A short lesson in how we construct reality

In this age of hyper-technology, we have myriad ways to construct our own realities, and as many or more ways to forget we don't necessarily construct it accurately. From Oregon comes a story of a couple trying to get home to Nevada through the cold and snowy mountains in the south central part of the state. The area is known for its wild roadless areas and rugged terrain.

To guide them on this trip, they relied on the GPS system in their Toyota Sequoia. They began to have serious doubts about the visibly deteriorating condition of their route, which turned into a 30 mile trek up an unmaintained road to nowhere, and eventually tried to turn around. They apparently trusted the technology, or more importantly, their understanding of the technology, over their own experience of the outside world. They became hopelessly stuck in the deepening snow and spent three days marooned before they were able to contact outside help, via the same GPS system that they had allowed to lead them into the wilderness.

The most reasonable (although somewhat rear-end-covering) comment in the story came from a spokesperson for Garmin, the maker of the GPS:

"drivers must always remember that GPS [systems] provide route suggestions. They do not cause drivers to make driving decisions."

That seems like a stellar reminder not just about technology, but also about most of the rest of the things, people and events in our lives: they do not cause us to make our decisions.

If we could just remember that notion at times of stress, moments of decision-making, interpersonal interactions, etc, we might make somewhat different decisions. When we believe we "have no choice", we are usually imagining that someone has "made" us decide a particular way, without remembering how we constructed the current reality.

We also make better decisions with more information, and by checking the accuracy of the information we think we have. If the Nevada couple had compared their GPS position to a paper map, for example, to get the "bigger picture", they might have seen that they had misinterpreted a turn, or that their selection for the "shortest route" did not allow for differences in road condition or seasonality.

In short, the more we remember how we constructed the information on which we based our decisions, and the more we verify and compare that information (especially when making decisions that could lead to our death by exposure), the less likely we are to end up stuck in the snow, literally or figuratively.

A Few Words on Science and its Critics

When we talk about cognitive accuracy, we mean something fairly specific: we contend that science gives us a way to construct an external or global reference point with a high probability of agreement, both with the external world and among members of a given communication. Sometimes this approach meets with resistance in the form of various arguments about the inadequacy of science. David DiSalvo has posted a cogent and articulate statement that addresses the resistance of the -ists and isms. He notes that we cannot escape our biases, but if we expose them to the light whenever we can, and accept, even embrace, the likelihood of our mistakes, we can reduce their number and severity. Only science takes that approach.

In a nutshell, DiSalvo notes:

Science is one of the best tools we have to reach beyond our limited capacity. It’s not a flawless tool by any means, and it can’t right all the wrongs that beset our brains. But when compared to several other modes of inquiry, it’s one of the best we have.

and:

If supernaturalism or postmodernism were reliable tools for expanding understanding and improving our lot, we’d have every reason to value them as much or more than science—but the truth is, they’re not. In fact, the absolutism endemic to both makes them philosophical cul-de-sacs.

What we don't know....can HELP us

"...thoroughly conscious ignorance ...is the prelude to every real advance in knowledge."
--James Clerk Maxwell, physicist and mathematician (1831-1879)

This applies to personal knowledge as well as scientific or theoretical knowledge, in my opinion.

To solve a problem, it matters as much, or more, to know what you don't know, as it does to know what you do know. It's where you don't know something that you can make the biggest difference. Deliberately uncovering and examining the gaps in your understanding--of a problem, of a situation, of a person, etc--takes maturity and a kind of comfortableness with your position, but in the long run, it becomes easier and more beneficial than sticking steadfastly to the known while ignoring the unknown.

Sloppy Language in Science on Human Uniqueness

Blogger Calden Wloka, in his post Sloppy Language in Science on Human Uniqueness, points out the irresponsible nature of science reporting that uses florid or unscientific statements to heighten the appeal of the subsequent report. I was unable to access the article in question, from ScienceNow, from the link in the post, but here's a few snippets from Calden's assessment. His major concern is with how the reporter, Greg Miller sets up the article:

I was quite astonished to see a ScienceNOW article not only referencing Descartes in the first sentence but following it with the question, “What imbues us with this uniquely human sense of self-awareness?”

Calden notes that how we speak and think about a thing can influence our evaluation of the relative meaning of that thing:

Making such an unqualified statement irks me, as I believe it fosters an undue reverence for the human brain (despite our heavy reliance on model organisms for neuroscience research), and is reminiscent of Descartes’ baseless theological labeling of all non-humans as mindless automatons.

He hits the (to-me) heart of the matter by reminding us how deep into our own abstractions we tend to live:

The difficulty of making cross-species generalizations is further compounded by our inability to break away from our own human perspective.

He notes the irony with which Miller's over-anthropocentric hype is undone by other articles in the same magazine:

Just four short days after Greg Miller claimed that only humans were self-aware, another ScienceNOW news brief came out describing the success of pigs at learning to use a mirror to find food, a measure which, in the words of the lead author Donald Broom, gives pigs at least “some degree of self-awareness”. The article also conveniently provides a list of other animals who have passed the mirror test: elephants, dolphins, magpies, gray parrots, and some primates (including humans, which the article for some reason listed separately).

The importance of accurate language, in my view, extends far beyond the carefully crafted language we use in scientific papers. I object to a reporter using inflated language to draw in an audience, even if they subsequently convey important and meaningful information to that audience. The audience may not readily distinguish the inaccurate and overly dramatic intro from the more solid, more circumspectly written study results.

If we believe that what we say and think can affect the physical connections in our brains, then we will serve our goals best by working hard to say and think as accurately as possible.

Correlation and causation

Here's a post from Neosprockets demonstrating that the Internet causes autism!

Actually, it's a very nicely written and easy-to-understand discussion of correlation, causation and our old friend, confirmation bias, the seemingly unstoppable ability of humans to convince themselves of whatever they already believe with whatever they happen to come across.conf

Evidence-based living

PZ Myers (at Pharyngula) crafted this really charming Atheist's Creed in response to a silly comment by a theist who tried to claim that atheists don't "even believe in love". It offers a succinct description of the "evidence-based" life:

An atheist's creed

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

On Intelligence

If sex evolved so that your children are not condemned to be just like you, intelligence evolved so that you are not condemned to be just like yourself.
-Alison Jolly, primatologist

An Operational Definition of Confirmation Bias

Today Huffington Post offers such an amazing (to me) example of confirmation bias, it might even qualify as "textbook".

It appears that Rush Limbaugh picked up a blog posting about someone "discovering" the first ten pages of Barack Obama's college thesis (on the inadequacies of the Constitution). He apparently saw plenty in it that burned him up (doesn't hardly take a match these days), and went on the air with it before he even finished reading. Too bad. If he had used the old "cortico-thalamic pause" from general semantics, he might have had time to note the tag "satire" on the original posting at the JumpinginPools blog before jumping to his predictable conclusion.

Instead he went into full rant mode as he read excerpts live on air, using these quotes to hammer on his perennial message that our current President hates America and wants to destroy it. In mid-sentence, you can hear him start to sputter as blog posts and twitters started to question the source and the validity of the story. Eventually, he grants that the post, and the alleged thesis, were indeed a hoax.

Did he retract his rant? ask for forgiveness for jumping the gun without a shred of vetting?

Oh sure he did. NOT.

Instead, he actually says that while Obama did not REALLY write this, "it feels real". Yeah, that's what confirmation bias is all about. The facts don't determine your evaluation, your gut does, even in the face of direct contradiction.

Rush decided that Obama COULD have written this and therefore, he might as well have, and therefore, well, it FEELS like he must have, and therefore, oh look, it's true, at least, true enough for current purposes. Limbaugh will continue to hold the notions in this satirical "thesis" against Obama AS-IF he wrote it, even if he knows perfectly well he did not.

The word determined the facts and not the other way 'round--how NOT to apply cognitive accuracy to your thinking and behaving.

How Language Can Befuddle Us

New York Times cartoonist Tim Kreider laments the difficulties of "finding happiness" in a recent post on his NYT blog Averted Vision - Happy Days

While I understand the complaint, I don't relate with the evaluation. Language has befuddled us by allowing us to make "happiness" a NOUN, as if a thing, as if "it" "exists" and can be "found". And because we feel happy doing many different, disparate things, the noun "happiness" becomes muddy and complicated--do we "find" "happiness" when we love (another process that we have mistakenly made into a noun) "or" when we work? Does that mean love=work? If we sometimes feel sad when we love someone, have we "lost" "happiness"? What if we see a beautiful painting in an ugly place? Have we "found" "happiness" or "sadness"? How confusing!

Imagine if our language only allowed verbs and adverbs. Then we might "read happily" or "interact happily" or "work happily" but we could not fool ourselves into "seeking" "happiness"--no noun, no thing, just process.

As a thing, "happiness" seems to fill up the whole room and push every"thing" else aside when you "find" it, while its "lack" seems to leaves an unfillable hole. But do you imagine or hope to ever "find" "hunger"? No--you feel a sensation, hungry, at some times and not at others, regardless of what else you happen to be doing.

As a sensation, feeling happy resembles feeling hungry, or relaxed, or sleepy, or focused--all ongoing states that do not exclude other potentially contradictory sensations. In that light, we can start to see that we can feel happy right alongside feeling sad, or frustrated, or fulfilled, or accomplished, or lonely, etc. It's only a nasty trick of language that makes us think we can "find" it, rather than just feeling it here and now, or then and there, or not.

We Live in Public (and the end of empathy)

In a very interesting email/post, Jason Calacanis analyzes the curious effects from mixing the Web 2.0 "social network" environment with video gaming. He concludes that many people have acquired "Internet Aspergers", a loss of empathy that reflects the unstinting brutality that winning at video games requires. It's an interesting juxtaposition of technological details that I had not come across--that kids who play video games and learn to dehumanize their "enemies" in order to "level up" easily maintain the same mental attitude when interacting with bloggers, facebook friends and journalists online.

A long time ago, during the Vietnam war, it suddenly dawned on me that the farther you live from a situation, the easier it is to have an opinion about it. Fewer details, more abstract and concrete analysis. People who had rarely left their hometowns in the midwest or northwest or northeast, knew the definitive solution to the difficulties of people living thousands of miles away with a different culture and a different economy and a different history. And usually the solution involved bombing the crap out of them. After all, they weren't people, just political problems, right?

Ed Bailey wrote a wonderful paper on the issue of fairness, in which he makes the to-me startling assessment that we can best achieve fairness among various parties by cognitive accuracy. That is, the more we know about somebody, the easier we can empathize with them.

This seems to suggest the underlying lie of "social networking"--while we may build up "communities" of "friends", we generally achieve only the most superficial connections, and as a result, we lack the cognitively accurate understanding of others that underlies empathy. At the same time, we have shoe-horned ourselves into a "relationship" that involves sharing our most personal details.

It seems like the ultimate cognitive dissonance--are we intimates or strangers? Do we share a bond or just a form of transmission? Are we "friends" or "frienemies"? Do we reach out to others for more information, or do we grasp at their attention but reject their humanity?

How the Brain Works (a la Ballard St)

Today's Ballard Street cartoon, by Jerry Van Amerongen, neatly sums up one view I have of how my brain works. I fondly remember how my mother used to reply to some questions with "I'm of two minds about that." As I have learned and matured, I find myself thinking, two minds, heck, I'm completely confused by the proliferation of minds I have about some things!

To help integrate Cognitive Accuracy into my daily operations and transactions, I try to recognize how "what I think" rarely, if ever, represents a clear idea, an unvarnished "truth", or even a single voice. I detect multiple layers of meaning in most things, and trying to evaluate those multiple meanings with my multiple experiences and opinions and emotional valences leads directly to "two minds", or, as the cartoonist says, some parts of me finding other parts of me crazy.

Cognitive accuracy won't change the multiplicity of meanings and levels and evaluations. But I believe that by focusing on which of those meanings more closely reflect my best, most dispassionate observations, and which offers the highest correlation with my preferred outcomes, I have the best chance of making decisions that will cause me the least amount of regret and confusion in the future. That sounds like a good thing, to me.

How Words Affect Your Access to Information

In a study reported by Bloomberg and other news services, scientists analyzed data about the predatory habits of great white sharks using a method called geographic profiling. After tracking more than 340 attacks in waters off South Africa:

We found that white shark hunting is non-random, and they have an anchor point or search base.

The analysis method, which tracked the location of the sharks as they hunted and rested, helped to reveal that the sharks position themselves near seal populations, waiting for individuals to pass by before launching a sudden vertical attack. Some sharks achieved an 80% success rate with this approach.

Unfortunately, at least in some respects, the data analysis method was borrowed from police, who use the same kind of profiling to detect and predict the behavior of human serial killers. Scientifically it makes good sense to use an already established and successful model to analyze what appears superficially to be similar behavior, especially given that, as the study points out:

The white shark hunting patterns remain very poorly understood.

The scientists themselves appear to understand the difference between their subjects and human killers. One of the study's authors, Neil Hammerschlag commented that:

Sharks differ from serial killers in that their hunting is typically for survival. The profiling technique is useful as a measure to protect sharks rather than humans.

Newspapers, on the other hand, have to sell papers (or headlines I saw regarding this study generally came to one conclusion: Bloomberg said "The Great White Sharks Hunt Like Serial Killers, Scientists Say"; the BBC said "Great whites 'plan' seal attacks"; the Boston Globe spiced it up a bit with "Great white sharks hunt just like Hannibal Lecter". Of course, to sell papers, these headlines focus on the killing aspect of the shark's behavior, while obscuring the fundamental difference between killing for pleasure and killing for food. The headlines skew not only our attention to the story, but also seeks to touch our fear of such animals, all the while condemning them for "causing" our fear.

However, I fear humans far more than sharks. Human serial killers kill members of their own species (mine too), and usually for complex deeply irrational reasons. Sharks kill members of a different species for which they have no natural empathy, and consume what they kill in nearly all cases. They put seals in the same category that we put hamburgers or apples: something edible. While that may not sound quite as titillating as comparing them to serial killers, it more accurately represents the behavior. Accurately understanding a behavior gives us a better handle on how to categorize it and how to react to it--not with fear or horror, but with interest and empathy.

Familiarity Breeds Recognition

In a recent Science Daily article, we learn that people appear to use a different part of the brain to infer the thoughts of familiar people than they use when estimating the thinking of unfamiliar people. The article says that Harvard researchers watched the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vPFC), known as an area involved in introspection, while subjects speculated about the views and thoughts of people described as a lot like them or quite different (based on cultural details like location, religion and schooling.) They found that the vPFC lit up when subjects speculated about the "like-me" target, but did not light up when they speculated about the "not-like-me" target. Researchers suggest that this means we think differently about unfamiliar people.

It occurs to me, however, that if we view this study in light of Hawkins' theory about brain structure described in On Intelligence, we might draw a different conclusion. Hawkins proposed a hierarchical brain structure devoted to pattern recognition, with low layers devoted to recognizing bits of patterns, and higher levels responsible for integrating the bits into larger patterns. As long as the pattern remains recognizable, the layers manage the perception more or less automatically. Repeated recognition of unfamiliar patterns trains the lower levels and expands the repertoire of patterns we can recognize without effort. When successive layers fail to report a familiar pattern, the attention centers are activated to bring conscious attention to the evaluation of the perception.

In the case of the Harvard study, we might conclude that the subject could not automatically evaluate the thoughts of the target with the unfamiliar background using lower levels of pattern recognition, so the evaluation was moved to some more conscious, executive area of the brain.

I would have liked to know if the researchers identified what other part of the brain lit up when the subject considered the unfamiliar target. Such information would add greatly to the interest of this study.

A Boost for Novelty Search

Recent research reported by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania provides new support for the importance of novelty search in human cognition. In short, they found that "a lucky win seems to be retained better than a probable loss." Unexpected results drew more of the brain's attention and resulted in more learning than expected results.

This would seem to suggest that when searching for a solution, it makes much more sense to try anything, in hopes of triggering an unexpected result, than to plot a path and stick to it regardless of the feedback available.

Language speaks louder than actions?

Recent research into police interrogation techniques has produced some interesting results. As this article in the NYT May 15, 2009 reports, researchers who study interrogations and interviews with witnesses and suspects have uncovered behavior details that run counter to "common wisdom":

1. Liars don't look any more shifty or deceitful than honest speakers.
2. Honest people talk more, include more details, and make mistakes,while liars avoid detail and rigidly stick to their story.
3. Asking for information gets far better results than demanding it.

In terms of cognitive accuracy, this makes sense to me. We know that imperatives have little to do with reality, and more to do with wishful thinking and a pre-determined belief in the "truth". By comparison, interrogatives and informatives have more to do with exchanges of information. That police organization have begun to realize that a question tends to produce answers more readily than a demand seems like a good thing.

A bit about book covers and the brain

By now anyone not buried in sand or on a trek through the Antarctice knows the name Susan Boyle. If you haven't seen the Youtube replay of her performance on Britain's TV show "You've Got Talent", you might want to do so before reading on. Go ahead, I'll wait.....

Okay, back? If you think anything like me, you found the story interesting, inspiring, amusing and a little odd. On the face of it, the whole episode reminds me of my mother's admonition (echoed throughout my life from a jillion other sources) about the pitfalls of judging a book by its cover. Yep, she looks frumpy and yep, she doesn't do a great job of looking collected and alluring up there on the stage. We like our stars handsome and someone who doesn't fit has the temerity to aspire to stardom, we don't just dismiss her, we scorn her. Never mind that few in the audience would come off much better, we frumpy folk are supposed to know our places and not inflict our frumpiness on others, especially not on national TV.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have offered plenty of analysis of course. In this article from the NY Times, several experts note that this categorizing behavior runs very deep in the brain, reaching far back into our evolutionary history. Back then, we benefitted from a quick assessment of the stranger in front of us: are they good or bad, am I safe or in danger, can I eat it or have sex with it, etc. In modern times, we employ the same basic behavior to distinguish far less critical matters, like who's in and who's out, or who we want as leaders and who we can safely ignore.

As with so many other modern cultural co-optations of basic brain circuitry, we do not easily resist this compulsion to stereotype:

Scientists are finding that stereotypes are not simply stored and retrieved by the brain, but “are associated with general regions in the brain involved in memory and goal-planning,” Professor [David] Amodio [an assistant professor of psychology at New York University,] said, suggesting that “people recruit stereotypes to kind of help them plan a world that’s consistent with the goal they might have.”

The article goes on to note the research of Susan Fiske, , a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton,who found that:

The part of the brain that normally activates when you are thinking about people is surprisingly silent when you’re looking at homeless people...It’s kind of a neural dehumanization...But...the neural response is restored when people are asked to focus on what soup the homeless person might like to eat, something that makes one think about the person as someone with wants or goals.

In other words, the more we know about someone, the harder time we have not seeing them as "one of us", a human being.

I think this story tells us a lot more than simply to watch out for the dangers of judging by book cover. It demonstrates a few critical aspects of cognitive accuracy:

One: we get a more useful, accurate result if we base our assessment of someone on as many available facts as possible.

Two: we get more useful results when we recognize that our assumptions may interfere with the accuracy of our assessments.

Three: we get more useful results when we use available feedback to update our assessments when new information becomes available.

It's True: What You Say Influences What You Think!!

Does the gender of a noun influence the way speakers think about the object to which the noun applies? On NPR's Morning Edition, Robert Krulwich interviewed Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky about her experiment with speakers of languages that assign gender to nouns.

Boroditsky asked German and Spanish speakers to supply a list of words that came to mind when they thought about the word "bridge". The Spanish subjects produced a list containing words like "strong", "big" and "towering", while the German speakers came up with words like "beautiful", "slender" and "elegant".

It turns out that the German word for "bridge" is assigned the feminine gender, while the Spanish word is assigned the masculine gender. The adjectives selected seem to reflect common stereotypes of human gender.

Boroditsky repeated the test with the word "key", which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. In this case, the German list of descriptors included "jagged", "heavy" and "hard", while the Spanish list included "little", "lovely", and "intricate".

This seems to suggest pretty strongly that the rules of the two languages have conditioned different emotional reaction to otherwise inanimate, ungendered objects, based solely on what an English speaker would probably call an arbitrary quirk.

I wonder if we could extrapolate from this that the lack of gender in English in any way contributes to its use as the "universal" language for economics, science and, to some extent, art.

Delicious cautionary tale of semantic awareness

A dear friend has sent me a favorite story from one of Pete Seeger's books:

A man is driving down a narrow one-lane country road. He sees a car come round the corner toward him. As it came closer, he saw it was a woman driver. So he’s gallant; he goes in the ditch with two wheels and stops. As the other car passes, the woman stuck her head out the window and shouted, “Pig!”

The man was shocked. Adrenalin shot through his body. He angrily jammed his foot on the gas, zoomed out of the ditch, down the road, around the corner.

And ran into the pig.

A Human President

While President Obama works to put together his new government, he has run into a few problems. He has called some of the "self-inflicted injuries". This is an example of what I find so interesting about this new president. In this post at The Oval, a USA Today community blog, he says:

"The fact of the matter is Tom Daschle pulled out today," Obama continues. "And I'm here on television saying I screwed up and that's part of the era of responsibility; is not never making mistakes; it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that's what we intend to do."

Does that sound familiar to you? This sounds to me like a man who understands his flawed and fallible tendencies, and the same tendencies in those around him. He prefers to simply admit mistakes and works to reveal them and take responsibility for them.

In short, he prefers to behave with cognitive accuracy rather than wishful thinking.

Science and Certainty

Fox News has a long-standing reputation for twisting words, injecting judgments, and stretching meanings. People who get most of their news from Fox get some pretty strange notions, and one wonders how well they can distinguish fact from less-than-fact. Consider the opening of a recent story about the rumblings under Alaska's Mount Redoubt:

Mount Redoubt volcano in Alaska could erupt within days to weeks, say scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, amazing the rest of us with their certainty.

"Amazing us" sounds like commentary, not reporting, to me, but worse yet, the intro casts the scientists as making claims with "certainty", which, of course, we know they do not.

As of this writing, Mount Redoubt stands at Volcano Alert Level Orange. For Alaskan volcanos, this means

"Volcano is exhibiting heightened or escalating unrest with increased potential of eruption, timeframe uncertain, OR eruption is underway with no or minor volcanic-ash emissions."

In other words, following standard rules for scientific predictions, "volcano warning systems are based on a probability of an eruption or hazard" which they determine through observation, evaluation of past data and fit of the data to current models of volcanic behavior.

In my view, injecting commentary into news stories, may serve to make the subject of the stories seem controversial, extreme, threatening or ridiculous, when the factual details of the story do not by themselves suggest such evaluations.

In this case, I think Fox suffers from a strong projection bias, attributing their need for certainty in an uncertain world onto the scientists predicting volcanic activity. The scientists have no horse in the race, so to speak (in other words, they don't consider any outcome as more desirable than any other). Fox, on the other hand, has a vested interest in titillating and agitating their readers. So they use words that imply that the *scientists* consider their predictions to amount to certainty, when we know that they do not. Instead, it seems likely that Fox writers and readers strongly prefer certainty and attribute that preference to everyone else.

In a way, they want to have it both ways. They prefer certainty, but do not believe that science can provide certainty, and yet they project their preference for certainty onto scientists, but do so, apparently, to belittle their predictions, which do not in fact include certainty.

See what I mean about twisted meanings?