracy.

Goals in Life

Today I read this quote:

There are two things to aim at in life; first to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second. -Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)

At first, this seems like a wise observation. Then it occurred to me...what if we think of this in light of cognitive accuracy?

What do we mean by "get what you want"? Do you *know* what you want? Do you know how to "get" it? Do you know whether you can "enjoy it" after you get it?

What if, instead, we thought of it this way:

In life, the wisest of us look for ways to maximize whatever we find enjoyable, and minimize what we find least so.

This view acknowledges that we may not necessarily know what we find enjoyable, that we may not have the means to "get what we want", and that we do best to take a pragmatic, cognitively accurate view of what we do encounter, enjoyable or not.

How Words Don't Make Meaning

Here's an example of political speech that I would like to see analyzed. Unfortunately, it's not from a major candidate, but rather from a comment to an article in the Boston paper, concerning the off-shore drilling bill passed last night by the House. Here's the comment:

Utilizing our natural resources is imperative to all Americans in these troubled times. All of America is being scrutinized and manipulated both home and abroad by a failed domestic energy policy that has been being developed and legislated long before Bush ever came to office. America as a whole has to wake up and decide if we are to going to keep putting our culture, families, and country at risk by being politically correct, or are we going roll up our sleeves and take control of our countries destiny by building a bridge to the future. The bridge we need is paved with security and its piers are a developed platform of usable energy that can sustain OUR economy... end of story. To allow our leaders to continue to make this a "political issue" is leaving all of we Americans in the lurch and putting our countries long term survivability at grave risk.

I feel pretty sure this guy thinks he said something meaningful and comprehensible. But from what I know about the basic positions of the "two" sides (drill/don't drill), I cannot tell if this person favors drilling or rejects it in favor of "renewables". Can you? Lots of great words and phrases, no clarity, little meaning.

Bias Analysis

I came across this very well-written and useful analysis of bias recently.

I especially like the article on "Superhumans", in which the author notes that we humans tend to behave as if we had super human powers, like senses that give us a direct and accurate picture of the world, or memory that does not distort and amend the events it purports to represent, etc.

An excerpt:

Quoting Tavris and Aronson (2007) Mistakes Were Made (but not by me):

Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

How much more would we enjoy our lives if we simply accepted the incontrovertible fact of our own flawed humanity?

Auto-focus

Lately my partner, formerly from Wyoming, has been accumulating pictures from a webcam in Centennial, Wyoming. The image refreshes every 10 minutes. Somebody sent him a link to an amazing catch--a lighting strike on the hill behind the town. Since he spent a lot of time driving all over Wyoming, he enjoyed the odd sense of watching folks he might know, in a place he had spent time, doing whatever they were doing, without them knowing he might see them. So he keeps a browser tab open to the webcam and periodically refreshes his screen to see what's new. We've seen rain clouds, beer deliveries, a Farmer's Market, RVs parked outside the restaurant and so on. He plans to gather enough interesting, day-in-the-life sort of snaps to maybe develop a movie, a kind of "remote documentary" if you will, small town "still life".

One interesting phenomenon that caught my eye involves the placement and behavior of the camera itself. It appears to look almost due west, because early morning pictures show this hills in the background illuminated. As noon approaches, the sun apparently crests the front edge of box housing the camera. As the light on the front of the camera increases, instead of seeing the town of Centennial, we start to see the reflection of the lens in the plastic window protecting the camera from the weather. As the reflection becomes more distinct, the camera at some point starts auto-focusing on its own image, and the town buildings get blurry and indistinct. Eventually, the sun moves far enough west to appear in the camera's view and around that time, the reflection disappears and the town comes back into focus. I suspect this anomaly will add interest to the planned movie.

But of course, I didn't stop with a simple observation. When I realized why the town went blurry in the afternoon, it occurred to me that we do something similar in our own lives: under certain circumstances, we catch sight of our "reflection" (our self-image, our own abstractions, our built-up notions about How Things Work) and we auto-focus on that, instead of on what appears in front of us. We let our own *personalized* view of things get in the way of what we ordinarily consider more important: "reality", What is Going On, the stuff we try to observe and track via cognitive accuracy.

What happens when we do that? Just like the little town of Centennial in the bright noon sun, the "reality" part of our view goes out of focus. We lose precision, lines blur, and we start to think that the our own imaginings represent the "real" picture. If we make decisions based on this "sharper image", we run a high risk that we won't get them right, since we cannot account for what we don't see, and we don't see what we could see if we stay focused on our own narrow, subjective view.

We can fix the problem by re-focusing the cognitive lens back to the appropriate focal length so that, as much as possible, the details of the world around us stay sharp and clear, while our own flawed and fallible view doesn't distract us.

How Things Work - Part 2

On the way from one place to another, I heard a story on the radio that made me shake my head. The narrator interviewed a couple of African-American men standing in line to buy lottery tickets in a South Side Chicago convenience store that apparently sells more lottery tickets than any other in the city.

The first man had dreamed of a devil and a lottery dream consultant told him that meant he should pick 771. He bought a stack of 30 one dollar tickets, saying he thought it a reasonable investment for a multi-million dollar payoff. He admitted to spending between four and six thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets. When asked about the odds, I could almost hear him shrug--"somebody has to win, might as well be me."

The second man confided that he had uncovered proof that the lottery was rigged. Only white people from other parts of the city can win. Black men never win. So why did he continue to buy tickets, the interviewer asked. Another audible shrug. "Somebody's got to win. They might let one of us win now and then."

The futility of their actions struck me hard, as of course, the interviewer intended. I can't imagine better examples of the way our in-built biases can lead us to take actions that directly contradict our own beliefs.

The biases our brains fall prey to range from minor to major, and from easily deflected to practically inevitable. We judge books by their covers, we leap before we look, we have an odd affinity for numbers or words that show a similarity to others we didn't even notice we heard, and so on. And, as the lottery ticket buyers amply demonstrate, we can "know" one thing and make critical decisions based on something completely other, opposite even.

To counter these effects, we suggest that while humans cannot eliminate bias, we can skew our biases in a different direction. We can develop a "tendency" to check our decisions against available information. We can develop a healthy mistrust of our initial impulses, and by delaying a decision for a tolerable moment, we can perhaps improve our chances of a more favorable outcome by choosing based on more accurate, up-to-date information.

And we can employ language to assist in these efforts. While humans typically speak in terms of what "should" happen, or how things "are", we contend that prescriptives like "should" and "must" and "need to" lead us into a fantasy land where things happen only as we wish them to. Since that fantasy land doesn't really exist, we set ourselves up for regular disappointment by acting as if wishing can make it so.

In contrast, if we trade in our "shoulds" for "wants", as in "I want things to go well for me" instead of "I should get what I want," we remind ourselves that things might not go the way we want. We prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best. We moderate the biases that evolution has built into our brains and bring our expectations more in line with the more highly probable events that cognitive accuracy predicts for us.

How Things Work - Part 1

Today I encountered a quote from a work of fiction, David Guterson's highly-regarded novel The Other, that I think says something important about How Things Work--or perhaps more precisely, how WE work:

If I extrapolate from myself, there's a lot of deceit in the world without a beginning, middle, or end. The way it really works, a lot of the time, is that you suffer from the weight of what happened, from what you said and did, so you lie as therapy. Now the story you make up starts to take up space otherwise reserved for reality. For phenomena you substitute epiphenomena. Skew becomes ascendant. The secondary becomes primary. When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying.

In this succinct and eloquent bit of prose, Guterson has sketched something vivid and accurate about How We Humans Work.

We are all fiction writers inside our heads. Some of the brain's circuitry actually supports this most human habit. We call the overarching tendency the bias of "blind sight"--the inability (due both to neurology and training) to overlook the way we erode the experience and memory of an event into terms we find more fitting with our own views of ourselves and how things "should" work.

We propose the notion of cognitive accuracy, in part, to counteract blind sight and the other biases it hides from us. We hope to offer insights and suggestions that help to shine a light on the "hidden layer" that embodies our learned behaviors. As we come to understand and accept the fallibility of brain-use, we can learn ways to counteract it--questioning our memories, weighing our evaluations against the best available evidence, delaying our decisions until we have consider alternatives, etc.

Today's Quote

Comes from Buckminster Fuller:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Bias du Jour: Choice-Supportive Bias

Neuroscientists have identified a substantial number of cognitive biases, brain habits that, left unchecked, lead us astray by gratifying our "feels familiar, feels good" brain circuits at the expense of accuracy. We can improve our tendency towards cognitive accuracy by uncovering and examining ways we subvert our own efforts with these implicit biases. Many sound familiar once described, but like most foundational behaviors, we sometimes find it hard to see them even when we look.

One such bias, the "choice-supportive bias", operates by letting us adjust our assessment of previous choices to come out "smelling like a rose". As Erik Benson at the "Radical Mutual Improvement" blog notes, this bias "makes one tend to believe that their choices of the past were better than they actually were". He gives three reasons why we find this bias so easy to follow:

1. Having a rich understanding of choice taken, while having an abstract or distant idea of the choice not taken. Just like we are more attached to people we come into contact with every day than we are of people who live on the other side of the world (even if both are equal strangers to us), we are attached more to our own decisions than of decisions not taken.
2. The "it's too late anyway" line of reasoning. As soon as we begin to think about that other choice, we have a short circuit that turns it off because "it's too late anyway" and "better make due with what we have".
3. It supports the belief that we are learning and growing through the choices we have made. We assume that every experience is a one of learning, even though we are only learning about the choices we have made and not about the choices we didn't make. Just because a choice led to a good outcome doesn't mean that the other one wouldn't have led to an equal or better one. However, it's more difficult to assume that that's possible.

Researchers Mather and Henkel observed that choice-supportive bias has as much or more to do with *how* we remember than *what*. In one experiment, they manipulated the memory retrieval of some subjects by "reminding" them of choices they did not actually make. These subjects showed just as strong belief in their "assumed" choices as those who were "reminded" of their actual choices.

In a related study, Mather and other researchers speculated that the heuristics we use to estimate "memorability" of a choice directly influences how we feel about our remembered choice.

In recalling past choices, people expect the chosen option to contain more positive and fewer negative features than do its competitors. In recalling past assignments, in contrast, people expect the assigned option to be remembered better than the unassigned alternatives. This vividness heuristic leads to systematic misattribution of new features to unassigned alternatives, but not in a manner supportive of the assigned option.

So what does all this mean for YOU, dear reader? Well, that's simple--but not easy!

First, you will want to put some effort into becoming aware of moments when this bias may influence your thinking. Trent at "The Simple Dollar" poses this example:

For example, let’s say you’re shopping for cars and you’re down to a final choice between a Mercury Sable and a Lexus LS 300. Both have distinct advantages, but no matter which one you select, those are the advantages you will remember, not the advantages of the car you didn’t choose.

Knowing this *might* (will?) happen gives you a handle you can use to get control of this bias.

Simply put, you will have a better idea of the effectiveness of your choices if you recognize that *what* you remember and *how* you remember may not accurately reflect what you *really* chose to begin with. Sure, that sounds pretty hard. But here's some ideas that might help:

1. When you make a choice you think you might want to review later, write it down. Try to include some info about why you made the choice you did: you had reasons, right? Try to suggest to your future self what sort of outcome you expected, too, since we do want to improve predictability, right?

2. When making a decision that you consider important, take extra time to weigh all the options, making sure to a) scrutinize the initially less attractive options; and b) include as many of the costs and benefits as you can think of, not just the apparent face value of the alternatives.

3. When recalling your decision later, review the original choices with an eye toward what you *actually* thought at the time, and only then consider if you still agree with yourself now.

4. Do not hesitate to *change your mind*!

The Choice-Support Bias militates against changing your mind, which leads you into a rut, believing that your choice has all the good traits you want, and none of the bad traits. Why cut yourself off from likely benefits just because "that's the way I've always done it"?

Why Cognitive Accuracy Matters

Buyers Remorse--Predicting Emotions After Decision-making

A study conducted by University College London found that people under-estimated their likely remorse and over-estimated their likely pleasure over the potential outcome of a test. In other words, when asked how bad they would feel if they did less well than they expected to, they discounted their potential disappointment. Can we abstract from this that when they DID do less well, they found it more painful than they might otherwise? Did their assessment of their likely reaction reduce their perceived likelihood of doing less well? The study apparently didn't address that.

Another related study found that in a simulated negotiation, people who acted more reasonable (ie, make more reasonable offers) had far less "buyer's remorse" than more aggressive negotiators.

Sounds like a job for Cognitive Accuracy!

If we make decisions with awareness of the possibilities and a realistic assessment of how the outcomes might affect us, we suffer less regret when the outcomes don't go our way. We have lower expectations, and thus lower vulnerability to shock from potential losses.

Daily Recalibration: Uncovering Preference

Most uses of the word "should" belie a preference on the part of the speaker, which the listener may not share. "Should" describes an imaginary world where we get our way all the time and always know the right answer with certainty.

"You should..." implies that what follows offers a kind of universal truth.

Stating a preference reveals who wants what: "I would like you to..." shows the locality of the preference, and of the underlying information on which it is based.

Short form: When I feel a "should" coming on, I will unmask the "want" it tries to conceal.

Daily Recalibration: Thinking before Speaking

My first reaction MAY accurately reflect my preferred semantic reaction, but I will take a minute to review it before saying what I think.

Reading in a Hyper-Media World

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This article by Nicholas Carr really struck home for me. I can remember periods in my life where I read for hours on end, literally finishing some books in a few days or even a few hours.

Now I work to get through a chapter a day. Of course, I can imagine other factors that contribute to that decreased reading productivity: I have a zillion other things going on, including many other things I want to read, so any one book has to really jump up and down to get my attention. And these days, I tend to read non-fiction books with more content and less fluff, if you will, so each chapter requires digesting, rather than just zipping through like I might demolish a tasty sci-fi novel.

Nonetheless, I suffer from the same scan and surf behavior Carr describes.

Seems to me that educators would do well to sit up and consider what this might mean for their classroom assignments. They may already have sense this trend, but perhaps some research needs doing.

To avoid the accusation that I have overlooked work already in progress on this, I will do some *surfing* and *skimming* over the weekend to see if I'm the last to learn about this.....

Updating

In my other life, I do tech support. After 25 years at that, I find I repeat myself a lot. I started saving emails and documents that I had sent out that had useful or complicated steps, so I wouldn't have to retype it when the inevitable next time came around. I take a bit of pride in my "one-page wonders", memos that provide instructions or explanations in a clear, concise and carefully tested bullets or paragraphs. Feedback from my clients and users suggest that I have learned a bit about how to communicate. So it makes sense, to me, to keep some of these "pearls" around for repeat customers.

However--and this is a BIG however--I have had some reason to actually read some of these boilerplate messages, like when I know that some step has changed or I find that more information would help, etc. When I do, more times than I would like to admit, I find some egregious typo or omission in my "pearl" that I not only missed the first time around, but continued to miss every time I re-used the message.

Our brains work much the same way. Learning something takes time, usually, and varying amounts of work. During the learning phase, we pay attention, check facts, ask questions, edit our understanding, update our model, etc. At some point, we decide we "know" this fact or procedure or belief, and we stop reviewing it, just as I stopped seeing what I had said in my re-usable messages.

Just like my stored email boilerplate, learning something can serve you well. You don't have to remember how to read--you just do it. You don't have to pay attention to recognize your best friend--you just know that face and voice. But things change, inevitably and continually, and if you don't check in now and then to make sure you have all the latest info on a subject, you may find yourself with the neurological equivalent of a typo--assuming you know something that you don't, or believing something that no longer makes sense, or no longer applies to your world.

Learning works best if we keep the info up-to-date with a healthy skepticism of our own knowledge and beliefs, and with attention to the accuracy of our underlying information.

Applied Life Science

Most of us know the term "life science" to mean "the study of living things", biology, botany, and so on.

But what might we mean by Applied Life Science?

Let's consider another likely situation you might find yourself in. Let's say you DID call that person and you DID go out with her, and she DID have a good time, and so did you. Now you glimpse a possible future, and it looks pretty appealing. In the flash of a neuron, you see warm nights, long talks, shared joys and sorrows, maybe a walk down the aisle, a couple of kids.....whoa, wait a sec. Let's back up to the Here and Now for a bit.

You have a couple of choices here, whether you realize it or not.

You could take the more common path, the one many of us take without thinking, without realizing we have a choice, and fall heads over heels in love. Sounds great, right? While you practice walking with your head in the clouds, I'd like to talk a bit about some of what's going on in there, in your head.

You might think you fall in love with your heart, but that organ contributes little more to the process than to pump blood around to keep the brain humming. And hum it does when you are in the throes of a new relationship: hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin are bathing your memory banks with *significance*, new synapses are reaching out and building connections, areas of the brain that don't usually work together start making associations between your new lover and your "feels good" circuit.

The more time you spend together, the stronger these new brain connections get. You even put a little extra oomph into the process, usually without even noticing. Picture your lady love in your mind. She's a beauty, right? And she's smart, and cute, and she seems to like all the things you like. You might even go so far as to say she's "perfect", for you at least, right?

What do you notice about these thoughts, now that I've asked you to look? What *I* see, or rather, what I *don't* see, is anything negative. Well, sure, you say, she's perfect, why would I want to say anything negative? Don't get me wrong--I'm not suggesting you trash her, or your growing relationship. But if you stop to think about it--maybe step outside yourself for a moment and look at you, and her, from a little distance--can we really call anybody "perfect"? Did she hesitate for a second before declaring that she loves Death Cab for Cutie? Did she really reach out with her fork and take food off *your* plate, without even asking? Do you really like that vegan restaurant she drags you to, or have you just convinced yourself that the food's edible?

Do I mention these negative aspects of the relationship because I think they indicate that there's no hope for you? Not at all! It's okay and normal and inevitable that you won't actually find a truly *perfect* match, because no two people feel exactly the same about everything and have the same mix of tastes and interests. Indeed, some more poetic types think that the differences between lovers keeps the heat turned up--and I DON'T mean the fighting type heat, either...;-)

So, since we have no reason to think that anyone or any situation is perfect, really, it seems likely that you *do* have differences. Not important, you say. Love conquers all, you say. Maybe. But you can help love stay on the winning side simply by keeping your eyes open and your toes, if not your feet, on the ground.

Here's where the scientist makes a few hypotheses--that is, thinks about how things work--and tries to prediction about what he will discover when it looks into something. The more *accurately* you think about something, the better your predictions will be. So how do you make predictions about this new relationship?

You could take the head-on approach and look for evidence of places where you and she might not line-up on the same side. It will take a bit of determination to see these, with all the bonding stuff going on. Here are some suggestions for ways to brush the fog aside and clear up your vision just a bit, right out of the scientist's playbook:

1. Most direct: ask. Ask what she thinks about having kids, and make the questions specific. When and how many top the list of questions, followed by questions about things like schooling, religion, discipline and so on. These questions will help reveal now whether these very critical issues will bring you together or drive you apart. Better to get an idea about them now, before you have an actual kid to make decisions about.

Besides kids, ask about religion, politics, money, career, lifestyle, habits...in short, all those things they warn you not to talk about when dating. They warn you not to talk about them because people have strong opinions about at least some of these issues, and strong opinions don't always go well with romance. But not knowing how your lover thinks and feels about the fundamental aspects of living can lead to shocks later in life, after you've already made commitments and invested time. One of the most common complaints in divorces is "he's changed" or "she showed me a whole new side that wasn't there before" or "we aren't compatible anymore". Usually, what has really changed wasn't the other person, but our *perception* of them. Without the glow of budding romance clouding our vision, we start to realize that those little imperfections that seemed so inconsequential suddenly have uncomfortable, unacceptable consequences.

2. Observe. A scientist tries hard to see what "really" happens, without letting what they *want* to happen or what they *think* will happen get in the way. This takes practice, but you can learn a lot by observing yourself.

For example, when you spend time with your new love, what happens, before, during, after you are together? Do you worry? Do you share? Do you talk about your day and listen to her talk about hers? Do you change your habits of thinking and acting when she's around? Is that hard, or do you see it as a welcome change?

Ask the same questions about her--either directly, by asking her, or by observing her and noting her behavior with you. If you notice that she avoids a subject, passes off an incident you think differently about, seems uncomfortable in a situation, ask why.

You may learn something you don't want to know--that you don't share some important opinions, or that she doesn't value something to the same extent you do. But when a scientist observes something that contradicts his prediction, he doesn't wish it away. He accounts for it. You don't want to drive across a bridge built by somebody who just hopes he used the right kind of steel. In the same way, you don't want to head into your future with somebody you just hope will stick with you in the hard times. You need to have enough information to believe in your predictions for the future.

And you do that by applying science to life.

What Do You Mean?

When we say "Cognitive Accuracy", what do we mean?

Simply put, it refers to the relative difference between what we *suppose* will happen and what we actually observe. The smaller that difference, the more accurately we have evaluated events, and the less likely events will result in unexpected shocks.

For example, say it's Friday night and you don't have a date. You consider your possibilities. You could call the woman you went out with last week. Ask yourself: will she say yes? How do you decide whether to call or not?

Well, you could review your best features and skills and tell yourself that any woman would be lucky to spend time with you. You could recall the events of your last date with her--did she seem to enjoy herself? Did you? Did you part warmly?

Now, repeat that last set of questions and ask yourself whether you have *recalled* what happened accurately, or whether you have perhaps focused on favorable details and overlooked or "forgot" the negative moments. If you perhaps maybe did a bit of the latter, you are in good company, like, the whole human race.

Our brains have evolved to meet certain needs for survival--we base most of our decisions on two simple criteria--feels good, feels bad. To a large extent, our cultural upbringing largely defines for us which things we define as "good" and "bad", but we still have a basic bias towards things and actions that "feel good" and away from things and actions that "feel bad".

So what does this have to do with your dating decisions? Glad you asked.

You most probably grew up with certain cultural biases that deem mistakes as "bad". This can play out at least two ways. On one hand, when you recall last week's date, you might *automatically* overlook the things you might feel uncertain about, that you think might have been "mistakes"--did you laugh at the wrong moment, did you take her to the wrong restaurant, did you make the wrong move when you dropped her off? When you overlook these possible goofs, you feel a lot better about how the date went, right? This approach allows you to feel better about yourself despite your mistakes--in fact, you will tend to believe that you didn't really make any mistakes. If you discount your mistakes, or minimize them, you reduce the "feels bad" effect, which your brain *automatically* wants to do. However, you haven't really given yourself an accurate picture of what happened, have you?

On the other hand, when you recall last week's date, you might *automatically* overlook the things you might feel good about--sure you took her to a nice place, but it wasn't the *best* place, and yeah, she did seem interested in what you had to say about your work, but other people have more interesting jobs. And so on. In this scenario, your bias is still against what "feels bad", but paradoxically, it's your successes that you rate as potentially "bad". Psychologists generally view this as a fear of success, usually because you worry about being able to "keep it up" or that despite your best efforts, you "always" fail in the end. If you just assume you failed, you don't have to worry about the awful potential for it. But, if you overlook what you did right with this woman, you haven't really given yourself an accurate picture of what happened, have you?

Now imagine using either of these evaluations to decide whether to call her this week. In the first case, you might discover when you call that she really didn't enjoy your company and would rather stay home alone in the dark than go out with you again. What a shock! You didn't see THAT coming! You didn't think it went all that bad. In fact, you remember it being quite a fun time. What's her problem??

In the second case, you might simply decide not to call at all. You don't see any point in calling when you know the whole night must have disappointed her. But then suppose you see her a few days later, after not calling, and she makes it very clear that she would have liked to see you again, but some other guy called in the meantime. You missed out on a potentially great Friday night because you completely misread her experience of the last date.

Either way, what you *thought* would happen never did. In fact, what did happen didn't come close. Do you give up on dating because women are OBVIOUSLY impossible to understand? I hope not!

Consider this alternative. Imagine that you review that first date and say something like this to yourself: I enjoyed my time with her. We went to a pretty fair restaurant that met my finances, but still served decent food and had a nice atmosphere. I didn't expect her to be overly impressed by it, but I do recall her saying it reminded her of a good time she had with her folks when they went to Paris. That sounds like a positive thing. I might have laughed at the wrong moment when she was talking about her major, but when I apologized, she laughed it off and said she knew it was pretty odd for a girl to be studying sports psychology. We shared a nice quick kiss at her door. I would have liked more, but she didn't seem repulsed by it. So I think I'll give her a call and just see if she's busy.

See what you did this time? You kept your evaluations closer to the facts and farther from your biases--you considered possible negative aspects, but you granted yourself a few good moves too. You improved your chances for predicting what will happen if you call her, just like scientists improve their predictions by gathering facts ahead of time.

So that's what we mean by cognitive accuracy: gathering facts and trying to keep your "feels good/feels bad" sensors out of the picture.