Author: tom

Categories
psychology science

Cognitive Dissonance Reduction

Following on from my earlier post about the way psychologists look at the world, let me tell you a story which I think illustrates very well the tendency academic psychologists have for reductionism. It’s a story about a recent paper on the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, and about a discussion of that paper by a group of psychologists that I was lucky enough to be part of.

Cognitive Dissonance is a term which describes an uncomfortable feeling we experience when our actions and beliefs are contradictory. For example, we might believe that we are environmentally conscious and responsible citizen, but might take the action of flying to Spain for the weekend. Our beliefs about ourselves seem to be in contradiction with our actions. Leon Festinger, who proposed dissonance theory, suggested that in situations like this we are motivated to reduce dissonance by adjusting our beliefs to be in line with our actions.

Obviously after-the-event it is a little too late to adjust our actions, so our beliefs are the only remaining point of movement. In the flying to Spain example you might be motivated by cognitive dissonance to change what you believe about flying: maybe you come to believe that flying isn’t actually that bad for the environment, or that focussing on personal choices isn’t the best way to understand environmental problems, or you could even go all the way and decide that you’re not an environmentally responsible person.

The classic experiment of dissonance theory involved recruiting male students to take part in a crushingly boring experiment. The boring part was an hour of two trivial actions — loading spools into a tray, turning pegs a quarter-turn in a peg-board. At the end of this, after the students through the experiment was over, was the interesting part of us. The students were offered either $1 or $20 to tell the next participant in the experiment (actually the female accomplice of the experimenter) that the experiment she was about to do was really enjoyable. After telling this lie, the participants were then interviewed about how enjoyable they really found the experiment. What would you expect from this procedure? Now one view would predict that the students paid $20 would enjoy the experiment more. This is certainly what behaviourist psychology would predict — a larger reward should produce a bigger effect (with the effect being a shift from remembering the task as boring, which is was, to remembering it being enjoyable, which getting £20 presumably was). But cognitive dissonance theory suggests that the opposite would happen. Those paid $20 would have no need to change their beliefs about the task. They lied about how enjoyable the task was to the accomplice, something which presumably contradicted their beliefs about themselves as nice and trustworthy people, but they did it for a good reason, the $20. Now consider the group paid only $1. They lied about how enjoyable the task was, but looking around for a reason they cannot find one — what kind of person would lie to an innocent for only $1? So, the theory goes, they would experience dissonance between their actions and their beliefs and reduce this by adjusting their beliefs: they would come to believe that they actually did enjoy the boring task, and this is the reason that they told the accomplice that it was enjoyable. And, in fact, this is what happened.

At this point I want you to notice two things about cognitive dissonance. Firstly, it requires the existence of quite sophisticated mental machinery to operate. Not only do you need to have abstract beliefs about the world and yourself, you need to have some mechanism which detects when these beliefs are in contradiction with each other or with your actions, and which can (unconsciously) adjust selective beliefs to reduce this contradiction. The second thing to notice is that all this sophisticated mental machinery is postulated to exist from changes in behaviour, it is never directly measured. We don’t have any evidence that the change in attitudes really does result from an uncomfortable internal state (‘dissonance’) or that any such dissonance does result from an unconscious perception of the contradiction between beliefs and actions.

So, to the recent paper and to reductionism. The paper, by Louisa Egan and colleagues at Yale [ref below] is titled ‘The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance‘, and represents one kind of reductive strategy that psychologists might employ when considering a theory like cognitive dissonance. The experiments in the paper (summarised here and here) both involved demonstrating cognitive dissonance in two groups which do not have the sophisticated mental machinery normally considered necessary for cognitive dissonance — four year-old children, and monkeys. The reductionism of the paper, which the authors are quite explicit about, is to show that something like cognitive dissonance can occur in these two groups despite their lack of elaborate explicit beliefs. Unlike the students in Festinger’s classic experiment we can’t suppose that the children or the monkeys have thoughts about their thoughts in the same way that dissonance theory suggests.

To demonstrate this the authors employed an experimental method that could be used with subjects who did not have language, but would still allow them to observe the core phenomena of dissonance theory — the adjusting of attitudes in line with previous actions. The method worked like this. For each participant — be they a child or a monkey — the experimenters identified three items (stickers for the children, coloured M&M’s for the monkeys) which the participant preferred equally. In other words, if we call the three items A, B and C then the child or monkey liked all of the items the same amount. Then the experimenter forced the participating child or monkey to choose between two of the items (lets say A and B), so that they only got one. Next the child or monkey was offered a choice between item C and the item they did not choose before. So, if the first choice was between A and B and the participant chose A, then the next choice would be between B and C. What does dissonance theory predict for this kind of situation? Well, originally the three items are equally preferred — that’s how the items are selected. After someone is forced to make a first choice, between A and B, cognitive dissonance supposedly comes into play. The participant now has a reason to adjust their attitudes, and the way they do this is to downgrade their evaluation of their unchosen item. This will is known as being happy with what you got or “I must not like B as much, because I chose A”. So on the second choice (B vs C) the participants are more likely to choose C (more likely that chance, and more likely than a control group that goes straight to the ‘second’ choice). This prediction is exactly what the experimenters found, in both children and monkeys, and the startling thing is that this occurred despite the fact that we know that neither group was explicitly talking to themselves in the way I outline the dissonance theory prediction above (“I must not prefer B as much…etc”). Obviously something like cognitive dissonance can be produced by far simpler mental machinery than that usually invoked to explain it, conclude the experimenters. In this way, The paper is a call to reduce the level at which we try and explain cognitive dissonance.

How far should you go when trying to reduce the level of theory-complexity that is needed to explain something? Psychologists know the answer to this immediately — as far as possible! So when our happy band of psychologists got to discussing the the Egan paper it wasn’t long before someone came up with a new suggestion, a further reduction.

What if, it was suggested, there was nothing like dissonance going on in the Egan et al experiments? After all, there was no direct measurement of anxiety or discomfort, so why suppose that dissonance occurred at all — perhaps, if we can come up with a plausible alternative, we can do away with dissonance all together. Imagine this, see if you find it plausible: all of us, including monkeys and children, possess a very simple cognitive mechanism which saves us energy by remembering our choices and, when similar situations arise, applying our old choices to new situations, thus cutting down on decision time. That sounds plausible, and it would explain the Egan et al results if you accept that the result of the first, A vs B, decision is not just “choosing A” but is also “not choosing B”. So, when you get to the second choice, B vs C, you are more likely to choose C because you are simply re-applying the previous decision of “not choosing B”, rather than performing some complicated re-evaluation of your previously held attitudes a-la cognitive dissonance theory.

At this point in the discussion the psychologists in the room were feeling pretty pleased with themselves — we’d started out to with cognitive dissonance, reduced the level of complexity of mental processes required to explain the phenomenon (the Egan et al result) and then we’d taken things one step further and reduced the complexity of the phenomenon itself. At this point, we had a discussion of how widely the ‘decisional inertia’ reinterpretation could be applied to supposed cognitive dissonance phenomena. Obviously we’d have only been really satisfied with the reinterpretation if it applied more widely than just to this one set of experiments under consideration.

But further treats were in store. What if we could reduce things again, what if we could make even simpler the processes involved? We’d already started to convince ourselves that the experimental results could be produced by simple cognitive processes rather than complex cognitive processes, perhaps we could come up with a theory about how the experimental results can be produced without any cognitive processes at all! Now that would be really reductive.

Here’s what was suggested, not as definitely what was happening, but as a possibility for what could potentially be happening — and remember, if you are sharing a table with reductionists then they will prefer the simple theory by default because it is simpler. You will need to persuade them of the reasons to accept any complex theory before they abandon the simple one. Imagine that there is no change at all going on in the preferences of the monkeys and the children. Instead, imagine — o the simplicity! — that any participant in the experiment merely has a set of existing preferences. These preferences don’t even have to be mental, by preferences all I mean are consistent behaviours towards the items in question (stickers for the children, M&Ms for the monkeys). From here, via a bit of statistical theory, we can produce the experimental result with out any recourse to change in preferences, cognitive dissonance or indeed anything mental. Here’s how. Whenever you measure anything you get inaccuracies. This means that your end result reflects two things: the true value and some random ‘noise’ which either raises or lowers the result away from the true value. Now think about the Egan et al experiment. The experimenters picked three items, A, B and C, which the children or monkeys ‘preferred equally’, but what did this mean? It meant only that when the experimenters measured preference their result was the same for items A, B and C. And we know, as statistically-savvy psychologists, that those results don’t reflect the true preferences for A, B and C, but instead reflect the true preferences plus some noise. In reality, we can suppose, the children and monkeys actually do prefer each item differently from the others. Furthermore this might even be how they make their choice. So when they are presented with A vs B and choose A it may be because, on average, they preferred A all along. Now watch closely at what happens next. The experimental participants are given a second choice which depends on their first choice. If at first they chose A over B then the second choice is B vs C. But if they chose B over A then the second choice is A vs C. We know the results: they then choose C more than the unchosen option from the first choice, be it A or B, but now we have another theory as to why this might be. What could be happening is merely that, after the mistaken equivalence of A, B and C, the true preferences of the monkey or child are showing through, and the selective presentation of options on the second choice is making it look like they are changing their preferences in line with dissonance theory. Because the unchosen option from the first choice is more likely to have a lower true preference value (that, after all, may be why it was the unchosen option), it is consequently less likely to be preferred in the second choice, not because preferences have changed, but because it was less preferred all along. In the control condition, where no first choice is presented, their is no selective presentation of A and B and so the effect of the true values for preferences for A and B will tend to average out rather than produce a preferential selection of C.

Now obviously the next step with this theory would be to test if it is true, and check some details which might suggest how likely this is. Did Egan et al assess the reliability their initial preference evaluation? Did they test preferences and then re-test them at a later date to see if they were reliable? These and many other things could persuade us that such an explanation might or might not be very likely. The important thing, for now, is that we’ve come up with an explanation that seems as as simple as it could possibly be and still explain the experimental results.

For psychologists, reductionism is a value as well as a habit. We seek to use established simple features of the mind to explain as many things as possible before we get carried away with theories which rely on novel or complex possibilities. The reductionist position isn’t the right one in every situation, but it is an essential guiding principle in our investigations of how the mind works.

Link: to earlier post about how psychologists think.

Cross-posted at mindhacks.com

References

Egan L. C., Santos L.R., Bloom P. (2007). The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys. Psychological Science, 18, 978-983.

Festinger, L. and Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Festinger/”>Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-211.

Categories
academic psychology

How do psychologists think?

I believe that the important thing about psychology is the habits of thought it teaches you, not the collection of facts you might learn. I teach on the psychology degree at the University of Sheffield and, sure, facts are important here — facts about experiments, about the theories which prompted them and about the conclusions which people draw from them — but more important are the skills which you acquire during the process of learning the particular set of facts. Skills like finding information and articulating yourself clearly in writing. Those two things are common to all degrees. But lately I’ve been wondering what skills are most emphasised on a psychology degree? And I’ve been thinking that the answer to this is the same as to the question ‘how do psychologists think?’. How does the typical psychologist[*] approach a problem? I’ve been making a list and this is what I’ve got so far:

1. Critical — Psychologists are skeptical, they need to be convinced by evidence that something is true. Their default is disbelief. This relates to…

2. Scholarly — Psychologists want to see references. By including references in your work you do two very important things. Firstly you acknowledge your debt to the community of scholars who have thought about the same things you are writing about, and, secondly, you allow anyone reading your work to go and check the facts for themselves.

3. Reductionist — Psychologists prefer simple explanations to complex ones. Obviously what counts as simple isn’t always straightforward, and depends on what you already believe, but in general psychologists don’t like to believe in new mental processes or phenomena if they can produce explanations using existing processes or phenomena.

I am sure there are others. One of the problems with habits of thought is that you don’t necessarily notice when you have them. Can anyone offer any suggested additions to my incoate list?

Footnote:
* I’m using the label ‘psychologists’ here to refer to my kind of psychologists — academic psychologists. How and if what I say applies to the other kinds of psychologists (applied, clinical, etc) I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.

Cross-posted at mindhacks.com

Categories
politics

We live in small worlds

When I go to the kinds of places that I go to, I tend to see people I know. Sometimes I don’t know the people I meet in these places, but we find out we have mutual friends or acquiantances. Then we laugh and we say “Small world!”. Small worlds are nice. They make a large and sometimes hostile world seem friendly and controllable. Small worlds mean there is a handle on every person I meet — not a stranger, but a friend-of-a-friend I haven’t met yet. I like being surprised when I walk into a pub in a strange city and meet someone I know from university, or go on demonstration and meet someone I met at a party once. This kind of thing happens so often that it is sometimes really hard to believe that there are six billion individuals on the planet. If that was true, why do I keep bumping into the same five hundred or so?

There answer, of course, is one part our ability to ignore what we aren’t interested in (even people) and another part the ability to move in tremendously limited circles, circumscribed by habit, personality and class. The first factor means that we spend a lot of time not noticing the fifty people in a bar, say, who we don’t know, and far more noticing the one person we do. The second factor means that our choices of location are very very far from random. The shops we use, the evenings we spend, the paths we walk are patterned, always and pervasively, by the kind of person we are. Because of this patterning, we tend to run into a circuit of people who are like us — people with the same or overlapping orbits of habits, preferences and class.

The two factors combine when we manage to ignore our own influence in determining who we meet ‘by chance’. Even in foreign cities our habits, preferences and class will make selections on where we go, allowing us to almost unconsciously ignore certain options (“that restaurant looks tacky”, “that restaurant looks pretentious”, etc) so that when we arrive in a place that we tell ourselves was completely random, we are in fact already set up to bump into other people who are like ourselves, and hence have those small world meetings that we love so much.

The dark side of the small world is when we allow our choices to colour who we meet so strongly that we stop noticing that other kinds of people exist. If we never meet people with other attitudes or backgrounds then we lose a contrast against which we can gauge our own attitudes and background. Suddenly the whole world is full of people just like us (vegans, libertarians, motorist, whatever). From here it is hard to avoid self-righteousness and then irrelevance.

Categories
links

Links for nov 2007

Categories
quotes

The Technologizing of the Word


Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three-hundred years

Water Ong (1982, 2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge

Categories
misc

If you see anything unusual

leunig cartoon

Categories
links

Links for oct 07

Categories
technical notes

Fasthosts are money-grabbing censorous bullies

I moved my hosting to positive internet” because my previous hosts, fasthosts, are money-grabbing, censorous bullies. There’s a long story to this, but the advice you need to know is this:

If you have a fasthosts contract, cancel it immediately. Of course, you can always renew it as the expiry date approaches, but if you don’t cancel then you risk stupid fines if — like me — you lose you credit card and forget to update you details with them

There’s details about this which I won’t bore you with. Basically, I got a reminder email a week before they were due to take a year’s payment for hosting, and it took me a week to get round to answering it. By then, it was too late and they’d charged me an additional 30 quid for being late to paying them for the privilage of another year’s hosting. 30 quid for a week delay after a single reminder email is too much, and I complained bitterly but just met an immoveable wall. So I posted about it on my blog , including the advice to cancel any existing contracts, and that’s where the second take home message comes in:

Fasthosts retain the right to take down your site without warning, and without appeal, if you post anything that they don’t like. With me they refused to discuss the matter, refused to show how what I’d posted was against their terms of service, refused to discuss what part of my complaint post against them was ‘unsuitable’. Conclusion: fasthosts have no respect for freedom of expression, especially when it comes to criticism of them and possibly on other topics too

I had a long and futile email correspondence with them about this. I didn’t make a big fuss about it, partly because they had all the cards, and partly because I was busy with more important things, which I wanted my website to be operational for. Now fasthosts weren’t a bad host, technically, as far as these things go, but their complete lack of respect for me as a customer, and for some of the values I think hosting should be about (freedom of speech), mean that I couldn’t risk keeping my hosting with them. I knew that when the next thing went wrong I would meet exactly the same response from them: “lump it and shut up.”

I moved to Positive mostly because they offered free hosting to badscience, but so far I have found their service reliable and their support excellent — both competant and friendly.

Categories
books

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart

Cover of “No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice”

I have been seriously impressed by Tom Slee’s book “No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice”. It’s an accessible guide to economic game theory and an impassioned critique of market popularism. Slee is obviously an activist, but also has a measured, academic approach to economic theory. What is great is that he uses standard economic theory and simple illustrations to make a case for the necessity of collective action for solving our problems. It shows how far MarketThink dominates popular discourse that such a minimal plea comes across as radical. “No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart” is a lively and intelligent guide to how good individual choices can lead to regretable outcomes, and the ideas in it are essential tools for intellectual self-defence.

Book website www.web.net/~tslee/

Blog of the book whimsley.typepad.com/

Categories
Uncategorized

the wire-mesh mother of methodology


It might be the case that, while exploratory factor analysis isn’t a generally reliable tool for causal inference, for some reason it happens to work in psychological testing. To believe this, I would want to see many cases where it had at least contributed to important discoveries about mental structure which had some other grounds of support. These are scarce. The five-factor theory of personality, as I mentioned above, is probably the best candidate, and it fails confirmatory factory analysis tests. As Clark Glymour points out, lesion studies in neuropsychology have uncovered a huge array of correlations among cognitive abilities, many of them very specific, none of which factor analyses predicted, or even hinted at. Similarly, congenital defects of cognition, like Williams’s Syndrome, drive home the point that thought is a biological process with a genetic basis (if that needs driving). But Williams’s Syndrome is simply not the kind of thing anyone would have expected from factor analysis, and for that matter a place where the IQ score, while not worthless, is not much help in understanding what’s going on.

…

The psychologist Robert Abelson has a very nice book on Statistics as Principled Argument where he writes that “Criticism is the mother of methodology”. I was going to say that such episodes cast that in doubt, but it occurred to me that Abelson never says what kind of mother. To combine Abelson’s metaphor with Harlow’s famous experiments on love in monkeys, observational social science has been offered a choice between two methodological mothers, one of the warm and cuddly and familiar and utterly un-nourishing (the old world of linear regression, analysis of variance, factor analysis, etc.), the other cold, metallic, hurtful and actually able to help materially (statistical methods which are at least not definitely unable to do what people want). Not surprisingly, social scientists, being primates, overwhelmingly go for the warm fuzzies. This, to me, indicates a deep failure on the part of the statistical profession to which I am otherwise proud to belong. It is never a good sign when your discipline’s knowledge is the wire-mesh mother all the baby monkeys avoid if at all possible. Less metaphorically, the perpetuation of these fallacies decade after decade shows there is something deeply amiss with the statistical education of social scientists.

Cosma Shalizi, ‘g, a statistical myth’

Categories
quotes

Eternal Recurrence, The Heaviest Burden


What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again — and you with it, speck of dust!” — Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you experienced a a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him, “You are a God and never have I heard anything more divine!” If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you, the question in all and everything: “do you want this again and again, times without number?” would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well would you have to be disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than this eternal sanction and seal?

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by R.J. Hollingdale

Categories
technical notes

If you can see this post…

…then you are looking at a page hosted by positive internet

Categories
politics

A global roar

It would be a wonderful thing if a million people around the world voiced their support for the Burmese democracy movement: Stand with the Burmese Protesters. Here’s the bumf from their petition


Hi, have you heard about the crisis in Burma?

Burma is ruled by one of the worst military dictatorships in the world. Last month Buddhist monks and nuns began marching and chanting prayers to call for democracy. The protests spread and hundreds of thousands of Burmese people joined in — but they’ve been brutally attacked by the military regime.

I just signed a petition calling on Burma’s powerful ally China and the UN security council to step in and pressure Burma’s rulers to stop the killing. The petition has exploded to over 500,000 signatures in a few days and is being advertised in newspapers around the world, delivered to the UN Security Council, and broadcast to the Burmese people by radio. We’re trying to get to 1 million signatures this week, please sign below and tell everyone!

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/s.php

Thank you so much for your help!

Categories
intellectual self-defence science

The choice of facts

Robert Park’s article ‘The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science is a result of his attempt to help judges faced with expert witnesses making scientific arguments. He has attempted to come up with heuristics of bad science: ‘indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse’

Here they are:

  • 1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
  • 2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
  • 3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
  • 4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
  • 5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
  • 6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
  • 7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

It’s a good list. Sadly, however, telling the difference between sense and nonsense is never going to be easy. Even the best of us, when we get out of our field, can feel at a loss. It feels to me that your position on the classic controversial science debates (global warming, alternative medicine, creationism) is utterly removed from the facts either way, but instead depends on the pre-theoretical commitments you have made. So, for example, a preference for conventional vs alternative medicine, or creation science vs evolution, is in fact impossible to refute from within the frame of reference of the person with that preference (this will be obvious to any creationist who has tried talking to an evolutionist, or vice-versa). Rather than a choice which can be faulted on facts, it is really a case of choices about what kinds of information define facts. All views of the world have biases in them, the distinction between a scientist and a pseudoscientist is not about which each believes to be true, but rather about what set of systemmatic biases each has decided to place their faith in.

Categories
links

Links sept 07

Categories
politics

Boycott Politics

Boycotts have the alure of radicalism, they give a false impression of action through inaction. Really they are a mode of political action which has been colonised by consummerism. The individual consumer choice is seen as the locus of political operation, and it becomes harder and harder to convieve of political action in any other form. It’s a seductive view in these times. If to be is to shop what could be more radical than to deny yourself something?

Boycotts allow us the pretence of taking a stand when really they are an abdication of responsibility. If something is wrong, then by all means avoid doing it yourself — but recognise that as long as the choice is there to be made, your own abstention is nothing more than a sitting on the sidelines while the tide of the battle goes to those offering the choice.

Contrary to this, to not boycott something whilst campaigning for its abolition is to assert your right and your obligation to demand change. I’ve little respect for medieval monks who believed that outside the monastry was a state of damnation and decay, with final judgement immenent, and whose response was to wall themselves into their monastries and pray for their own salvation. The boycott alone as a political act is just as selfish, just as mistakenly righteous, just as mislead.

I gave a speech once at a debate against the death penalty and the opposition speaker said that if i didn’t like it I could leave the country. I campaigned against an academic publishers involvement in the arms trade and was told that if i didn’t like the arms trade i should quit my job at the university. So here again we have the idea of politics as individual consumer choice, an idea which colonises the debating space. By keeping my job at the university, by engaging with the publishers both professionally – by publishing – and morally – by campaigning for them to drop their arms trade links, i asserted my engagement with them and the legitimacy of my claims on their behaviour.

I’ll repeat, if something is wrong then there is a moral need to avoid consuming it — i wouldn’t buy candles made from human fat, for example. But also i wouldn’t rest while candles made of human fat were available for sale, and i wouldn’t believe that merely refusing to purchase them myself was an adequate or appropriate response.

Categories
events technical notes

Comments off, tom off

Sorry folks, i’m turning off the comments on the site for a little while. There has been a massive increase in comment spam – a veritable whirling shitstorm and I’m going to batten down the hatches until the spam-catching software has caught up.

In other news, I’m in Bristol until sunday and the Oxford monday until wednesday, so drop me a line if you’re about or there’s anything you think I should see there.

Technical note WordPress plugin for turning off comments here

Update Comments back on now. Plugin appears to have fairly major flaw of preventing the user from accessing the blog at all, which was okay while I didn’t want to use it, and prevented me getting lots of comment spam, but isn’t a long-term solution

Categories
quotes

Quote #210


There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin, close of the first edition of The Origin of Species

Categories
quotes

Quote #209

Non-violent struggle offers weak people the strength which they otherwise would not have. The spirit becomes important and no gun can silence that. Whether the Ogoni people will be able to withstand the rigours of the struggle is yet to be seen. Again, their ability to do so will point the way of peaceful struggle to other peoples on the African continent. It is therefore not to be underrated.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Categories
quotes

Quote #208

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money, so long as you have got it.

Edwin Way Teale, quoted by Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World

Categories
books politics systems

Questions for economists

Tim Harford wrote ‘The Undercover Economist’ and also writes the ‘Dear Economist’ column for the Financial Times. His book is excellent — a very readable introduction to economic theory and how it applies to various facets of everyday life. I was going to write him a letter, but then I found out that he’d sold half a million copies of his book and so, reckoning that he’d be too busy to write back to me, I am posting my thoughts here. This is partly for my own benefit as a note-to-self and partly because I’d be very happy to get answers from anyone or everyone on the questions I ask. Useful references are an acceptable substitute for wordy explanations.

Dear Undercover Economist,

On development — can everyone be rich? Won’t there always have to be someone to work the fields / clean the toilets / serve the coffee? Technologists answer: automatisation will remove much of life’s drudgery. Environmentalist retort: resources put limits on growth. Economists: imagine a world where every economy is ‘developed’. In that world we would expect to find people are wealthy according to their talents (because talents define scarcity). My question : in that world, what will the utterly talentless be paid to do with their time? Presumably we’ll still be forcing them to clean toilets, because the toilet-cleaning robots will be too expensive (they need to be in order to pay the wages of the very-expensive-to-hire toilet-cleaning-robot designers).

Information asymmetry: Akerlof (1970) has a description of how information asymmetry can prevent a viable market existing. Harford’s discussion credits to information asymmetry the reason why you can’t get a decent meal in tourist areas, but I am wondering if the effects are far more wide reaching that this. Big organisations will have an information advantage over individual consumers (on some things), as will anyone who devotes their entire economic energy to a single domain (eg selling avocados) over someone who is time poor (eg the typical avocado buyer). Coupled with a dynamic economic environment, couldn’t those with informational advantage effectively manipulate those with informational disadvantage? In other words, i’d be willing to bet that in a static market even an extremely informationally-deprived / cognitively challenged agent will work out the best deal, given enough time. But if the best deal keeps changing (and those with the information advantage keep changing it to suit their ends) the chances of the individual agent aren’t so good. File under benefits of collectivisation / market failure?

Efficiency of the market leads to loss of diversity (because all inefficient solutions are squeezed out). Diversity has it’s own value, both in system robustness (see ecosystems) and in terms of human experience (belonging to a specific place, variety being the spice of life, etc). So how do we incorporate the value of this diversity into market systems? I would submit that diversity is an example of something that exists above the single-agent view of things — is an example of an emergent phenomenon (see below). (Previously on idiolect Why is capitalism boring?)

Markets don’t have foresight. Do free marketeers admit that this is one of the functions of government? For example imagine agents who like to consume some finite resource. Presumably a ‘free market’ will be the most efficient way to organise their consumption. Efficient consumption of the resouce leads to its disappearence. Then what? In the Undercover Economist (p237) Harford says that in markets ‘mistakes cannot happen’ because any experiments with resources stay small scale. I would submit that while this is true at the micro level, with respect to efficiency — in other words, I agree that markets tend to efficiency — this is not true at the macro level, with respect to whole-system health.

An objection to this is that markets do have foresight because the individual agents have foresight – so they will incorporate into their cost function the anticipated future (so, eg, anticipated future resource availability). But what is agents do not have the information, or motivation to worry about the future? Does my concern just resolve down to the existence, or not, of the tragedy of the commons? Perhaps. I think key is the existence of a discontinuity between agent-level information and collective-level information; ie the issue is really about emergence, which is what the tragedy of the commons is really a specific example of.

Side note: if you are a market economist you are a de facto fan of emergence. Aggregate effects which emerge from mass individual action = emergence. Disconnection between individual goals (eg profit) and collective outcomes (efficiency). Etc. Economics is interesting precisely because their are non-obvious relations between agents and outcomes.

Side note the second: there is an essential similarity between economics and cognitive psychology – a focus on information processing. Further, market economics recognises the power of distributed information processing, as does the connectionist school of cognitive psychology. This is the reason I talk about agents, rather than consumers. I believe that the same principles will not just apply to the economic and social sciences, but also to the social sciences (remember Minksy’s “Society of Mind”). A question: can we usefully apply the idea of a distributed, free, ‘informational economy’ to undestanding neural coding? (Remember Glimcher’s “Neuroeconomics”)

Categories
elsevier

DSEi 2007

This tit-bit from the Observer on sunday

n June, Reed agreed to sell the business. DSEI generates around £25m for the publishing giant and is thought to be worth double that. Four organisations have expressed strong interest in the business, though neither their identities nor nationalities are known.

DSEi starts tomorrow (tuesday)

Categories
links

Links for 5-Sept-07

Categories
quotes

Ethical consumerism


Ethical consumerism is mood music, rather than a reengineering of the economy in a meaningful way. We’ve got to get away from the passivity of being defined as consumers, and start making things happen

Andrew Simms, quoted in the Triodos Bank newsletter (thanks Harry)

Categories
quotes

Apply to climate change, mutatis mutandis

From a Crooked Timber discussion of WWII and British politicians’ view of the possible end of civilisation:

A possibly apocryphal moment, which the ungossipy Lukacs does not treat us to, has Attlee pointing out to Greenwood that if Churchill loses to the Tory grandees civilisation in Europe will be gone, Greenwood retorting that if so, “it won’t be our fault” and Attlee responding “I don’t want to go down in history as someone whose fault it wasn’t when civilisation was destroyed”

Categories
quotes

Judge not, for without them you would as bad, or worse

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Last lines

Categories
events

Come and play

Who would like to come with me to any of the following events?

  • Told By An Idiot’s Casanova @ The West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. I can definitely make the 12th, 18th, 19th or 20th of September, and am open to offers on other days.
  • Jim White @ Social, Nottingham – 12 October
  • The Battle of Ideas @ Royal College of Art, London – 27th & 28th of October
  • New Model Army play Sheffield Corporation!! 18th of November
  • Mercy and Grand: The Tom Waits Project @ West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds – 28th of November
    • Categories
    misc

    The biggest lie?

    What is the biggest lie you could tell?

    Categories
    quotes

    Quote #204

    The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and woman prepared to make fools of themselves

    Julian in The Children of Men (1992) by P.D. James

    Categories
    intellectual self-defence science

    statistical self-defence

    How to lie with Statistics is a classic. A ‘sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive’, says the author Darrell Huff. Why teach the world how to lie with statistics? Because, he says, ‘crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defence’.

    The bulk of the book is worked examples of classic statistical slights-of-hand: graphs with missing sections on the axes, different kinds of averages, post-hoc observation of correlations. What I want to do here is just review the last chapter ‘How to talk back to statistics’, which gives some rules of thumb on how to ‘look a phoney statistic in the eye and face it down’ whilst recognising ‘sound and usable data in the wilderness of fraud’. Huff gives the reader five simple questions with which to arms themselves, which i summarise and then provide some commentary on at the end.

    Huff’s five questions with which to arm yourself against statistics:

    1. Who says so?

    Can we suspect deliberate or unconscious bias in the originator of the statistic? Huff recommends looking for an “O.K Name” – e.g. a university – as some slim promise of reliability. Second to this he recommends being careful to distinguish the originator of the ‘data’ from the originator of the conclusion or intepretation.

    2. How Does He Know?

    Is the sample biased? representative? large enough?

    3. What’s Missing?

    Statistics given without a measure of realiability are ‘not to be taken very seriously’. What is the relevant base rates / appropriate comparison figure? Do averages disguide important variations?

    4. Did somebody change the subject?

    E.g. More reported cases are not the same as more cases, what people say they do (or will do) is not the same as what they actually do (or will do), association (correlation) is not causation.

    5. Does it make sense?

    Is the figure spuriously accuracy? Convert percentages to real numbers and convert real numbers to percentages, compare both with your intuitions.

    Commentary by tom

    Who says so?

    Two things interest me about the recommendation to base judgements of credibility, even if just in part, on authority. Firstly, by doing this Huff is conceeding that we are simply not able to make a thorough independent evaluation of the facts ourselves. This is in contradiction to the idea that science is Best because if we doubt something we can check it out for ourselves. The pragmatic response to this is obviously ‘well, you won’t check out everything, but you could check out any individual thing if you wanted’. Is this much consolation in a world where everyone, including the authorities, are assaulted by too much information to check out personally? Scientific authority then becomes a matter of which social structures, which use which truth-heuristics, you trust rather than a matter of direct proof (“it says so in the bible!” verses “it says so in a respectable academic paper!”?).

    The second thing that interests me is that the advice to rely on authorities becomes problemmatic for those who either don’t know who the authorities are, or who distrust the usual authorities. What proportion of the population knows that the basic unit of scientific authority is the peer-reviewed journal paper? You can see that if you don’t know this you immediately lose a vital heuristic for evaluating the credibility of research you are told about. In a similar vein, even experts in one domain may be ignorant of the authorities in another domain — leading to similar problems with judging credibility. If you know about but simply don’t trust the established authorities you are similarly lost at sea when trying to evaluate incoming evidence (a reason, I’ll bet, for the mixed quality of information available from, variously, conspiracy theorists and alternative medicine practicioners).

    How Does He Know?

    This is perhaps the most important question you can ask in my opinion. Often all that is required to dispell the superficially-convincing fog that accompanies some statistic or factoid is to ask How did they find out? What would actually be involved in gathering that information? Could it possibly be correct? For example, ‘if you die in your dream, you really die’ How do they know?! Dead people aren’t exactly available for comment.

    What’s Missing?

    Knowing what is missing is the hardest trick, in my opinion. It’s a mark both of expertise and of genuine intelligence to be able to pick up on what isn’t being said, to notice when the intepretation of what you’re being told could be fundamentally altered by something you aren’t being told (because, of course, this involes imaging a bunch of counter-factuals). Outside the realm of statistics the idea of frame-analysis speaks to this idea of making invisible what isn’t talked about.

    Did somebody change the subject?

    Does it make sense?

    Both good checks to carry out when challenged by a statistic. It is unfortunate that statistics seem to have an inherant air of authority – a kind of wow factor – and these questions are good tools with which to start dismantling it. I think this wow factor is because statistics seem to imply rigourous, unbiased, comprenhensive investigation, even though they may in fact arise from nothing of the sort. In the same way that evolution will produce imitators who have the colouration of being poisonous, or whatever, without actually bothering to have to produce the poison, and most social situations will attract free-riders who want to get the benefits without paying the costs, so there is an evolution of rhetoric strategies to include things which carry the trappings of credible information without going through the processes which are actually causal in making the information from these sources credible. So we get statistics because everybody knows science uses statistics, we get figures quoted to the second decimal place when the margin of error is a hundred times larger than this level of accuracy, and we get nonsensical arguments supported using citations, even though the studies or works cited are utterly without credibility, because having citations in your arguments is an established form of credible arguments which is easy to reproduce for any argument, whatever the level of credibility.

    Reference: Darrell Huff (1954) How to Lie with Statistics