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.