The Heuristic in the Bias

In the art of annoying people with science, nothing is as effective as pointing out cognitive biases. Bringing out the Confirmation Bias in particular is unlikely to endear you to friends and colleges. But you usually get away with the point – there is almost always more research to be done – unless someone figures out that you already came equipped with the idea that your opponent would use the confirmation bias, and then choose the evidence that seemed to confirm that idea. The discussion that follows can take up a substantial part of the seminar, and effectively hide the fact that you haven’t done the required reading. Do try this at home.

To be caught exhibiting any kind of bias is usually held to be a bad thing, not only in science. But, as Kahneman, Tversky and Slovic (among others) points out: biases are heuristics. The are usually very useful indeed. It is in the nature of a bias/heuristics that it may lead us astray, but practically any epistemic strategy or habit is bound to lead astray in some cases. We usually solve this by having other strategies to keep the first in check. And so on. Peer-review is one such strategy, not fool-proof. Democracy might spring to mind, to.

The term ”confirmation bias” was coined, I believe, by the psychologist Peter Wason, but the notion is way older than that. My favorite wording comes from Laurence Sterne’s eternally ahead of its, and any, time novel ”Tristram Shandy”:

It is the nature of a hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by everything you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.

”This is of great use”. I used this paragraph as one of many mottoes for the second part of my dissertation. I certainly did pick the evidence that seemed to confirm my theory (that pleasure and value is very closely related indeed). But the point is that I did not conceive of a theory, derive the consequences and then do the researach. The project was much more preliminary than that (still is). I wanted to find out what, if anything, hedonism was true about. What are the facts, and can they be put together in a coherent, sense-making way to form a theory, still recognisable as ”hedonism”?  At this stage, at least, confirmation bias is a very useful strategy.

If you like it maybe you should write a dissertation about it?

I’m mostly useless at cocktail-parties. To engage, exchange pleasantries, gossip and general observations and then move on goes against every instinct I have. As a sort of debutante, I thought that my role at social occasions should be that of the salon-communist – to provoke, insult and amuse the other guests with my wild and controversial ideas, ultimately with the function to reassure them that the company they kept was a socially and intellectually diverse one, and that they were very tolerant indeed. I should be endured. I was not.

Unwilling to change to pleasant observations about trivial matters my next, and current, strategy was to identify special interests. Their ”Geekdoms”, in a word. People, I decided, usually have some obscure special interest that they long to talk about at length, but believe will bore others. I believed that people’s most interesting ideas and complex reasoning moved around these special interests. I also believed that when no one wanted to talk about what I wanted to talk about, my best bet was to identify what interested them in the same way that my interests interested me. I was starting work on my dissertation, and wanted to identify what others would write their dissertation about, if they were given the opportunity. The idea was that everyone has at least one dissertation, as well as a novel, in them.

Always in need of over-justification, I had the further idea that bringing out these special interest and showing that they could be used to ones advantage in a social context would help keep these interests alive. Insofar as people grow boring, it is because they haven’t been encouraged to stay interesting. The social ineptitude associated with the nerd has always struck me as a terrible mistake, based on the inability to cope with knowledge. Knowledge management should be as much of a thing as Anger management is.

What Modesty Forbids

I’m sure every reader has his/her way of working her/his way through a book or paper with the help of a pen, underlining and making notes in the margin. The ”notes in the margin”, for me, has settled on a quite restricted number of expressions. There’s ”qb”, of course, for ”question begging”, there is the exclamation mark (which I hardly ever use otherwise) for remarkable statements, there are shorthands for missing premisses, spurious reasonings. and so on. There is the occasional ”good point”, when something strikes me as being just that. And the ”Exactly”, when someone makes a good point with which I agree. Finally, the ”Exactly. Damn it”, when the point is good, I agree, and it is so essential to my own argument that I curse the fact that someone else got to publish it first. (These things tend to happen when your views are true and interesting.)

This happened to me constantly while reading Leonard D Katz’ absolutely superb dissertation ”Hedonism as metaphysics of mind and value” (and yes, my title is a bit of a hommage). In fact, I might as well have put a sticker with ”Exactly. Damn it” on the cover. (His practically book-length on pleasure in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is simply amazing, without doubt the best piece of philosophical writing there is on the subject, and the fact that things still get written about pleasure without reference to either of those two texts is nothing short of a scandal. (Stop it David, you are getting all worked up and excited, and that’s a shame).)

And now it happened again, in the work of Sharon A Hewitt. The most striking resemblance of my view and hers is our claim that goodness and badness are basically phenomenal properties: the experiences of pleasure and displeasure. ”Feeling good” is, in fact precisely that: having that feeling which goodness consists in. I would like to praise her work, because it is really quite brilliant, but it seems to me that modesty forbids it. We have not been in contact while working on our respective dissertations, so either there is a common source (and Katz’ work might very well be it. That, or C.I. Lewis’ ”An analysis of knowledge and valuation”), or we have some sort of snail-telegraph thing going.

Stop reading, start writing

My first all too serious philosophical essay was on Heidegger (well, actually, I did a number on the ”positionality” concept in the work of Sartre earlier still, but it would take an insane amount of scholarly obsession for anyone to ever dig that up). The nicest thing said about was that it is ”not as incomprehensible as these things usually are”. The literature I discussed, I found at the University Library, actually going through a number of philosophy journals. I had a computer at the time, which was just barely hooked up to the internet, but didn’t use it for literature searches, just for writing and the occasional email. I spent a lot of time thinking about the subject of my essay, and used a very limited amount of sources.

A year or so later, while working on a different essay, I discovered JSTOR, and for about a month and a half, the printer didn’t get a rest. It suddenly dawned on me that everything interesting had been written about, at length, from almost every perspective, and the goal to find a theoretical position that was not currently occupied, and then to occupy it, suddenly struck me as much more difficult than I’d imagined. I spent the next few years reading more, too much probably, and thinking and writing less.

I used to do all my best thinking during walks and while running (or derogatorily: ”jogging”). Usually in very dull environments, not to distract from the thinking. Then I got an iPod, and started to listen to lectures, podcasts and audiobooks during those walks and runnings. (iTunes university has some great stuff, the podcasts from Nature, and from TED and the RSA are excellent. BBC 4’s ”thinking allowed” and ”in our time” just have me in stitches). And instead of thinking about what I’ve just heard, I tended to listen to another lecture, podcast or audiobook. Similarly with papers, even books. Before I start working on this chapter, I argued, I just need to read this paper, or that book. One wouldn’t like to be caught out ignorant, now, would one? No, one would not.

The all too great availability of other people’s writing and thinking made me quite heavy on the consumer side of science and philosophy, and much less of a producer. It is, of course, a great thing to learn, and to listen, but in order to become a philosopher, it is necessary to start doing it for yourself. To actually not care, for a bit, whether someone has written that same thing before, and been more well read while doing so.

My dissertation took longer than it should have, and I know people who have been, and still are, in that state where they just can’t seem to finish their texts. Partly, I believe, for this reason. They are excellent, well-read consumers and thoughtful, accomplished critics, but seems almost to have forgotten how to actually do philosophy. (The dominance of ”critical” philosophy among published articles is a testament that this tendency is very common indeed). The kind of second-order thinking were you are constantly reflecting on how what you are writing relates to what other people have written tends to stand in the way of confident, genuinely original and interesting work. At some point, you just have to get out of reading mode, and enter writing mode.

Pleasure is very good indeed

Hardly anyone denies that pleasure is good. ”Because it is pleasant” is an excellent answer to the question ”why do it?”, even if some people find it a slightly to self-indulgent one. But so what? Pleasure is good, but so are a lot of things. Justice is great. Knowledge is just excellent. Excellence to has a lot going for it. And True Friendship and Self-knowledge and Health and Success are all good. At least we talk as if they are, and a good theory of goodness, or of any common sensical concept, should respect the objects that we group under the term that expresses that concept. Right?

If we respect our actual evaluations, then, something like pluralism seems to be right.

We could perhaps think up a concept that would cover the things we usually value, and such a concept would probably chime well with our ordinary language (good luck finding such a concept that cover an uncontroversial set of things, however). But when I say that Pleasure is Good, I say something slightly different from when I say that friendship, knowledge or excellence is good. Pleasure has some more intimate relationship to goodness than any of those things. Pleasure is not only one of the things that we value, it is the basic means by which we value. To experience pleasure is already to pass an evaluative ”judgment” on whatever object that happens to be saliently in our mind at that moment.

I believe this means that pleasure should be given a foundational role in the theory of value. The value that accrues to it is much more fundamental than the ”value” we might want to assign to other objects. The scope of the common sensical concept ”value” has probably evolved to extend beyond its humble origin in hedonic processes, but its origin is still relevant to that concept. Pleasure, I say, is not only good, it is very good indeed.

changing preferences

A number of things are said to happen when you become a parent. One of these is the curious event of changing preferences: an unprecedented, radical and rather immediate switch in interests and priorities which, so it is said, is impossible to imagine beforehand. The last bit is usually added by people who are already parents, and with more than a detectable  hint of smugness. This smugness is earned by not sleeping very well.

(Topic for an another blogpost: the inflated case for first-hand  experience. When people say things like ”you had to be there” I often react ”Well, then you must not be telling it very well”. Not to their face, obviously. Also: don’t say ”this town is too small for me”, it has the metaphorical implication that you are in some important sense bigger than the people for which the town in question is not too small. Rather, say ”I’m not capable of flourishing in this environment”. Or, come to think of it: don’t say that either. You might get a short, sharp visit from the smack-fairy).

What’s interesting about changing preferences is that they muck rational decisions up a bit. If a travesty of the classical model of a rational person is correct, and a rational person is one who acts in accordance with his/her preferences: How can we make the decision that involves changing those preferences rationally? What preference is satisfied by my creating new preferences? It might be a meta-preference: for having preferences that are more easily satisfied, for instance. If you have a preference for chinese food, and there is no good place for chinese food where you live, and you wont move (what? I question your devotion to chinese food, sir) there is a case for you giving up on this preference. At least if you take the preference to be contingent on its own existence, i.e. if there are no preference independent reasons to care for chinese food.

If the change in preferences brought about by having a kid is radical and unforeseeable, it becomes even more difficult to make the decision rationally: you don’t know whether the preferences created will be easy to satisfy, nor what they will involve when it comes to changing your preferences for things that you know genuinely care about. In fact, you might even loose the preference (meta- or not) that made it seem like a rational decision in the first place.

Comparable decisions are to start caring about a sports-team or to use drugs. In particular the latter is comparable, since it has a tendency to consume other preferences. (The drug case is different insofar that it is very rarely a good idea).

What adds complexity to the child-case is that not only do you change your own preferences: you create a new subject of preferences and those are in a very real sense unpredictable in the long run.

Let the record show that so far, there has been a clear net gain in preference satisfaction, notably among the unforeseen ones (such as rekindling my interest for preference changes), and a non-significant loss of previous, important ones.

december is the blackest month

When we were first dating, my wife to be gave me a box of home-made fortune cookies with personal messages (one of them suggested that I should get a drivers license. Five years later, I finally got around to it. Another simply said ”Heart of Gold, Brain of Jam”. She was on to me at the start). A stream of thoughtful, witty and useful gifts later (she converted me to mac, for instance), the beginning of december brought around  one of the nicest yet: the Liquorice Christmas Calender.

I’ve gone on record declaring my devotion to liquorice, listing it as one of my main sources of pleasure. I also have a  thing for weekday-labeled socks. Alice combined these two things so that each day of december, there is a weekday sock stuffed with delicious liquorice of some variety I haven’t tried before. All have been interesting, and has helped me define my preferences, and some have been just fantastically good eatin´.There is a specialist shop Stockholm which I have yet to visit, but when I do, I now know just what to look for. (I think I’ll wait a bit, though, making january ”liver failure awareness month”).

I try to reciprocate, of course, and hope to have covered some distance by dedicating my dissertation to her.

Calender of socks

The Liquorice Stuffing

when does it get interesting?

We just returned home with our newborn child, who shall remain nameless (but not for long). And, in a very Carrie-like trope indeed: it got me thinking. (Carrie of New York single life fame, not the gym-hall massacre one. Or the one hilariously falling over in the opening credits of ”little house on the praire”): At what age does a human being get interesting? Every now and then I come across opinions, and decided preferences (and you know those interest me no end), in this matter. Most frequently the (faux)controversial opinion is that kids are tedious and uninteresting at least up until the point they develop thoroughly thought through political views and a natural distaste for their parents. Also, they should be able to help you with your computer.

Others require less. Capacity for speech, for instance, and some creative thinking/acting to boot. This preference is guided by wanting a human being to be treatable as an equal, and the relevant equality is one of thought, rather than of bowel movement or need for constant attention. Four-year olds will do for these people. There is a trend in moral psychology to make a big deal out of the stage where kids start to distinguish conventional from non-conventional wrongs, which is usually a bit earlier still and that certainly is an interesting age.

Infants, on the other hand, are often perceived as poop/sleep/crying machines that have the mild added value of smelling quite nice. (Young, single intellectuals – the group I’ve spent the larger portion my life belonging to, and thus have some inside knowledge of – have a hard time realising how they could possibly enjoy the company of, and thus care for, people of this miniscule sort.) They may be cute, and they may evoke some positive emotions, but interesting? Not as such.

I beg to differ (from the people I just kind of made up). Infants exhibit complex behaviors, and while it might seem random beyond the bare essentials, learning does takes place. The study of infants needs to take into account what they actually control. One particular interesting study used the baby’s ability to change the speed with which it sucked on a pacifier to reveal its preferences. We don’t need  to assume fullblown intentions in order to identify interesting behaviors and the beginning of individual differences. To me, at least, the Little One has been interesting from the start.

One might, but I wont

I consider banning the phrase ”one might argue that…” from all my future writings. Since these writings have a better than average chance of being writings in philosophy, this ban would be the equivalent of Perec’s ban of the letter ‘e’ from that novel you know you ought to have read already.
You see, it’s such a useful phrase, and it rids you of all responsibility for anything that follows. No referee, however anonymonous, is likely to insert the comment ”no, one might not”. Since philosophy consist to such a large extent of stating propopositions to which one does not assent, dispensing with this trope is perhaps masochistic of me, and might well prove near impossible, but I believe it would be an improving exercise.

Afternoon wine

The notoriously reclusive philosopher D Brax has recently granted a few interviews to a select number of magazines. Being that Pynchonesque creature, I can tell you, means that I’m not that accustomed to dealing with photographers, and their various means of conveying meaning. Thus I found myself quite perplexedly (is that a word? Let’s go ahead and pretend it’s a word) holding a glass of red wine in the middle of the afternoon. You see, this being a wine magazine, holding said receptacle while smiling would somehow get the message across. The perplexedness (word? Let’s say it is) has yet to subside, as you will no doubt see yourself from this picture. Amazingly not a montage.