Nominative determinism

”Hey!” someone with the authority to command my attention wrote to me today ”You should take a look at this book” and then there was a link to ”Law and the Brain” by authors Semir Zeki and – wait for it – Oliver Goodenough. I congratulate you, Sir, on a fabulous name. Those, ”good enough”, are also the two last words of my dissertation. As if the title and the splendid collaborator and the recommendation weren’t enough the get me to read the book, some mechanism of nominative determinism seems to drive me towards it as well.

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 are 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.

How do I get happy?

If you want to sell a book about happiness research/positive psychology, or anything even remotely related to that area, you better be prepared to answer this question. Or at least claim that you are, and then subtly change the subject and hope that no-one notices.

Basically, the answer is this: find out what happiness is, and then, you know, go get that. .

Sometimes when you want something, the best strategy is to find out how people who got it behave, and copy that behavior. This works reasonably well for things like getting in shape, making a bargain, learning how to ride a bike, etc. It does not work as well if what you want is to be tall. It doesn’t help to copy the behavior of tall people, or to wear their clothes or go on the rides only they may ride at the amusement park. If you want to be as good a writer as Oscar Wilde was, to copy every word Oscar Wilde wrote won’t exactly do it (That is not to say that it wouldn’t do anything, I’m sure there are worse ways of learning the style).

Just copying behavior statistically demonstrated to be exhibited by happy people is probably not the best idea (that would be Cargo Cult Science): If we are to learn from the habits of others, we better learn how to generalize correctly, and in order to do that, we need to understand how happiness works. In order to be happy, it’s probably not sufficient to get the things/habits/relations that happy people got. An educated guess is that the relevant factor is that they got things/habits/relations that they like, and so should you. Or you should like the things you’ve already got. Whichever is most convenient.

Parachuters may be the happiest people alive, but the excitement of jumping might upset, bore or kill you. You should do the things that does for you, what parachute-jumping does for them. And note that even ”excitement” might be a wrongly generalized category: maybe excitement is not for you. Maybe you’re a sofa kind of person. It might still be possible for you to be a person for whom excitement or even parachute-jumping is rewarding, but that requires a completely different kind of neural rewiring.

Possibly, what happy people got is the disposition to like what they get, or to find something to like in everything they get and that disposition, rather than the things that they, or you, like, is what you should get. Of course, if you are disposed to like everything, you might stop and appreciate the glorious spectacle of a runaway train moving towards you at speed, and that, you know, would be bad. You shouldn’t have that disposition. Further qualifications are needed, for strategic and individual reasons. This is why we should be very careful when we try to translate science into advice.

As to the neural rewiring: reading about happiness-research might bring about some of the required changes. Learning does occasionally occur as a consequence of reading, after all. But it is likely to do as much good for your happiness as a class on Newtonian mechanics would do for your billiard-playing skills.

The Next Doctor

In an episode of BBC’s ”Chain reaction”, where noteworthy people, mainly comedians, get to interview each other (A interviews B, in next program B interviews C, and so on. It’s a chain reaction.) John Lloyd – legendary  producer of things funny – suggested to his interviewee Phil Jupitus – comedy-quiz fixture  and master of comedy in the short format – that he, being so promising, should take the ”next step” in his career and do something great and influential and worthwhile. Phil, quite sensibly, answered something like ”I’m pretty happy with my work, thank you very much. Let the young people think of new and exciting things to do”.

But one sees what John Lloyd was up to, does one not? Trying to manage Phil Jupitus career, think of things for him to do. One sees brilliance, thinks that there is more where that came from, and one wants to exploit it further.

At present, I’m a bit like that with Sue Perkins. I want her to be in everything, I want her to have bit parts in Shakespeare dramas, I want her on every comedy quiz show devised by man, I want her to go exploring and post amusing reportages from whatever she’s up to. And then it hit me, just now: I want her to be the next Doctor.

David Tennant has set a standard for the next generation of doctors, and I have not much faith in the current place-filler, so if Doctor Who is to move on, I see only one suitable candidate: Ms Perkins.