Category: Conversations with Tyler

Fundamental Attribution Error - Judging People in a WEIRD Way

Fundamental Attribution Error – Judging People in a WEIRD Way

Posted on by jabittan
In his recent conversation with Indian TV journalis, Barkha Dutt, Tyler Cowen and and Dutt had the following exchange:
 
 
“Cowen: Plenty of Whites in the United States have resources, education, but is it possible the Brahmins of India who come to America — they’re better at cracking foreign cultural codes, they’re more used to diversity, they’re more used to strange environments? …
 
 
Dutt: I guess my hesitation in answering your question is that I hate essentialism. It’s the same way that I hate it when people say women are better leaders because we are more empathetic. …”
 
 
This part of the conversation really stuck with me. I found it really interesting that Cowen was trying to ask a question about what has made people from upper classes/castes in India become so successful with running companies in the United States (Sundar Pichai of Google is an example they mentioned). For Cowen, this was a normal seeming question, but for Dutt, the question was WEIRDly weird. What she saw in the question was an aspect of essentialism, which she seemed to view as a shortcut way of explaining complex social phenomenon by boiling something down to one particular element. For Dutt, she didn’t see success for people at the top group as entirely due to their own dispositions but in many ways as a result of how society has treated people who are at the top and who have vast resources. Rather than something essential about the individual, rather than being WEIRD and looking at individual dispositions, Dutt looked at people as part of a larger whole.
 
 
WEIRD people (Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people) tend to see components rather than the whole. This means that when we look at individuals we don’t always see them in relation to society, but as individual actors with specific traits. Cowen’s question demonstrates this default way of thinking and how we judge ourselves and others.
 
 
In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich writes about how dispositional ways of thinking about ourselves and others leads to both Cognitive Dissonance and Fundamental Attribution Error. Henrich writes,
 
 
“In WEIRD societies, the pressure to cultivate traits that are consistent across contexts and relationships leads to dispositionalism – a tendency to see people’s behavior as anchored in personality traits that influence their actions across many contexts. For example, the fact that he’s lazy (a disposition) explains why he’s not getting his work done.” We look at an individual, judge their behavior and the things they say and determine something fundamental about who they are. From this judgment we make predictions about them, treat them a certain way, and justify rewards or punishments that they receive. When we look at ourselves, Henrich explains that we do complex mental gymnastics to dismiss negative traits and characteristics while convincing ourselves that we posses good traits. Henrich continues,
 
 
“The available evidence suggests that WEIRD people suffer more severely from Cognitive Dissonance and do a range of mental gymnastics to relieve their discomfort. Second, dispositional thinking also influences how we judge others. Psychologists label this phenomenon Fundamental Attribution Error, though it’s clearly not that fundamental; it’s weird.”
 
 
Our tendency toward dispositionalism and essentialism is more common in WEIRD societies than in other societies. We make judgments about other people based on how we see them act and behave in one context. We project traits associate with that behavior onto the individual and assume that those traits are consistent across all contexts and relationships for the individual. We further project those traits among broader groups to which the individual belongs. And this can lead to many problems like bias (both positive and negative), discrimination, halo effects, and segregation. We lock up criminals for a long time because we assume they are purely evil. We hear a passionate campaign speech and assume a political figure and their party can do no wrong. We segregate our neighborhoods economically so that we can get away from lazy people who can’t hold good jobs. All of these are examples of us making a WEIRD judgment about an individual’s dispositions and projecting specific traits across all contexts for the individual and the groups to which they belong. We make fundamental errors in this attribution process and that can be quite damaging for ourselves and society in the long run. This is a WEIRD way to think about the world, and something we should be aware of as we try to understand ourselves and our societies.
Crass Art

Crass Art

Posted on by jabittan
Tyler Cowen recently interviewed Dana Gioia for his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Gioia is a noted poet and writer and was once the Poet Laureate for California. In the podcast, Cowen asked Gioia an interesting question and received a response from Gioia that I can’t stop thinking about:
“Cowen: Is rap music simply the new poetry? It’s very popular. It is poetic in some broader notion of the term.
GIOIA: Rap, hip hop without any question is poetry. It is rhythmically structured words moving through time. … if I go back to 1975 when I was leaving Harvard, I was told by the world experts in poetry that rhyme and meter were dead, narrative was dead in poetry. Poetry would become ever more complex, which meant that it could only appeal to an elite audience … what the intellectuals in the United States did was we took poetry away from common people.
We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away, and the common people reinvented it.“
This passage is fascinating because it looks at rap music, something that is often hated for its misogyny, drug/sex culture, and general shallowness and appreciates it as a true art form. Gioia’s answer takes our distinction between high culture and low culture, what we consider fine art and crass art, and turns it upside down. Gioia says that poetry was deemed too complex for simple people and that it was taken away from them, only to be reinvented in pop culture through rap music.
Since listening to this podcast I have thought a lot about popular culture and high culture. I always feel a temptation to engage with fine art and to look down my nose at what we generally consider crass art, but at the same time I often find a great pull and fondness toward that crass art. I enjoy Marvel movies, I find myself reflected in the characters of the Harry Potter books, and when I workout I like to listen to rap music or even trendy K-Pop with nonsensical and often ironic lyrics.
What Gioia noted about rap music, and what I have felt with regard to popular mega-IPs and trendy music, has been seen with different artforms and media in human history. In the 1920’s, writes Michael Tisserand in his biography of cartoonist George Herriman Krazy, comics were already seen as crass art. However, a quote from Gilbert Seldes’ book The 7 Lively Arts that Tisserand includes in the biography defends comics in much the same way that Gioia defends rap music. To quote Seldes Tisserand writes, “Reading a comic, Seldes noted, is seen as a symptom of crass vulgarity, dullness, and, for all I know, of defeated an inhibited lives.”
In the 1920’s, when Seldes wrote his art review, comics were already seen as crass art. Their value was misunderstood, and the people who read them were seen as failures. Yet, looking back at comics and pop art from the time tells us something important about the era and the people. We enjoy seeing commonalities between ourselves a century later and the art, worries, thoughts, and ambitions represented in popular culture. We can understand a lot by looking at what was derided as crass art.
When we think about popular culture today, we shouldn’t simply scoff at it as crass art. There are forces the drive the popularity of certain forms of music, cinema, art, television, and media. Understanding what those forces are, recognizing what values, challenges, and life views are present in those forms of art can tell us a lot about who we are. Rather than simply dismissing popular culture as crass art, we should strive to be like Seldes and Gioia who work to understand that art and see its value and merit, even if it appears simple, vulgar, and ephemeral. We don’t have to like it and spend all of our time with it, but we should not simply dismiss it and the people who engage with it.
Money Isn't About Economic Security (For Most of Us)

Money Isn’t About Economic Security (For Most of Us)

Posted on by jabittan
Tyler Cowen started his February 28th, 2018 podcast interview with his colleague from George Mason University, Robin Hanson, with the following:

 

“Robin, if politics is not about policy, medicine is not about health, laughter is not about jokes, and food is not about nutrition, what are podcasts not about?”

 

Hanson goes on to explain that conversations are not really about imparting useful information and finding out useful things, but that conversation is likely more about showing off and signaling. When you share new information to someone, you are showing them that you are a valuable ally who knows useful things that might one day be helpful. When you share a particular piece of knowledge, you are signaling that you are the kind of person who would know such knowledge.

 

I think that Hanson’s views toward signaling are correct and deserve more attention and consideration. A lot of what we do has more to do with signaling than about the reason we would give to an observer for what we are doing. Hanson is not alone in recognizing this reality.

 

In Thinking  Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes, the following about money:

 

“Except for the very poor, for whom income coincides with survival, the main motivators of money-seeking are not necessarily economic. For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our head.”

 

Money is not really about economic well-being (for most of us). Its not really about the things we can purchase or the vacations we can take. Money is really about social status. Having more of it elevates our social status, as does using it for impressive and expensive purposes. There is no objective ranking out there for our social status, but we act as if our social status is tangible and will reveal something important about our lives and who we are. Pursuing money gives us a chance to pursue social status in an oblique way, making it look as though we are doing something for high-minded reasons, when in reality we are trying to climb a social ladder and use money as our measuring stick of success.

 

Realistically, we are not going to be able to do much of anything about our signaling behaviors, especially if Hanson is correct in estimating that well over 90% of what we do is signaling. However, we can start to acknowledge signaling and chose where and how we send signals about ourselves. We can chose not to rely on money to signal something about who we are and can seek out more healthy avenues for signaling, with more environmentally friendly and socially conscientious signaling externalities taken into consideration.
Rich Representations of Things

Making Connections From Rich Representations of Things

Posted on by jabittan
On August 12th, Tyler Cowen released a podcast interview with Stanford Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom on his podcast Conversations with Tyler. In response to a question from Cowen about making adjustments in his life, Bloom said the following:

 

“For me, I really like to read broadly rather than deeply — sounds an odd thing to say. Every Monday, for example, or Sunday night, the National Bureau of Economic Research has this vast email of all the recent papers. I tend to try and scan every title and abstract. I read the papers. I like the Economist magazine. It’s good. It’s often been a source of ideas, actually.
We were talking before the call — I listen to your podcast. I actually listen to a lot of podcasts because I try and go out for a walk or a run for about an hour every day. I mostly listen to podcasts. [laughs] If I’m getting too tired, I have to switch to music. For me, that’s been helpful for coming up with new research ideas.” 

 

The quote from Bloom came back to mind this morning as I looked over a quote I highlighted in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman’s quote is about connections in the mind, and how having a rich set of connections can help us have better representations of the world. When people are asked questions about Michigan, research in Kahneman’s book shows, they have different responses depending on whether they remember that Detroit is in Michigan. People with more knowledge of the state think differently of it compared to people with minimal knowledge of Michigan. Kahneman writes,

 

“More intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.” 

 

This idea relates to what Bloom said in the interview with Cowen. Bloom was asked about his productivity, and how he is able to keep up a high level of publications with co-authors across a wide range of academic institutions, geographic locations, and subjects. Bloom responded that he is developing rich representations of most things through broad, but not necessarily deep, investigations of a wide range of topics.

 

By taking in a wide range of information, Bloom is able to pick out the important connections between disparate topics. This gives him an ability to deploy attention where there is a lack of study on certain topics. By reading across many fields, he is able to look at current developments in economics, news, and society to find relevant material that can generate useful knowledge for the world of economics.

 

Not all of us are ever going to be economists, and not all of us will be in a place where we can publish academic articles on lots of topics. But all of us are asked by social media every day to offer our opinion on something. If we have a narrow and limited knowledge base, then our opinions and ideas are going to also be narrow and limited. If, however, we can work to broaden our horizons and work to focus our memory and attention on relevant material, then we can start to offer better opinions about the world, and we can start to move discussions forward in a better direction.
Focus on Process

Focus on Process

Posted on by jabittan
Recently, Tyler Cowen released a podcast interview he did with Annie Duke, someone I remember from the days when my brother watched tournaments for the World Series of Poker.  A line from the interview really stood out to me and is something I think about in my life all the time, but haven’t stated as eloquently as Duke. In the interview she says, “The way to happiness is to focus on process. Then the winning becomes secondary to that. It becomes a way to keep score on how you’re doing on the process piece. And to really focus on that as opposed to focusing on the end result.”

 

I really like the way that Duke thinks about life, happiness, and process. So often in our lives we look at the end results. We ask ourselves if our house is big enough, if our car is fancy enough, if we have a good enough job, and if we took a good enough vacation this year. The problem, however, is that these are end results that we use to judge ourselves. They are lag measures, not lead measures, and as a result they only tell us how we are doing long after we have a chance to make improvements and adjust our approach. The second problem with thinking about the end results is that the end result we pick is arbitrary and in many cases our chances of achieving our desired end result are often beyond our control. There are so many random variables that can determine how successful you become and exactly where you end up. In poker, the randomness and chance within the game is part of its appeal, and sometimes whether you walk away with the most chips or with none is as much a matter of luck on a single hand as it is a matter of skill and intelligence.

 

Similarly, in Letters From a Stoic, Seneca writes, “When one is busy and absorbed in one’s work, the very absorption affords great delight; but when one has withdrawn one’s hand from the completed masterpiece, the pleasure is not so keen.” This quote from Seneca highlights the importance of maintaining good process. We are happy when we are engaged and active in our pursuit of a goal. Achieving our goal and no longer have work to do in pursuit of our goal is actually less fulfilling than the process to obtain the goal itself.

 

When we consider the quotes from both Seneca and Duke we see how important it can be to think about our daily habits, routines, and processes. If we can focus on goals related to process then we can have something meaningful to engage with that is unlikely to disappear and leave us feeling empty once reached. For a poker player, walking away from the table with a large stack of chips is what the game appears to be all about, but it is in playing poker, discussing strategy, and focusing on one’s abilities and weaknesses that professional poker players find the most enjoyment. Those are the pieces the player can control and engage with, and if the player focuses on process, they will improve and reach their end goals to ultimately be successful in the game. Focus on the process to build success and to enjoy the path toward continued success and excellence.

Speakers are Eager to Impress

Posted on by jabittan
The last few days I have been writing about communication and asking what our communication is really all about if it is not just about facts and conveying information. When just talking to someone or communicating anything we seem to be including a lot of information that we are not even aware of. One of the things we are showing off in conversation is that we are someone who should be kept around, because we have useful insights and thoughts into the world around us.

 

In The Elephant in the Brain, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler look at this point directly. They write, “Speakers are eager to impress listeners by saying new and useful things, but the facts themselves can be secondary. Instead, it’s more important for speakers to demonstrate that they have abilities that are attractive in an ally.”

 

In his episode of the Conversations with Tyler Podcast, Hanson describes it as showing off your backpack of skills and abilities. We want to show off that we know interesting facts so that people keep us around to hear more interesting facts in the future. We want to show how well connected we are with other allies so that people want to stick by us to get potential benefits from those insider connections. We also want to demonstrate that we are able to find out useful knowledge that might help someone else in the future. We might have just shared a simple or interesting fact about our experiences or something we learned, but it can demonstrate a lot more about us than we recognize.

 

Over time, we likely won’t remember where we heard information first. We likely won’t remember exactly who told us what, but we will remember who we have had good conversations with in the past, and people will remember that we had a lot of helpful things to say about a given topic. What we say in this moment doesn’t matter, as long as we develop a pattern of being helpful and insightful.

 

All of this is happening in our conversations without us realizing how much it is taking place. Conversation is natural, and we don’t want to seem like we are only engaging in conversation to get something useful from someone else, otherwise we won’t truly build any allies and friendships. The brain works better for us when it is not aware of its own motivations in this instance.

Lets Consider Our Standards for Life

Posted on by jabittan
In Letters From a Stoic Seneca writes, “Let us try to maintain a higher standard of life than that of the multitude, but not a contrary standard; otherwise, we shall frighten away and repel the very persons whom we are trying to improve.”

 

On an initial quick read, this quote seems to be saying, live better than the masses but don’t act like you are better than everyone else. That’s good advice that has been said so many times that it is basically useless. We already all believe that we are morally superior to other people and we are especially likely, according to Robin Hanson in an interview he gave on Conversations with Tyler, to say that our group or tribe is morally  superior to others. If you give the quote a second thought however, you see that there is a deeper meaning within the idea being conveyed.

 

The first thing we should consider is what it would look like to maintain a high standard of life. In his same letter, Seneca advises that a high standard of life does not mean that one wears the nicest possible toga or that one has silver dishes laced with pure gold. A high standard of life is not about maintaining exorbitant material possessions. Advertising in the United States would make you think differently. A high standard of life is advertised to us as driving the finest sports car, demanding the best possible wrist watch, and having exquisitely crafted faucets. Seneca would argue that these things don’t create a high standard of living, but just show off our wealth. I would agree.

 

A high standard of life, Seneca suggests and I would argue, is a well ordered life in which we can live comfortably but don’t embrace the mindset that it is our possessions that define our success and value. A high standard for life means that we cultivate habits which help us be more kind and considerate. We pursue activities and possessions that help us be more effective, less impulsive, and allow us to better use our resources and intelligence.

 

Maintaining this version of a high standard of life can have the same pitfalls we may associate with the Real Housewives of LA if we don’t give thought to the second part of Seneca’s advice. Maintaining high living standards can lead us to selfishness and self-serving decisions if we don’t think about other people and how we operate as a society. Seneca’s advice is about becoming a model for other people and helping become a force that improves lives by encouraging and inspiring others. This idea was echoed in Peter Singer’s book about effective altruism, The Most Good You Can Do. Effective altruists want to direct their efforts, donations, and resources in the direction where they can have the greatest possible positive impact on the world to help the most people possible. One of the ways to do that is to inspire others to also strive to do the most good they can do. No one would follow an effective altruist who gave away all their money and lived a miserable life. But someone would follow an effective altruist who gave a substantial amount of their money to an effective and meaningful charity and still lived an enjoyable and happy life.

 

Our high standard of living in the end should be one that drives us toward continual improvement. A life that makes us more considerate, more thoughtful, less judgmental, and less impulsive. It should encourage others to live in a way that helps them be happier and healthier, rather than living in a way that suggests that having expensive things and showing off is what life is all about.

Aware of Your Feelings of Superiority

Posted on by jabittan
In my life I want to remain open to the world around me, try new things, and stretch myself in areas where I recognize I don’t have much experience. In order to successfully live an open and exploratory life, I will have to accept that I am not as great as my ego wants me to believe I am, and I will have to accept that I don’t already know everything I need to know about how to live a good life. If I begin approaching the world as though I already have it figured out and as if my way of life is superior to the way that other people live, then instead of branching out, I will likely turn inward, away from a changing world.

 

“No group ever decided to pull inward and cut off contact with the outside world because they believed their own group was inferior,” Colin Wright wrote in his book Becoming Who We Need To Be. It is hard to avoid judging other people, and even easier to judge other groups rather than just other individuals. “Moral superiority is probably some degree of confidence in their social group and their support of their social group. That is, people are especially willing to express moral superiority when they’re expressing the superiority, not of themselves individually, but of the group of people they’re within together,” Robin Hanson stated in an interview with Tyler Cowen for his podcast Conversations with Tyler.

 

Allowing ourselves to see ourselves and our groups as morally superior to others limits our world and puts us in a place where we are less likely to connect with people who are not like us. I see this a lot with the relationships between runners and people who do cross-fit. It seems almost universal that runners criticize cross-fit athletes. I have thought about this a lot, and I think that what is happening is that runners are trying to express their (moral) athletic superiority over cross-fit athletes as a way to justify why they don’t do cross-fit themselves. To acknowledge that cross-fit is a good workout and accept that a cross-fit athlete is just as athletic, talented, hard-working, or smart as a runner places the runner in a position where they have to defend their sport and their choice to do running when a potentially more well-rounded and fun type of exercise exists.

 

The runners versus cross-fit example is just a small example of how our in-group versus out-group thinking manifests in real life. This type of thinking, of believing that we and our group are superior to other groups can have serious consequences. It can lead to our group becoming more close-minded. It can lead to us individually being less open to people who live differently. It can lead to enclaves and divisions within society that see conflict and threat instead of opportunity and learning. By becoming aware of these feelings of superiority, recognizing how frequently these feelings lack any solid rational basis, and by trying something new, we can prevent ourselves and our groups from becoming isolated. This will give us a chance to learn new things, gain insightful experiences, and it will help us provide more value to the world.

Training Our Instincts

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Becoming Who We Need To Be, author Colin Wright explains how training in certain areas changes us. “Training our instincts is like feeding our subconscious. It grants us more informed, helpful knee-jerk reactions, rather than blind and potentially damaging impulses.” For examples, Wright writes about the ways that experienced auto mechanics are diagnose vehicle problems in one area of an engine based on a signal in a different area of the engine and he writes about learning to cook in six months and having a new understanding and appreciation for raw ingredients that can be cooked together to make a meal. In isolated cases, things we don’t know about and don’t understand at all can become things that give us clues and slight insights based on our experience and knowledge.

 

Recently, Tyler Cowen interviewed Ezekiel Emanuel for his podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and I was struck by Emanuel’s efforts to learn and engage with something new each year. He has recently learned how to make his own jam and chocolate and in the interview talked about the insights and unexpected things that he has gained by trying something completely new. He doesn’t always stick with everything he learns and tries, but by applying himself in a lot of different areas, he picks up new perspectives, meets new people, and gains a new appreciation for something that was foreign to him in the past.

 

The lessons from Wright and Emanuel are things we should keep in mind and try to build into our own lives. When we only have a vague understanding or idea of how the world works, we are going to move through it making assumptions that are not warranted. We will act in ways that seem intuitively obvious for us, but our way of moving through the world may be as foolish as asking the French why they haven’t had an air tanker drop water on Notre-Dame. Ignorance can be quite costly in our own lives and in the negative externalities that we push onto the rest of the world, and as we become more responsible with relationships, families, and businesses that count on us, ignorance can be quite costly for the rest of society. Becoming aware of areas where we have no expertise and no training is important so that we can identify where we might have these knee-jerk reactions that won’t help anyone. Awareness of our ignorance can help us choose what we want to focus on, what we want to learn about, and what would help us become a better person for our society.

 

On the opposite side of the coin, as we become more expert in a given area, we will be able to better sense what is happening around us and make choices and decisions that we can’t explain but that work properly. It is something we should strive toward, but all the while we should recognize where our expertise falls short and how bad assumptions could harm us and others.

Building Models and Examining the World and Our Thoughts

Posted on by jabittan
This morning listening to an episode of Conversations with Tyler, Russ Roberts, the guest on the show said something that really stood out to me, “I used to believe that…my models described the world, as opposed to gave me insight into the world.” We operate in a world where there is no way for us to ever have complete information. There is simply too much data, too much information, to much stuff going on all around us for our brains to perfectly absorb everything in a reasonable and coherent way.

 

You do not notice every blink, you could never possibly understand every chemical’s smell that makes up the complex aroma of your coffee, and you can’t hold every variable for that big business decision in your head at the same time. Instead, our brains filter out information that does not seem relevant and we key in on what appears to be the main factors that influence the world around us. We build models that sometimes seem like they describe the world with spectacular clarity, but are only a product of our brain and the limited space for information that we have. Our models do not reflect reality and they are not reality, but they can give us an insight into reality if we can build them well.

 

No matter what, we are going to operate on these models in our daily lives. We develop a sense of what works, what will bring us happiness, what will create well-being, and how we will find success. We pursue those things that fit in our model, toss those things that don’t fit in the model to the side, and somewhere along the line begin to believe that our model is reality and criticize everyone who has a model that doesn’t seem to jive with ours.

 

A more reasonable stance is to say that we have developed a model that gives us insight into some aspect of reality, but is open for adjustment, improvement, or could be scrapped altogether in favor of a new model if necessary. The only way to do this is to be an active participant in our lives and to work to truly understand ourselves and the world around us. The quote from Roberts on Cowen’s podcast aligns with the quote that I have from Colin Wright today. From Wright’s book Becoming Who We Need To Be I have a quote reading, “It’s not enough to just smell the fragrances that drift our way every day. We have to take the time to pull those aromas apart, to figure out what components go into them, and compare and contrast them with others. We have to be awake and aware, not just alive. We have to be participatory in our own lives, and give our mental capacities a reason to keep operating and expanding, otherwise they will, quite understandably, if we’re using biological logic, begin to shut down to save energy.”

 

Deciphering the aromas is a metaphor for understanding how we are interacting with the world and how the world exists around us. If we retreat to safety and comfort by believing that our models are correct and perfect, then we fail to improve our understanding of the world and our place in it. Our mind atrophies, and the potential we have for making the world a better place is continually diminished. Simply believing something because it benefits us, makes us feel good, and is what people similar to us believe can drive us and the world into an inefficient place where we fail to do the most good for the most people. There is nothing wrong with that world, it is an option, but if we believe that human flourishing is worth striving for and if we believe that we can help improve the living standards for ourselves and the rest of humanity, then we must use and expand our cognitive capacity to better understand the universe to improve the world for ourselves and the rest of humanity. Your model is incomplete and gives you insight into one aspect of reality, but you must remember that it is not a perfect description of how the world should be, and you must work continuously to build a better model with better insight into the world.