Tag: Knowledge

Should You Be So Confident?

Should You Be So Confident?

Posted on by jabittan
Are you pretty confident that your diet is a healthy option for your? Are you confident in the outcome of your upcoming job interview? And how confident are you that you will have enough saved for retirement? Whatever your level of confidence, you might want to reconsider whether you should be as confident as you are, or whether you are just telling yourself a narrative that you like and that makes you feel comfortable with the decisions you have made.

 

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

 

“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

 

We feel confident in our choices, decisions, and predictions about the future when we can construct a coherent narrative. When we have limited information and experience, it is easy for us to fit that information together in a simplified manner that creates a logical story. The more conflicting and complex information and knowledge we obtain, the more diverse experiences and viewpoints we adopt, the harder it is to construct a simple narrative, and the harder it is for our story about the world to align in a way that makes us confident about anything.

 

A high level of confidence doesn’t represent reality, and it may actually reflect a lack of understanding of reality and all of its complexities. We are confident that our diet is good when we cut out ice cream and cookies, but we don’t really know that we are getting sufficient nutrients for our bodies and our lifestyles. We don’t really know how we perform in a job interview, but if we left feeling that we really connected and remembered to say the things we prepared, then we might be confident that we will land the job. And if we have a good retirement savings program through our job and also contribute to an IRA, we might feel that we are doing enough for retirement and be confident that we will be able to retire at 65, but few of us really do the calculations to ensure we are contributing what we need, and none of us can predict what housing or stock markets will look like as we get closer to retirement. Confidence is necessary for us to function in the world without being paralyzed by fear and never-ending cycles of analysis, but we shouldn’t mistake confidence in ourselves or in other people for actual certainty and knowledge.
Understanding the Past

Understanding the Past

Posted on by jabittan
I am always fascinated by the idea, that continually demonstrates validity in my own life, that the more we learn about something, the more realize how little we actually know about it. I am currently reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and I am continually struck by how often Harari brings in events from mankind’s history that I had never heard about. The more I learn about the past, or about any given subject, the more I realize how little knowledge I have ever had, and how limited, narrow, and sometimes just flat out inaccurate my understandings have been.

 

This is particularly important when it comes to how we think about the past. I believe very strongly that our reality and the worlds in which we live and inhabit are mostly social constructions. The trees, houses, and roads are all real, but how we understand the physical objects, the spaces we operate, and how we use the real material things in our worlds is shaped to an incredible degree by social constructions and the relationships we build between ourselves and the world we inhabit. In order to understand these constructions and in order to shape them for a future that we want to live in (and are physiologically capable of living in) we need to understand the past and make predictions about the future with new social constructs that enable continued human flourishing.

 

To some extent, this feels easy and natural to us. We all have a story and we learn and adopt family stories, national stories, and global stories about the grand arc of humanity. But while our stories seem to be shared, and while we seem to know where we are heading, we all operate based on individual understandings of the past, and where that means we are (or should be) heading. As Daniel Kahneman writes in his  book Thinking Fast and Slow, “we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less that we believe we do.”

 

As I laid out to begin this post, there is always so much more complexity and nuance to anything that we might study and be familiar with than we often realize. We can feel that we know something well when we are ignorant of the nuance and complexity. When we start to really untangle something, whether it be nuclear physics, the history of the American Confederacy, or how our fruits and veggies get to the supermarket, we realize that we really don’t know and understand anything as well as we might intuitively believe.

 

When we lack a deep and complex understanding of the past, because we just don’t know about something or because we didn’t have an accurate and detailed presentation of the thing from the past, then we are likely to misinterpret and misunderstand how we got to our current point. By having a limited historical perspective and understanding, we will incorrectly assess where our best future lies. It is important that we recognize how limited our knowledge is, and remember that these limits will shape the extent to which we can make valid predictions for the future.
Substitution Heuristics

Substitution Heuristics

Posted on by jabittan
I think heuristics are underrated. We should discuss heuristics as a society way more than we do. We barely acknowledge heuristics, but if we look closely, they are at the heart of many of our decisions, beliefs, and assumptions. They save us a lot of work and help us move through the world pretty smoothly, but are rarely discussed directly or even slightly recognized.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman highlights heuristics in the sense of substitution and explains their role as:

 

“The target question is the assessment you intended to produce.
The heuristic question is the simpler question that you answered instead.”

 

I have already written about our brain substituting easier questions for harder questions, but the idea of heuristics gives the process a deeper dimension. Kahneman defines a heuristic writing, “The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.”

 

In my own life, and I imagine I am a relatively average case, I have relied on heuristics to help me make a huge number of decisions. I don’t know the best possible investment strategies for my future retirement, but as a heuristic, I know that working with an investment advisor to manage mutual funds and IRAs can be an adequate (even if not perfect) way to ensure I save for the future. I don’t know the healthiest possible foods to eat and what food combinations will maximize my nutrient intake, but as a heuristic I can ensure that I have a colorful plate with varied veggies and not too many sweets to ensure I get enough of the vitamins and nutrients that I need.

 

We have to make a lot of difficult decisions in our lives. Most of us don’t have the time or the ability to compile all the information we need on a given subject to make a fully informed decision, and even if we try, most of us don’t have a reasonable way to sort through contrasting and competing information to determine what is true and what the best course of action would be. Instead, we make substitutions and use heuristics to figure out what we should do. Instead of recognizing that we are using heuristics, however, we ascribe a higher level of confidence and certainty to our decisions than is warranted. What we do, how we live, and what we believe become part of our identity, and we fail to recognize that we are adopting a heuristic to achieve some version of what we believe to be a good life. When pressed to think about it, our mind creates a justification for our decision that doesn’t acknowledge the heuristics in play.

 

In a world where we were quicker to recognize heuristics, we might be able to live with a little distance between ourselves, our decisions, and our beliefs. We could acknowledge that heuristics are driving us, and be more open to change and more willing to be flexible with others. Acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers (that we don’t even have all the necessary information) and are operating on substitution heuristics for complex questions, might help us be less polarized and better connected within our society.
Narrative Confidence

Narrative Confidence

Posted on by jabittan
We like to believe that having more information will make us more confident in our decisions and opinions. The opposite, however, may be true. I have written in the past about a jam study, where participants who selected jam from a sample of a few jams were more happy with their choice than participants who selected jam from a sample of several dozen jam options. More information and more choices seems like it would help make us more happy and make us more confident with our decision, but those who selected jam from the small sample were happier than those who had several dozen jam options.

 

We like simple stories. They are easy for our brain to construct a narrative around and easy for us to have confidence in. The stories we tell ourselves and the conclusions we reach are often simplistic, often built on incomplete information, and often lack the nuance that is necessary to truly reflect reality. Our brains don’t want to work too hard, and don’t want to hold conflicting information that forces an unpleasant compromise. We don’t want to constantly wonder if we made the right choice, if we should do something different, if we need to try another option. We just want to make a decision and have someone tell us it was a good decision, regardless of the actual outcome or impact on our lives, the lives of others, or the planet.

 

Daniel Kahneman writes about this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. He describes a study (not the jam study) where participants were presented with either one side or two sides of an argument. They had to chose which side they agreed with, and rate their confidence. “Participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides,” writes Kahneman, “This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”

 

Learning a lot and truly understanding any given issue is challenging because it means we must build a complex picture of the world. We can’t rely on simple arguments and outlooks on life when we start to get into the weeds of an issue or topic. We will see that admirable people have tragic flaws. We will see that policies which benefit us may exploit others. We will find that things we wish to be true about who we are and the world we live in are only semi-true. Ignorance is bliss in the sense that knowing only a little bit about the world will allow you to paint a picture that makes sense to you, but it won’t be accurate about the world and it won’t acknowledge the negative externalities that the story may create. Simplistic narratives may help us come together as sports fans, or as consumers, or as a nation, but we should all be worried about what happens when we have to accept the inaccuracies of our stories. How we do we weave a complex narrative that will bring people across the world together in a meaningful and peaceful way without driving inequality and negative externalities? That is the challenge of the age, and unfortunately, the better we try to be at accurately depicting the world we inhabit, the less confident any of us will be about the conclusions and decisions for how we should move forward.
Seneca on Quotes

Seneca on Quotes

Posted on by jabittan
In Letters From a Stoic, Seneca writes, “give over hoping that you can skim, by means of epitomes, the wisdom of distinguished men. Look into their wisdom as a whole; study it as a whole. They are working out a plan and weaving together, line upon line, a masterpiece, from which nothing can be taken away without injury to the whole.”

 

I really like this quote and the idea that Seneca presents. He is saying that simple quotes and sayings are insufficient if we hope to actually build knowledge and construct a concrete mental framework for thinking about life. There are many inspirational quotes from famous and influential people, but reading them in isolation is often inadequate for developing a real philosophy of life.

 

This is an idea that I agree with. I actively try to avoid individual quotes, even though I present quotes from books, writers, and thinkers on this blog. My hope is that diving deeper into the meaning for an interesting quote and exploring the ideas it represents will help the quote be more valuable and meaningful for me and anyone else. I try to present some context and how a quote may or may not relate to different aspects of life or perspectives on the world.  Based on Seneca’s quote, I suspect he would approve of this approach. What he would not approve of is simple quotes in isolation, or layered over background sunrises.

 

Individual quotes in isolation become trite, and trying to attach undue meaning to an individual quote or phrase can be harmful, especially when it is taken out of context or applied in an overly broad way. Quotes can only truly be helpful when we consider them within the larger body of work of the individual or culture from which they originate.

 

Seneca’s writing is less valuable on its own than when it is considered alongside other stoic thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius or modern day writers who have a similar focus like Colin Wright or Ryan Holiday. Deep study is what helps us truly understand the world and develop a better understanding of how ideas relate to the world around us. Deep study is necessary if we want to develop our own framework for the world – an amalgamation of quotes from across the web won’t do.
Steel, Coffee Beans, and Healthcare

Steel, Coffee Beans, & Healthcare

Posted on by jabittan
“GM spends more on health care than steel, just as starbucks spends more on health care than coffee beans.” Dave Chase writes in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call. “For most companies, health care is the second largest expense after payroll. This puts you in the health care business.”

 

It is incredible to think that major companies like Starbucks and GM spend more on healthcare than on the products they produce that make them stand out. It feels incredibly troubling and a bit counter to our American pro-business narrative for our companies to spend so much on something that is not a key part of their business and that is not part of their core competency. But as a quote from Warran Buffett that Chase uses to open the 11th chapter of his book says, “GM is a health and benefits company with an auto company attached.” 

 

I am among those who think that one of the greatest failures in America’s healthcare past was to allow businesses to provide health benefits with a tax break for the company. Rather than paying employees more money, which would come with higher tax rates, companies have been allowed to provide health benefits, which instead come with tax breaks. This is how we have fallen into a system where the quality of care, the structure of access to healthcare, and what you pay is largely determined by how well your employer does with navigating the complex healthcare landscape. You might work for someone like Harris Rosen who has figured out how to provide large amounts of preventative services with low costs, or you might work for a cash strapped organization with a random HR person trying to make healthcare plan decisions while also dealing with that employee who won’t take down the inappropriate calendar in their office and is simultaneously trying to review several applications for a new position.

 

The reality of healthcare spending by companies shows us that they cannot reasonably expect to have an inexperienced HR person handle healthcare benefits. The spending is too high for someone who is not completely focused on industry trends and changes, someone who doesn’t understand how insurance companies and PBMs work, and someone who has multiple other responsibilities to manage. If we want to keep private health insurance tied to our jobs, then we need to demand better from our employers and our public policy.

 

When we discuss the costs of healthcare in our nation, and when we consider whether a single entity (the Federal Government) should provide health insurance versus having everyone either buy private insurance through individual markets or receive health insurance through their employer, we need to consider the reality of business spending on healthcare. We need to ask whether GM should be producing cars and accountable to so many employees for their basic health needs. Maybe there is still a space for GM to be involved with the health of their workforce, but should they be the entire determining factor, spending more on healthcare than the steel that goes into the cars they produce? These are the questions I would like to focus on when we think about how we should access and pay for the care we receive.
The First Value of Deep Work

The First Value of Deep Work

Posted on by jabittan
“Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century Philosophers,” writes Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. “It’s instead a skill that has great value today.”

 

A tension that I think a lot of us face (I know its true for me) is that we are pulled in two different directions when it comes to media and information. The news cycle moves so fast today that it feels hard to keep on top of whats happening in the world. We all want to feel connected and feel like we are in the know, and we like being the person at the water-cooler who has the latest information about some nationwide or global event. We have a drive to constantly stay on top of what is happening right now.

 

Pulling against this urge is the desire to know interesting things and to consume media that is thoughtful, thorough, and interesting. It is one thing to know what is happening in the world right now, but it is an entirely different thing to truly understand the context and antecedents that gave rise to the current news cycle.

 

The first desire we have is to know new things about the world, the second desire is to truly understand the world. One desire encourages shallow quick headlines, while the other desire encourages deep thoughtful engagement. It is very challenging to do both.

 

Cal Newport’s suggestion is to shoot for the latter. Learning and engaging with complex topics requires real focus and deep work. The value from the second will far outlast the first. The first value of deep work that Newport shares in his book reads, “We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. … To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.”

 

Staying on top of the news simply requires that we flutter around on Twitter, absentmindedly distracting ourselves and taking in a few headlines and quotes without thinking critically about how it all links together and exactly why people are reaching the conclusions they reach. This is does not develop the skills that are necessary for quick learning, even thought it is a quick way to sort through information.

 

Learning complex things quickly requires that we be able to engage in deep work and focus on the most important items. Failing to build these skills and abilities means that you won’t be able to truly master changing technologies and markets. You will be left behind reading headlines about changes, without actually understanding changes and adapting to them. Deep work is valuable because learning and critical thinking are both becoming more valuable, and both require deep work in order to be done well and timely. The answer then to how we should handle the tension I mentioned above is to more or less abandon the headlines and give up on staying on top of the news. We might look a little uninformed to others about current world events, but we will have a better background and understanding of what is shaping the world today than the others around us, and we will be able to learn the important lessons faster.

Placing Blame Rather Than Working Toward a Solution

Posted on by jabittan
I like to think deeply about public policy. I think there are very interesting structures and ideas that we could put in place which would help us to achieve better outcomes in our societies. The challenge, however, is that the outcomes we want to see are based on value judgement. As in, I think the world should be more this way or that way. When we use the word should we are expressing a judgement that represents some type of value that we hold, which other people might not hold. That means that our political structure is ultimately based on opinion and preference rather than rational cold hard facts.

 

But we don’t really see our world of politics in this way. We see the world of politics differently, believing instead that there is a clearly preferential best answer that can be empirically determined, and arguing as if we know what that perfect answer is. The result from this in the United States, where we have a two party system, seems to be polarization and contempt for the people on the other team. Across the globe, this tends to result in blaming others for bad things that we see around us, and voting for politicians who make us feel warm and fuzzy and rationalizing our support for them even if their ideas might not actually make sense when fully implemented.

 

In his book The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen writes about this phenomenon, “Elections these days often seem more about who is to blame than who is to govern.” We don’t think deeply during an election about the governable skills that someone has. We discuss policy, but the reality is that almost none of us understand policy in a deep way, and if we do, we only understand one narrow policy space. We are not all economic experts across the board, we are not all education experts, and we are not all medical experts. But we have vague senses about what would be in our interest and what types of views we should hold to fit in with other people like us. As a result we fall into a blame game where we criticize the other side for bad things and put blinders on to ignore the governance shortcomings of our own team.

 

Cowen continues, “Voters are less inclined to see their selection as a long-term contract with a candidate or party and more likely to see it as resembling a transaction with a used car salesman.” This is not surprising if you consider that no one is actually a policy expert. We want to see people like us do well in society, so we align with whoever seems to be best positioned to do that. We don’t really know what will lead to good outcomes, but as long as the politician or party says that people like us are good, then we know to align with and vote for.

Signaling Loyalty

Posted on by jabittan
Politics is an interesting world. We all have strong opinions about how the world should operate, but in general, most of us don’t have much deep knowledge about any particular issue. We might understand the arguments about charter schools, about abortions, or about taxes, but very few of us have really studied any of these areas in considerable depth. Anyone with a career in a specific industry understands that there is a public perception of the industry and the deeper and more complex inner workings of the actual industry. But when we think about political decisions regarding any given industry and topic, we suddenly adopt easy surface level answers that barely skim the surface of these deep and complex inner dynamics.

 

If we all have strong opinions about politics without having strong knowledge about any of it, then we must ask ourselves if politics is really about policy at all? Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson suggest that politics is generally about something other than policy. In The Elephant in the Brain they write, “Our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to our side (whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation), rather than as a good-faith attempt to improve outcomes.” 

 

If the main driver of politics was doing good in the world and reaching good outcomes for society, then we would likely be a much more hands-off, technocratic society. Instead, we have elected a president who doesn’t seem to have a deep understanding of any major issues, but who does know how to stoke outrage and draw lines in the sand to differentiate each side. We generally look around and figure out which team we belong to based on our identity and self-interest, and separate into our camps with our distinct talking points. We don’t understand issues beyond these talking points, but we understand how they make our side look more virtuous.

 

I believe that people who are deeply religious are drawn toward the Republican Party which currently denies climate change partly because a society that has less emphasis on science is likely to be more favorable toward religious beliefs. The veracity of climate change and the complex science behind it is less important than simply being on a side that praises people for religious beliefs. Similarly, I believe that people with higher education degrees are more likely to align with the Democrat Party because, at the moment, it is a party that encourages scientific and technical thought. It is a party that socially rewards the appearance of critical thinking and praises people who have gone to school. Without needing to actually know anything specific, people with degrees who appear to think in a scientific method framework are elevated in the party where people with religious beliefs are disregarded. Both parties are operating in ways that signal who is valuable and who belongs on a particular side. Issues map onto these signals, but the issues and policies are not the main factors in choosing a side.

Two Messages

Posted on by jabittan
In The Elephant in the Brain Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson write about the ways in which we act to signal something important about ourselves that we cannot outright express. We deceive ourselves to believe that we are not sending these signals, but we recognize them, pick up on their subtle nature, and know how to respond to these cues even if we remain consciously ignorant to them. In the book, the authors focus on how we use these cues in language and communication.

 

The authors write, “Every remark made by a speaker contains two messages for the listener: text and subtext. The text says, ‘Here’s a new piece of information,’ while the subtext says, ‘By the way, I’m the kind of person who knows such things.’ Sometimes the text is more important than the subtext … but frequently, it’s the other way around.”

 

It is important to acknowledge that sometimes the text truly is the important part of our message. Because we occasionally have really important things that people need to know, and because that information outweighs the fact that we are the one who knows it and shared it, we can use that as a screen for us in this game of two messages. We can believe that all our communication is about important important information because there are times where the things we communicate are crucial to know. Hanson and Simler’s idea above only works if sometimes it is true that the text is the important piece and if almost always we can plausibly say that we are just trying to convey useful information as opposed to showing off what we know or what we have learned.

 

No matter what, at the same time our communication says something about us and about what knowledge and information we may have. It can also say something about what we don’t know, which may be part of why we go to great lengths to make it seem like we were not ignorant of something – our language/knowledge might tell people we are not the kind of person who knows something that everyone else knows.

 

Our language also tells people that we are the kind of person who cares about something, or has great attention to detail, is strict and disciplined, or is from a certain part of the country/world. Some of these signals are fairly hidden, while others are more clear and obvious. When we look more closely at the way we signal in our conversation, we can see how often our words are only part of what we are communicating.