Eagleman on free will

When I originally blogged about this, I had just heard an interview with David Eagleman on NPR.  He is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine and runs the Laboratory for Perception and Action there.  The interview was on remodeling the prison system using what we have learned about neuroscience.

But now that I have read his book Incognito, which deals with mental function in much wider detail, I want to expand a bit on the subject.  This is really interesting whether you are into psychology, ethics, philosophy, or just human nature in general.

Much of the book delves into the nature of consciousness and the idea of free will (he is a neuroscientist after all).  He uses a newspaper analogy, but I think a caucus illustrates his ideas a little better.  Imagine a really large organization (e.g. the Republican party) making a decision (e.g. passing a law) on a particular subject (e.g. the ceiling on government debt).  The brain is made up of all the people in the party.  They all may agree, or there can be dozens of different opinions on the subject.  Some people might have more influence than others.  Most of the wrangling goes on behind the scenes.  It's like the proverbial sausage-making.  A disorganized process that creates something that looks organized when it comes out.  

Consciousness is a reading of the law that gets passed.  Consciousness doesn’t know what all the opinions were or how many people lobbied for each one.  All consciousness knows is what got passed.  Most of our mental processing is made up of the unconscious caucus/sausage making while our consciousness is limited and often a misrepresentation of what happened in the unconscious processing (what sensations and ideas pushed the unconscious to make a decision in a particular way).  We constantly make up explanations to justify why we do what we do, but often these are wrong.  We don’t realize they are wrong, it’s just that we only had access to the final law that was passed, not the original debate.  We try to make up logical explanations for why such a law was passed, but as with real laws (and sausage making), the final result rarely looks like what went in.  Or to paraphrase A Few Good Men, “you can’t handle the truth.”  It is way too illogical.

This is a problem for free will.  What does that term even mean?  Our consciousness thinks that we are exerting free will, but much of the processing is going on unconsciously and is based on genetics, pre-natal and growing up experiences that were beyond our control, and other things that go against the idea of “free.”  It is not just nature versus nurture.  Even most of the nurture is really beyond our control.  So he can’t answer the question of whether we have free will, he doesn’t think that the concept really makes sense epistemologically. 

The reason I love this particular book is that Eagleman is a real neuroscientist. He takes a very  complicated subject and makes it accessible.  But unlike Gladwell’sbooks, he is much more than a journalist so his descriptions, analogies, and explanations are more accurate.  Nothing against Gladwell, but there is always a book on the same topic, written by a real scholar, that is better.

In Chapter Six, Eagleman applies these ideas to punishment, particularly in the legal system (like the interview I blogged about earlier).  Imagine a 6-year old girl who writes with crayon all over the wall (his example).  You would expect her parents to punish her to teach her a lesson.  But what if she was sleepwalking when she did it?  You would instead expect that her parents would seek treatment.  But these are just two ends of a continuum.  What if she was awake, but had never been taught that this was wrong?  What if she had limited cognitive ability and couldn’t understand the difference between allowed and unallowed behavior?  What if she is a bad girl because of genetic influences that originated from her parents?  In fact, each of these are continua.  People aren’t absolutely good or bad, they are somewhere along the spectrum.  People are cognitively able or unable, they are somewhere along the spectrum (or many spectra).  People aren’t knowledge or unknowledgeable, they are somewhere along the spectrum.  And on and on.

Now extend this to our legal system.  As Eagleman describes, we (the U.S.)  assume that people either had the capacity to understand their crime or they didn’t.  They either had the intention to do the crime, or they didn’t.   They either understood the consequences of the crime, or they didn’t.  If the answer to any of these questions is no, we don’t prosecute the perpetrator of the act criminally.  Either they get off completely, or they get “sentenced” to medical treatment which ends when/if they get better.

What does he recommend instead?  He says instead of focusing on blame and culpability based on a concept of free will that doesn’t exist, we should focus the legal system on modifiability.  We should take the steps that will modify the person so they don’t do it again.  This may involve prison time.  It may involve “pre-frontal workouts” to give the person better impulse control.  It could be surgical intervention to remove a brain tumor that is causing a mental defect (he cites lots of these in the book, including one where a tumor caused pedophilia to appear out of nowhere, and then disappear when the tumor was removed.  Luckily this person had a smart wife who got him surgical treatment before he committed a crime.).  

There are other components of criminal punishments beyond rehabilitation.  There is some value to society of getting a feeling of retribution.  There is some amount of punishment needed for deterrence.  He is against the former (considering it the equivalent of vigilantism) and ignores the latter (I think because he assumes nobody would commit any behavior they knew was wrong if they had impulse control, no matter how valuable the results might be). 

I am not sure if I am 100% on the same page as he is, but it definitely brings up some very interesting points.  I would recommend to anyone interested in the psychology of human mental processing, the philosophy of free will, or the ethics of the legal system to read this book. 

Strategic Use of Twitter

When Twitter first came out, I thought it was the silliest thing ever.  And the way it was first used was pretty silly.  Even founder Biz Stone didn’t know what it would be used for, and if Paula Poundstone thought it was narcissistic, something must be wrong.

But there are some strategic uses of Twitter that I strongly recommend.  These uses can be used for career advancement, advancing a hobby or just learning something new.  140 characters is too short to present anything real.  But it is enough space to include a title and link.  In essence, Twitter is the ultimate tool to filter the immense volume of content on the Internet and present only what is really valuable.  Google searching is not precise enough for this.  And scanning through full blogs takes too long.  But with Twitter you can scan a hundred tweets in five minutes and either read the good links or save them for later.  But you will have found them.  And the person you are following who showed it to you gets some of the credit and branding. 

So for me, one of my hobbies is the intersection of technology and business.  So I follow Wired magazine, Fast Company magazine, and Harvard Business Review.  There are very few friends who’s minute by minute activities are worth following, so I can limit my feed to just them. 

And as a tweeter, I can provide my followers with just what I think will be really valuable to them.  If I am good at that, I will create a brand for myself.  I have no data to back this up, but I would stake a big chunk of my social networking reputation on the fact that I am more likely to get a consulting job when the client follows me on twitter.  And if you are applying for a job, if half the team follows you on twitter you have a big leg up on the job. 

Instinct Blindness

I was reading Incognito by David Eagleman and he used the term “instinct blindness” to refer to the lack of attention and resulting lack of memory traces from tasks that have become automatic (or that started out that way – hence the term instinct).  I have used the similar term “inattention blindness” to refer to the similar phenomenon when you don’t notice things write in front of you when your attention is on something else.  I like the use of the term blindness because unlike the novice mental model that the human visual system are like a video camera, it shows how blind we really are.  These events literally never register in our attention or situation awareness and never establish a memory trace.  Unless something salient happens, it will stay that way.  Just as if you were blind.

Teams and Specialization

I read an excellent white paper yesterday on the pros and cons of having teams specialize in particular skills.  The example they studied was searching through knowledge databases, but I think the findings are relevant to all kinds of specialization. 

The basic idea of the study is that you have a few people in a team specialize in a specific task (in contrast to having everyone do the task on their own), there are positive and negative consequences.  On the positive side, these people get very good at the task, so they tend to do it quickly.  The speed of the team’s progress increases.  Using the example in the white paper, when one person becomes a specialist at searching through the company databases, she gets good at creating sophisticated queries navigating through the database, and understanding what content is available and what isn’t. 

BUT there is a downside.  If you ask this person to do your search for you, he/she may be good at searching, but won’t get as much out of the search as you would have.  First, she may not understand the context of the problem you are trying to solve.  So she may miss the most applicable solution while looking for one that seems better from her limited perspective.  Also, there may be gaps in the communication back and forth, so part of the question or part of the answer may be lost or misunderstood. 

They also looked at the effects of teams that are either geographically dispersed or working in highly dynamic environments.  These kinds of teams need to use the organizational database more.  But they are hurt more by this specialization because the problems of misunderstood context or communication are even bigger.  There is less sharing of information when team members are geographically dispersed.  And shared information may no longer be accurate or relevant in highly dynamic environments.  

To take a completely different kind of example, imagine you have someone on the team who specializes is visual design.  By getting more practice and experience, this person may develop a lot of skills in knowing what colors go together or how to arrange objects on a screen to promote symmetry and balance.  But when you ask this expert to do the visual part of your design, she may not understand the message you are trying to get across in your design.  What are the tradeoffs between speed and accuracy?  Friendliness and professionalism?  Brand consistency and task effectiveness?  You can tell her, but she won’t really know it as well as you do.  The design will be done faster, but perhaps not as precise for this specific situation.

Imagine if you have one person in a clothing store who develops expertise in dealing with difficult customers.  Whenever a customer is difficult, you bring in the ‘expert.’  By getting all this practice, the expert gets really smooth at calming people down.  But by not knowing the exact problem as well as you do, there is more chance of a misunderstanding.  

Team management is a particular interest of mine, so I found these findings to be very important.  Did you??

Freakonomics wants you to quit.

NPR played a Freakonomics Radio special on quitting. It was very interesting because it is applicable in two areas that a lot of people have trouble with.

The first is also referred to as the fast fail model.  Try 100 things, quit the bottom 98 as fast as possible so you can do the best 2 effectively.  The faster you can quit the less successful ones, the more options you can try out and the more likely you are to find the best ones.  But it is hard because we have trouble letting go of our ideas.  When you start out thinking an idea might be a good one, we get cognitive dissonance admitting it is not.  We also suffer from confirmation bias (among others) when evaluating the idea, so we may think it is better than it really is.  Developing the skill of failing fast is very useful, especially in areas such as innovation and kaizen.

They also apply the idea of quitting to career development.  Think of the opportunity costs of continuing to work at a job or in an industry that you don't like.  Sunk cost fallacy tells us that we focus on all the years and time we have already wasted in this field so we can't switch now.  But it's called a fallacy for a reason.  It is never too late.  For young IEs out there, think about the industry where you work, the experience you are getting, and the expertise you are building.  Is this what you want to do? If not, the sooner you quit the sooner you can get on a path to what you do want.  And the sooner you do it, the easier it is because you have less cognitive dissonance and less sunk cost bias.  Is it too late if you are 50 and dissatisfied with your career?  Nope!!  Even then, you can apply what you have learned in one area to another that might be more meaningful to you.  There were lots of great examples on the radio/podcast special (no IEs of course :-D). 

Quitting is even harder when the thing you need to quit is part of your identity and self-image.  Musicians who have tried to build their rock band career, actors who have been trying to build an acting career, minor league baseball players after 10 years in the minors, etc.  Rock/acting/baseball isn't just what they do, it's who they are.  We can have similar situations in IE.  Perhaps all your life, even as a kid, you were a "car guy."  You were working on cars with your dad when you were 5 years old.  Everyone knew you would get a job in the car industry.  IE was just the particular path you chose.  But now you are 45 and realize it isn't meaningful any more.  Admitting this to yourself (and to everyone you have known your whole life) is tough.  Many people can't do it.  Some go to therapy to develop the strength to do it.  

But do it, whatever it takes.  You spend more time at work than doing anything else.  It should be something that makes you feel good at the end of the day.  When you love what you do, you don't have to "work" a day in your life.  And this happiness transfers to other parts of your life.  You become a better spouse, parent, friend, and more. 

Compensation v Incentives

The last couple of papers from the Happiness Research Conference had an interesting point-counterpoint kind of style regarding taxation and incentives.

Let's assume for a moment that married people have approximately $100,000 worth of extra happiness over their lifetime (this is the population average for the U.S.).  So if you were creating an ideal tax system, would your goal be to compensate for this by creating a marriage penalty that over a lifetime would give a single person an extra $100,000?  Or would you create an incentive for people to get married by giving a tax deduction for it and expect that the lost tax revenue is worth the extra happiness you have created.  But would marriages that are pushed by tax incentives create the same happiness as natural ones?  Maybe you are decreasing happiness because you are motivating some mad marriages.  Wow, this social engineering is tough.

There was a similar debate on age.  We have all heard that it is important to invest when you are young because of the magic of compound interest.  This article complements that thought by suggesting a high consumption tax on status-building goods.  If one person buys a status-building product, he/she gets happier but everyone else gets less happy.  So the aggregate societal happiness goes down.  We should discourage this (according to one argument) by having high taxes on these goods.  It is worse when young people do it because it creates a lifetime of one-ups-man-ship and middle aged people feel worse when younger people have status products that they don't.  So we could have high taxes on status-building products that are graduated so that we let older people enjoy the money they have earned but tax the young people;s status consumption and try to shift their money into investment.

The papers really are putting up strawmen as examples of what governments could do.  None of the authors are suggesting actually doing any of this.  But it does get you thinking.

Jury awards for pain and suffering

A paper by Cass Sunstein (Harvard B-School prof and currently in Obama administration) has some interesting insights into jury awards for pain and suffering.  It turns out, they usually have it backwards.  The kinds of injuries/conditions that people tend to get used to over time are the ones that juries see as very salient and so they make big awards.  This includes things like lost limbs.  But over time, the injured starts focusing on other things.  When eating a good meal, you can forget about a lost leg for a while.

On the other hand, chronic issues that we never habituate to are underestimated by juries and get small pain and suffering awards.  Things like chronic pain continue to ruin that good meal for the rest of your life.  But it is less salient to juries, so the awards are smaller.

He recommends creating guidelines based on a series of detailed studies that measure (at a general level) how bad different kinds of injuries/conditions are over time and creating award guidelines that reflect the experience the injured party will really go through, not just what it seems like to an ignorant jury.

Something I had never though about.  But it makes sense.  For a deeper and broader analysis, here is a Yale Law School prize winning paper on the topic.

Subtle Persuasion

The Skeptic column in Scientific American has a great article on decision making biases.  It’s like Michael Shermer (the columnist) took my class.  His basic message is that our decisions are based more on emotions and frames than they are on the actual facts.  He highlights confirmation bias, anchoring, and authority.  Then he has a great addition – the meta-bias.  This is the bias blind spot – we see bias in others but not in ourselves.

Then the Anti-Gravity column was about persuasion.  Steve Mirsky (columnist) uses car salesmen as an example but is really talking about persuasion strategies in general.  He mentions some of the good ones.  Establishing rapport creates in-group bias and likeability bias.  Then he said the salesman told him the price was available just for that day (scarcity).  The salesman also did some nice extra things to create reciprocity bias.  

These are very good things to know before getting into a persuasion environment (either as consumer or persuader). It works on juries, consumers, an even dealing with relatives.