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Neurotypicals are irrational beasts

razib — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:33:41 +0000

Neurotypicals are irrational beasts

Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts:

But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. "Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural," says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech. Better insight into human psychology gleaned by neuroscientists holds the promise of changing forever our fundamental assumptions about the way entire economies function--and our understanding of the motivations of the individual participants therein, who buy homes or stocks and who have trouble judging whether a dollar is worth as much today as it was yesterday.

The gain vs. loss dictum indicates a strong risk aversion in humanity. Why might this be? I suspect it has to do with the fact that for most of our history we've been an animal like any other, on the Malthusian boundary, always facing individual or group extinction. The possibility of becoming as rich as Warren Buffet, or as prolific as Genghis Khan, by taking risks or trodding the path less taken, simply did not exist. The downside was extinction, the upside might be temporary success, only to see your lineage be swept away by history due to a propensity to gamble.

Consider the case of sex. Clonal reproduction is more efficient in the short term. Every individual can generate many copies of themselves. In dioecious sexual organisms the existence of males cuts down on the short term reproductive output of both sexes in terms of gene copies passed into organisms each generation. While clonal reproducing females generate exact copies, sexual females dilute their genetic contribution by 1/2. But over the long term clonal lines presumably become extinct often enough that the non-clonal varieties are dominant at any given moment. Cloning has a short term upside, but its long term downside is extinction (over the long term all species go extinct, so the key is that you're just shifting the value of the expected interval which a species might exist upward).

Risk aversion is really a way to dampen volatility of behavior. You do what's worked in the past and stick to custom & tradition. In The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 Tim Blanning notes that it was very difficult to get European peasants to adopt new crops and modern agricultural science; productivity be damned. One exception to this was the rapid adoption of the potato in Ireland, which witnessed an enormous population boom in the 18th and early 19th centuries. And of course Ireland was hit by a potato blight which rendered it vulnerable to famine because of its excessive dependence on this one crop, which in the short term was the optimal way to convert land to calories in Ireland's climate (note that this example is not proof of the principle, just an illustration, as I'm well aware of the various institutional reasons which exacerbated the Irish famine).

The past is not the present. In the Malthusian world there simply weren't rates of economic growth which we see today in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its descendants. Thomas Malthus may seem foolish, writing as he was on the precipice of a new age, but his ideas were informed by all of human history. The hyperrational autistic individual whose analytic cognitive functions are sharp is faced with bewildering human animals with irrational "hard & fast" intuitive reflexes embedded in a world which baffles intuition. But like evolutionary psychologists I suspect that these cognitive intuitions have deep roots in pre-modern ecological fitness, the world of the hunter-gatherer & peasant, and many are to an extent "baked into the cake" of our cognitive architecture.

Naturally the pig-headed stubbornness of Russian peasants when faced with 19th century scientific agronomists seems short-sighted today, but Russia's 20th century experiments to some extent vindicate the suspicion of simple folk. But these attachments to older ways which emerge from risk aversion aren't simply nuisances, they might be essential in understanding human utility functions, which might have a thick network of prior values. In The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan argues that the typical human has weak conceptions of the non-zero sum dynamics at the heart of modern economics, especially in the case of free trade. This is true, but I think what this misses is that the utility function of most humans is more strongly weighted toward risk aversion and willing to accept a trade off between rate of growth and volatility of growth which minimizes the latter. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it isn't "rational"* for people to weight loss twice as strongly in their utility functions as gains, it's just how many people are in their bones.

* Most talk of rationality presupposes a relative clean, elegant and spare mental architecture. This model is manifestly false.

razib Mon, 06/29/2009 - 03:33

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I think your analysis here is correct, including your conclusion that most people are "willing to accept a trade off between rate of growth and volatility of growth which minimizes the latter.". I'd add that even in our post-Malthusian society there are still valid reasons to be risk-averse. For example, given most families' needs to secure adequate health insurance, pay for home mortgages, etc., it's perfectly understandable why most people don't quit their jobs and start small businesses, or join startups, or pick up and move to new cities, or whatever other courses of action they're always being urged to take in order to maximize their lifetime earnings and family wealth. On average they might indeed do so, but the consequences of failure can be pretty severe in terms of maintaining their prior station in life.

You didn't mention it, but your comments here are also of a piece with your past comments about religion: It's part of (almost) all humans' cognitive make-up, so it's pointless to rage against it as "irrational" in the hopes that you can argue people out of it.

Hmmm... Perhaps the modern world allows a fitness advantage to the hyper-rational autist who isn't hampered by excess loss aversion. Maybe that's why "non-neurotypical" traits are on the rise in modern times.

George Santayana said: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Overcoming our irrational cognitive biases requires knowledge and hard work. To learn what those biases are and how to overcome them, I recommend reading:

Shermer, Michael. The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. New York: Times Books, 2008

Shermer can supply the knowledge, the hard work is up to you!

The bubble in irrationality

razib — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:56:58 +0000

The bubble in irrationality

Felix Salmon pointed me to The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street today. There really is a boom in these sorts of books recently! Are we overdoing the "irrationality" bit? Probably. Mike offers up some skepticism about the creeping of irrationality as an explanation for everything.

razib Fri, 05/29/2009 - 04:56

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Far more trouble is caused by arguing rationally from bad premises than by arguing irrationally from good ones. And if you don't agree I'll bash you on the snoot.

There probably is some excess hoeing of the irrationality row going on, but that seems to me to be a relatively natural swing of the pendulum away from the excess of faith in human rationality which was prevalent before.In the current wave of books on irrationality it might be easy to lose the perspective that it was rational human thought which put together all of the research which exposed so much human irrationality. The current wave is fascinated with tearing down old constructs which were based on the myth of human rationality. At some point this should move toward attempts to build new models based on a more balanced view of human nature.

Is there a way of explaining a bubble in books about irrationality without positing irrationality? This stuff is deep, man.

It could be that authors and publishers see that there is a market for humans-are-irrational books and rationally decide to make them. But that still leaves consumers as irrationally obsessed with irrationality. Unless, you see believing in irrationality (or at least, talking about it and being seen reading books about it) as a rational choice...

How We Decide, stuff happens in the brain

razib — Wed, 13 May 2009 07:33:37 +0000

How We Decide, stuff happens in the brain

When I found out a while back that Jonah Lehrer's next book was titled How We Decide, I knew I was going to check it out. It's no coincidence that I recently reviewed Predictably Irrational, I blog because I'm interested in reducing the human animal down its basic units of organization. Due to my disciplinary focus I generally touch upon behavior genetics or the inferences of human history one can glean from evolutionary genetics. History, psychology and economics are all domains which have piqued my interest. But I'll be honest and admit that I tend to avoid neuroscience because there's a lot to memorize in terms of basic facts and I don't really have a good grasp of the field. When your network of contingent data is too thin you're really not in a position to make novel inferences, connections, or illuminate your own understanding of a topic.

Luckily, in How We Decide the neuroscience is preprocessed; you don't have to grapple with the details in all their baroque complexity. I already knew about the significance of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, how dopamine effects the way we think, and so forth. That was enough to manipulate the basic pieces on the chess board and push the narrative forward. As evidenced by the prominent blurb from Dan Ariely How We Decide is a good complement to Predictably Irrational. But there are important differences. How We Decide is the work of a writer, and its prose hangs together as a coherent narrative to a far greater degree than Predictably Irrational, which was really more a series of chapter-by-chapter verbal expositions of Ariely's scientific papers. That is fine as it goes, Predictably Irrational can be read a la carte by sampling interesting chapters. The argument in How We Decide on the other hand ties together various strands across each chapter, so that you have to follow the story along.

Though there is a great deal of scientific substance, the narrative hinges upon people as specific instantiations of the abstract general concepts. Some of the illustrations require a great deal of exposition, as very few in the public would be expected to have any working knowledge of avionics. The first example is very informative, the power of implicit, reflexive, and intuitive thought is illustrated through the ability of the New England Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady to select an open wide receiver in a matter of seconds. I'm not a hardcore sports junkie, but I follow football closely enough to grasp the core insight here: Brady's genius is not in his ability to reflect and process on a conscious level, rather, it is his sharpness of reflexive instinct. A dichotomy between the encapsulated reflexive cognition and reflective conscious thought is common sense. So common that paradigms such as Freudianism rename them in an act of scientification. But in How We Decide you see just how these abstract cognitive concepts relate to the biophysical "wetware." The amygdala which serves as the seat of the emotions, the motive force behind so many of our adaptive instincts. The prefrontal cortex, flexible and forward thinking, but also relatively slow on the uptake. These regions of the bain are also tied together by the chemical "soup," in particular dopamine, which has a critical role in mediating reward. In How We Decide Jonah tunnels through multiple layers of abstraction, from economics to psychology to cognitive neuroscience, down to basic biochemistry. These disparate fields are embedded in a vivid narrative fleshed out by real human beings who serve as concrete illustrations of the complex biobehavioral dance of decision making.

As story proceeds it is clear that the ultimate reality of how humans do decide must take into account the reality that our minds are a collective. The neuroscientific "meat" points us to the physical loci of the individual constituents of the collective, but moral doesn't require a deep understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. No, the issue isn't whether the human mind is divided within itself, it clearly is, it is how that division plays out in everyday life. Though early on Jonah shows how athletes must rely on their emotionally informed instinct, which is in many ways a distillation of previous experience and information, our instincts can also lead us astray. That was of course the topic of Predictably Irrational, and when instincts lead to error we term them "biases." There are clearly situations where one must look to one's rational faculties and overrule instinct. In How We Decide you again encounter the "pain of paying," whereby individuals tend to spend more when putting it on credit than cash. The difference here is that the phenomenon is not simply described, biochemical correlates and the neurological dynamics which undergird are also explored. At each step the concrete behaviors and biases are fleshed out through descriptive neuroscience.

By the end of How We Decide you do in fact have a reasonable map of how humans decide. But there isn't a particular "X" which marks the spot, that optimal mix of emotion, instinct, reflection and rationality, that allows one to decide to maximize utility. Why? Because that is not a matter of neuroscience, but one of philosophy and cultural norms. Perhaps what we should decide would be a topic for a next book?

Related: Also see Neurotopia.

razib Wed, 05/13/2009 - 03:33

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Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

razib — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:42:16 +0000

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

In the wake of Predictably Irrational, check out Tyler Cowen's endorsement of Geoffrey Miller's new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller is a good writer, so I'm assuming it will be a page-turner, but he does tend to be "provocative" in all the best & worst ways when it comes to popular science. Evolutionary psychologists have a tendency to make everything about sex & status, but within the field it seems Miller does come off as the "pimp daddy" always talking about the "bling" and "b**tches" as the raison d'Ãªtre.

razib Wed, 04/29/2009 - 11:42

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For Miller even 9/11 was ultimately about consumerism:

http://www.edge.org/documents/whatnow_print.html#miller

The saying is hackneyed as hell, but applies to Miller: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Aside: The cover of the book makes it look like a Geico caveman spinoff.

We're in a new Victorian Age, as far as Darwinian thinking goes -- there's a lot of good stuff, and a lot of questionable fashionable stuff to meet the ravenous consumer demand. I just hope this isn't like an irrational bubble -- "everything is evolutionary psychology, and we can never be wrong!" -- that will pop and result in an anti-Darwinian backlash, just like the bursting of the Victorian pro-Darwin bubble resulted in the void of evolutionary research in the early 20th C.

The interesting thing about this book by Miller is that he seems to do the impossible, namely to fashion evolutionary psychology into a weapon *for the left* against capitalism.

I generally don't like Miller's POV too much. The exchange he had with Satoshi Kanazawa a few years back was instructive. He frequently gives a pro forma nod of acknowledgement to (say) the heritability of IQ, but then gets right back to bashing Bush and capitalism as if it were somehow controversial or insightful to pile on -- even if he's jumping on the pile from a slightly different angle.

For example, with regard to the snippet that Tyler excerpted, it's not at all apparent to me that marketing and consumerism are net negatives.

First: it is amusing that Miller is almost certainly engaging in a book tour for his work, and probably spent a lot of time picking out the cover and so on. Of course he wanted to bring his product to people's attention and present it in the best possible light. The inherent contradictions here may have passed his notice, just as they most surely have passed Naomi Klein's (aka "Capitalism sucks! Buy my book now!").

Second: marketing is a signal of quality if nothing else. Leaving aside mom's home cooking for now, a product line which puts together a good marketing campaign is probably higher quality than one that can't. It's just like open source code -- stuff that is documented and has a well designed website tends to be better, simply because the guys putting it together had more talent and resources. Compare the Rails website to sourceforge abandonware. First impressions matter.

In other words, Miller as an evolutionary psychologist should realize that *beauty is more than skin deep*. A product which manages to appear "beautiful" often has many attractive properties. Of course there are optical illusions in marketing just as there is plastic surgery and makeup with beauty, but the basic principle is intact.

Third: the people who decry capitalism tend to live in advanced capitalist societies. And the invisible hand of "consumerism" built those societies.

For example:

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2005/03/college_profs_d.html

College Profs Denounce Western Culture, Move to Caves

Cambridge, MA - Two years ago this month, Alan Lowenstein, associate professor of philosophy at Harvard University, came to a fateful conclusion. "I suddenly realized that the oppression of western technology extended to my own life," he explained. "That's when I got rid of my computer, threw away my Brooks Brothers suits, changed my name to Grok and moved into a cave."

Basically, Miller's whole oeuvre rubs me the wrong way because he seems to get off on being seen as an iconoclast while (in practice) refusing to take on the real sacred cows.

"Miller is almost certainly engaging in a book tour for his work"

Last I heard he was spending this semester in Australia.

I'm told that part of the downfall of Postmodernism was the critique, which I first heard from Chomsky but which caught on among the Po-Mos themselves, that all this deconstructing of the enslaving metanarratives, etc., didn't actually result in poor or oppressed people living better lives.

If you wanted to do that, you volunteered in West Africa to administer shots against common but easily treated infections, or you organized a community, or whatever. Academic gobbledygook contributed nothing.

Might we see something similar with the railing against consumerism? If you don't like it, do something about it. Don't just sit there reading Ad Busters and made cute comments. Once people see how bogus a lot of the anti-consumerist stuff is, people will be OK with consumerism.

The interesting thing about this book by Miller is that he seems to do the impossible, namely to fashion evolutionary psychology into a weapon *for the left* against capitalism.

well, i know your opinions in regards to the necessary logical inferences that are made from the sciences of human nature, but it's just not impossible as an empirical matter. on the contrary, there's survey data that most promoters of ev psych lean left personally. i do agree that in his *popular* books miller squeezes as much social liberal juice as possible out of the work in a way that is atypically brazen, but not to be predictable, i think it's a marketing ploy in terms of what sells to his intended audience (e.g., his argument in favor of polygyny implicitly supporting temporary pair bonds). in any case, it seems likely that the nature of the human beast is to rationalize arguments for our preheld views (which we hold for whatever reason) from the set of data on hand, and evolutionary psychologists are no different here (though obviously there's an added irony that they're trapped in their natures when it's their putative discipline).

"the nature of the human beast is to rationalize arguments for our preheld views"

I would go even further. Everyone tries to not just rationalize but sacralize their own lifestyles and worldviews. The religious do it through allegedly supernaturally derived texts and ritual. The scientifically minded - scientists, atheists, so-called "rationalists" - do it through invoking the authority of scientific Truth (which serves the same psychological and sociological function as divine infallibility). And within the scientific/rationalist/atheist community this behavior extends far beyond evolutionary psychology. In fact, outspoken anti-sociobiologists are among the most blatant.

colugo, the tendency is weaker among those with some level of asperger's don't you think?

Miller definitely is doing a book tour. First hit on google for "Geoff Miller book tour":

http://www.amazon.com/Mating-Mind-Sexual-Choice-Evolution/dp/038549517X

I'm really excited about my new book 'Spent', and hope you find it engaging, funny, and provocative.

If you want to find out more about my research, see my university web site:
http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/lg_gmiller.html

I'll be doing a two-week book tour to promote Spent May 15 - June 1.
Events scheduled so far:
San Francisco May 18: Mechanic's Institute
Seattle May 19: Town Hall
Portland May 20: Illahee Institute
Los Angeles My 27-31: Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference.

Razib: That may well be the case.

all this deconstructing of the enslaving metanarratives, etc., didn't actually result in poor or oppressed people living better lives.

Very interesting. It squares with a thought provoking essay I read recently (no endorsement implied by link mind you). And of course it's one of Razib's favorite MOs -- use the master's tools to tear down the master's house, as it were.

I can't deny the effectiveness of the technique in tactical terms. Almost any idea can get a hearing if you pre-emptively blame the other side for being insufficiently leftist -- "how dare you endanger X lives by not using iodine supplements to boost IQ".

I wonder whether puffing up the current God works in strategic terms, though. See my next comment.

--------

well, i know your opinions in regards to the necessary logical inferences that are made from the sciences of human nature, but it's just not impossible as an empirical matter.

Hmmm. We might differ on what you think I think are necessary inferences :)

To clarify: the human sciences mostly serve as impossibility proofs for me. Certain policies have extremely low probabilities of success. Ignoring these constraints or minimizing their importance leads to outcome predictions that are wrong in trivial ways.

Now, it turns out that a lot of the things proven impossible are beloved of the broad left. But sure, you can emphasize aspects of the human sciences that are favorable to the left's worldview. Usually said emphases are rhetorical rather than substantive, but sometimes they are even genuine.

But I guess my view is that insofar as evolutionary psychology has any hard analytic results, an approach of this sort will tend to dilute the truth beyond recognition.

My analogy #1: doing this kind of framing reminds me of how many scientists in ye olden days had to portray their results as supporting the "greater glory of God". Well, ok, if that's what you need to do to get it out there.

My analogy #2: framing evolutionary psychology as favorable to the left is kind of like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh calling a policy "racist". Yeah, tactically that's a win. Everyone will work to avoid the label of "racist". But strategically it's a loss. By adopting the discourse of the left they're building up the taboos of the other team.

On the other hand, my version of your position: framing evolutionary psychology as favorable to the left is similar to the Gramscian campaign waged over the 20th century to make diversity the pinnacle of Americanism. The left didn't out-and-out state their hostility to America** when they were numerically weak. Instead they wrapped themselves in the flag and romanticized the Ellis Island period. (Ironically, if you read Woodrow Wilson or T. Roosevelt on Hyphenated Americans, the Ellis Island period wasn't too romantic when it was contemporary).

The result of this strategy: hilarious episodes, such as the one in which coalitional solidarity got PC Myers to admit an interest in the comparative ethnology of testicular volumes.

** Mencius has an interesting point -- that these anti-Americans really *are* to be viewed as ultra-Americans, as the Constitution was structurally unstable from the get-go. As such, the pose that many of the more cynical among them think is a tactic (aka Alinsky's Rule #4) is actually their historical strategy!

on the contrary, there's survey data that most promoters of ev psych lean left personally.

Sure. Lots of scientist believe in god as well, though. People can compartmentalize, but maintaining referential integrity is nevertheless valuable. When one table is updated with a new fact, you should syllogistically propagate that through to other tables. Joe Schmoe is incapable of such propagation on any time horizon, but that doesn't mean that it should be ruled as impossible. Teasing out the nontrivial implications of the current body of knowledge is what scientists do, after all.

i do agree that in his *popular* books miller squeezes as much social liberal juice as possible out of the work in a way that is atypically brazen, but not to be predictable, i think it's a marketing ploy in terms of what sells to his intended audience (e.g., his argument in favor of polygyny implicitly supporting temporary pair bonds). in any case, it seems likely that the nature of the human beast is to rationalize arguments for our preheld views (which we hold for whatever reason) from the set of data on hand, and evolutionary psychologists are no different here (though obviously there's an added irony that they're trapped in their natures when it's their putative discipline).

Sure. I guess there's a balance here. There's a certain set of ideas that I think are important and underappreciated. Miller has at least a glancing familiarity with some of them. He's written a book. If his net effect is Pinkerish -- to reduce some of the stigma around ev psych -- great. If his net effect is Diamondish or Lewontonian -- namely to furnish the left with half-understood *and wrong* arguments from genetics -- then it's bad.

The latter is what I'm afraid of here.

PS: One can't fail to note that the political valence of said net effect is generally correlated with the biases of the author (Pinker is effectively a man of the right, Diamond on the left). So I don't have high hopes.

PSS: One might ask, "why do you care about the political effect rather than the science itself"? Well, the thing is that the political arena determines what science can be done in this area, so...

By the way, that link by Colugo really is amazing. The worst part of it is noticing just how unexceptional Miller is. Seemingly every voice in that thread calls for us to understand the terrorists, that violence is not the answer, and so on.

Of course, no understanding was ever given to the Oklahoma City Bombers. No courses on the roots of rage, the "true meaning" of their jihad, the structural conditions that could have given rise to their anger, etc. etc. They were just crazy militia guys scared of black helicopters, end of story.

That portrayal is the difference between a movement that the media is sympathetic to and one it utterly condemns.

Additional digressive point: it's often said that seeking to "understand" something is not the same as sympathizing with it. But of course if your goal is to utterly destroy a movement, is there much point in *really* understanding it *on its own terms*? As an example, Nazism was completely destroyed and is ostensibly much studied in school -- but the first time I felt I understood their motives was when I saw 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me'.

"calls for us to understand the terrorists..": so do I, in hopes that it will lead to their more rapid and thorough extermination.

I take it back. Reading the excerpts of Miller on Sailer's blog, I can see that he really doesn't shrink away from pushing some controversial points. I'd only seen excerpts and talks by him where he stresses the "easy" stuff (capitalism sucks!). But since he's actually going to bat for genetics and personality -- i.e. calling out egalitarianism and nurturism by name for scorn -- his book will *overall* be a win.

Jake Young & myself on bloggingheads.tv

razib — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:52:48 +0000

Jake Young & myself on bloggingheads.tv

The episode is titled "your brains & your genes." There's more emphasis on economics than you think.

razib Sun, 04/26/2009 - 09:52

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Razib,

In the course of your conversation with Jake Young you mentioned an economist friend of yours who was working on the relationship between intelligence, time preference and earnings. You also mentioned an economist (the same one?) who was looking to associate genomic studies with economic behavior. Could you provide citations for the relevant articles. I would like to have a look at them.

Thank you.

two different guys. unpublished right now. i would point you to their current pubs, but i'd rather not identify them. i'll link on the blog when the work comes out. as it is i don't even have a working paper in hand, it is just something they told me they were working on.

You both seemed to believe that economic rationality is defined by how you respond to one price signal: that of money. This disregards a host of other things, like the fact that as a scientist you're being paid to play much of the time.

Economics is not really about money and if you read Mises, Hayek, and the other Austrians, they make this clear. Reading Keynes will have you believing that business cycles are inexplicable, saving money is detrimental to society even if it's good for you, and that building pyramids is a legitimate way to "stimulate" a people out of a recession.