The Human Mind

Drive

Posted by Peter on August 31, 2010
Posted in: Economics, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink.

This book explores some of the complexities of what motivates humans. It attacks a stereotype that says only financial rewards matter, and exaggerates the extent to which people adopt that fallacy. His style is similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s, but with more substance than Gladwell.

The book’s advice is likely to cause some improvement in how businesses are run and in how people choose careers. But I wonder how many bosses will ignore it because their desire to exert control over people outweighs their desire to create successful companies.

I’m not satisfied with the way he and others classify motivations as intrinsic and extrinsic. While feelings of flow may be almost entirely internally generated, other motivations that he classifies as intrinsic seem to involve an important component of feeling that others are rewarding you with higher status/reputation.

Shirking may have been a been an important problem a century ago for which financial rewards were appropriate solutions, but the nature of work has changed so that it’s much less common for workers to want to put less effort into a job. The author implies that this means standard financial rewards have become fairly unimportant factors in determining productivity. I think he underestimates the importance they play in determining how goals are prioritized.

He believes the changes in work that reduced the importance of financial incentives was the replacement of rule-following routine work with work that requires creativity. I suggest that another factor was that in 1900, work often required muscle-power that consumed almost as much energy as a worker could afford to feed himself.

He states his claims vaguely enough that they could be interpreted as implying that broad categories of financial incentives (including stock options and equity) work poorly. I checked one of the references that sounded like it might address that (“When performance-related pay backfires”), and found it only dealt with payments for completing specific tasks.

His complaints about excessive focus on quarterly earnings probably have some value, but it’s important to remember that it’s easy to err in the other direction as well (the dot-com bubble seemed to coincide with an unusual amount of effort at focusing on earnings 5 to 10 years away).

I’m disappointed that he advises not to encourage workers to compete against each other without offering evidence about its effects.

One interesting story is the bonus system at Kimley-Horn and Associates, where any employee can award another employee $50 for doing something exceptional. I’d be interested in more tests of this – is there something special about Kimley-Horn that prevents abuse, or would it work in most companies?

Disadvantages of Stories

Posted by Peter on August 12, 2010
Posted in: Investing, The Human Mind.

Tyler Cowen has a good video describing why we shouldn’t be too influenced by stories. He exaggerates a bit when he says

There are only a few basic stories. If you think in stories, that means you are telling yourself the same thing over and over

but his point that stories allow storytellers to manipulate our minds deserves more emphasis. For me, one of the hardest parts of learning how to beat the stock market was to admit that I did poorly when I was influenced by stories, and did well mainly when I relied on numbers that are available and standardized for most companies, and on mechanical rules which varied little between companies (I sometimes use different rules for different industries, but beyond that I try to avoid adapting my approach to different circumstances).

For example, The stories I heard about Enron’s innovative management style gave me a gut feeling that it was a promising investment. But its numbers showed an uninteresting company, and persuaded me to postpone any investment.

But I’ve only told you a story here (it’s so much easier to do than provide rigorous evidence). If you really want good reasons, try testing for yourself story versus non-story approaches to something like the stock market.

(HT Patri).

Hierarchy in the Forest

Posted by Peter on July 20, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm.

This book makes a good argument that a major change from strongly hierarchical societies to fairly egalitarian societies happened to the human race sometime after it diverged from Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Not due to any changes in attitudes toward status, but because language enabled low-status individuals to cooperate more effectively to restrain high-status individuals, and because of he equalizing effects of weapons. Hunter-gatherer societies seem rather consistently egalitarian, and the partial reversion to hierarchy in modern times may be due to the ability to accumulate wealth or the larger size of our societies.

He provides a plausible hypothesis that this change enabled group selection to become more powerful than in a typical species, but that doesn’t imply that group selection became as important as within-group selection, and he doesn’t have a good way of figuring out how important the effect was.

He demonstrates that humans became more altruistic, using a narrow biological definition of altruism, but it’s important to note that this only means agreeing to follow altruistic rules. He isn’t able to say much about how well people follow those rules when nobody notices what they’re doing.

Much of the middle of the book recounting anthropological evidence can be skipped without much loss – the most important parts are chapters 8 and 9.

Breakdown of Will

Posted by Peter on July 8, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Breakdown of Will, by George Ainslie.

This book analyzes will, mainly problems connected with willpower, as a form of intertemporal bargaining between a current self that highly values immediate temptation and future selves who prefer that current choices be more far-sighted. He contrasts simple models of rational agents who exponentially discount future utility with his more sophisticated and complex model of people whose natural discount curve is hyperbolic. Hyperbolic discounting causes time-inconsistent preferences, resulting in problems such as addiction. Intertemporal bargains can generate rules which bundle rewards to produce behavior more closely approximating the more consistent exponential discount model.

He also discusses problems associated with habituation to rewards, and strategies that can be used to preserve an appetite for common rewards. For example, gambling might sometimes be rational if losing money that way restores an appetite for acquiring wealth.

Some interesting ideas mentioned are that timidity can be an addiction, and that pain involves some immediate short-lived reward (to draw attention) in addition to the more obvious negative effects.

For someone who already knows a fair amount about psychology, only small parts of the book will be surprising, but most parts will help you think a bit clearer about a broad range of problems.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

Posted by Peter on April 30, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book Review: Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd.

This book presents serious arguments in favor of using simple rules to make most decisions. They present many examples where getting a quick answer by evaluating a minimal amount of data produces almost as accurate a result as highly sophisticated models. They point out that ignoring information can minimize some biases:

people seldom consider more than one or two factors at any one time, although they feel that they can take a host of factors into account

(Tetlock makes similar suggestions).

They appear to overstate the extent to which their evidence generalizes. They test their stock market heuristic on a mere six months worth of data. If they knew much about stock markets, they’d realize that there are a lot more bad heuristics which work for a few years at a time than there are good heuristics. I’ll bet that theirs will do worse than random in most decades.

The book’s conclusions can be understood by skimming small parts of the book. Most of the book is devoted to detailed discussions of the evidence. I suggest following the book’s advice when reading it – don’t try to evaluate all the evidence, just pick out a few pieces.

Happiness from the Inside Out

Posted by Peter on April 20, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: Happiness from the Inside Out: The Art and Science of Fulfillment by Robert Mack.

This easy to read book describes many of the approaches I’ve used to make myself happier. That makes me somewhat tempted to believe the rest of his advice, but he seems to exaggerate enough that I have some doubts.

Being less concerned about what others think of me is an important part of his advice. But it seems implausible that I can be completely unharmed by other peoples opinions of me. He seems to believe that it’s possible to have a romantic relationship without risking being disappointed by one’s partner. I can somewhat reduce my emotional reaction to a partner not acting as I expected, but complete detachment would seem to make it hard for me to sympathize with a partner when appropriate.

There’s plenty of peer pressure for people to claim to be less susceptible to peer pressure than they actually are, so many people will be unaware of how to reduce those influences. This book’s focus on optimism is likely to distract people from such unflattering insights. You should look elsewhere for awareness of your desires for status, and choose wisely which status hierarchies you want to care about.

His paints a misleadingly gloomy picture of long-term happiness trends in the U.S., by selective evidence such as rising teen suicide rates, but not the fact that overall suicide rates are lower than a few decades ago.

His discussion of the genetic influence on happiness is unnecessarily discouraging. He mentions height as a stereotypical trait influenced by genes. I suggest thinking about hair color – it’s probably more influenced by genes than happiness, yet people who decide their hair should be purple often succeed quickly.

His claim that “Happiness is a particularly personal journey and no amount of data or research can tell you what will bring you happiness” is somewhat misleading – see the book Stumbling on Happiness for a very different perspective.

ADHD and Autism

Posted by Peter on April 2, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

My understanding of Aspergers/autism (AS) and ADHD suggests to me that they can’t coexist in one personality. I keep coming across reports of people having both, and I’ve been trying to research whether those reports result from mistaken diagnoses or whether I’m missing something. I haven’t found any insightful discussion that addresses this directly. I’ve done some research on ADHD recently which clarified my ideas on this subject.

Both produce social problems due to unusual ways in which their attention works, and both involve unusually focused attention, which produce a good deal of overlap in symptoms. But there are many other features for which the two seem opposites.

ADHD – shifts attention easily and quickly in response to new stimuli
AS – slow to shift attention in response to stimuli

ADHD – seeks adrenaline rush from stimulating/risky situations
AS – avoids being overwhelmed by stimulating/risky situations

ADHD – often pays attention to multiple tasks at once
AS – finds multitasking unusually hard

From answers.com:

ADHD – makes inappropriate comments due to being impulsive but realizes afterward it was inappropriate

AS – makes inappropriate comments due to not knowing better and not understanding social conventions

ADHD – forgets details of daily routines

AS – follows daily routines rigidly

From another source:

Children with ADHD frequently break rules they understand, but defy and dislike. Children with Asperger’s Syndrome like rules, and break the ones they don’t understand. They are ever alert to injustice and unfairness and, unfortunately, these are invariably understood from their own nonnegotiable perspective. Children with ADHD are often oppositional in the service of seeking attention. Children with Asperger’s disorder are oppositional in the service of avoiding something that makes them anxious

With all these traits, there are wide variations in the degree to which anyone has them. But most of what I know suggests that people on one side of the AS/ADHD spectrum with regard to one of these traits are almost always on the same side with respect to the others, or else too close to the middle to classify.

Since many of these traits are poorly observed by those who diagnose them (you don’t observe peoples’ daily routines in a doctor’s office), it’s easy to imagine that widespread mistakes in diagnoses create a false impression that AS and ADHD coexist. Does anyone know of a good analysis that disagrees with my conclusion?

[Update 2010-11-15: I’ve gotten some feedback from people with some ADHD traits who don’t clearly fit the pattern I’ve described. Maybe my analysis only works for one subtype of ADHD, or maybe things are too complex for any existing categories to work as well as I’d like.]

The Chimera Hypothesis

Posted by Peter on March 2, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

The Chimera Hypothesis: Homosexuality and Plural Pregnancy makes the surprising claim that:

at least 50-70% of healthy adults are chimeric to some extent.

The hypothesis can explain some homosexual and transgender tendencies, and suggests some reproductive advantages that offset those reproductive disadvantages:

Therefore, women prone to having more than one egg fertilized, but whose pregnancies only resulted in only one live birth, would have the optimum level of fertility. A side effect of this could be an increased incidence of chimerism in human children … even a relatively small increase in female fertility, which is really the limiting factor in human population growth, could outweigh the disadvantage of less fertility in a small number of male infants.

One observation that this hypothesis doesn’t explain is why there are many more homosexuals than transgenders. So my guess is that it explains only a modest fraction of the homosexuality that we observe, but might explain the observed frequency of transgenders fairly well.

Impro

Posted by Peter on January 29, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone.

This book describes aspects of the human mind and social interactions which actors often need to analyze more explicitly than others, because actors need to be aware of the differences between various roles/personalities that they play, whereas unconscious understanding is adequate for people who only interact as a single personality.

The best chapter is about status, and emphasizes the important role that status games play in most social situations and how hard it is to be aware of one’s status-related behavior.

One disturbing claim he makes is that “acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together”. I’m very tempted to deny that I do that (as he predicts most people will deny acting). But I know there’s more happening in social interactions than I’m aware of, so I’m hesitant to dismiss his claim.

The chapter on spontaneity has apparently important insights about the role self-censorship plays in spontaneity and creativity. But I find it hard enough to change my behavior in response to those insights that I can’t be confident he’s correct.

He has the insight that “personality” functions as a public-relations department for the mind. Personality doesn’t seem like quite the right word here, but this is remarkably similar to an idea that Geoffrey Miller later developed from evolutionary theory in his excellent book The Mating Mind.

The chapter on masks and trance is strange and hard to evaluate.