Dressing well and the origins of motivation

One interesting thing that happened over this past year was that I gained an interest in dressing better.  Around October or so, I started reading blogs on men's style.  With this new found information, I had my clothes tailored to fit better, and started shopping for all kinds of different clothing items.  I overhauled my entire closet.  I went from wearing jeans and "witty" t-shirts to wearing ties, sport jackets, and leather brogues on a daily basis.

People who know me are predictably surprised at how I appear now.  Most are supportive, and nearly all are curious as to why I decided to make this change.  This is an interesting question in general.  I have no good answer for them.  How did I develop the interest and motivation to pursue this line of decision making?  It's not like I made a conscious decision one day to change the way I dress.

This sort of thing happened to me before.  I became interested in playing guitar and making music.  I became interested in studying philosophy.  I can't tell you why I all of a sudden became so interested in these things.  They just happened to me.  It's as if a railroad switch went off in my brain, redirecting my attention and effort to certain things, and away from others.

This leads me to conclude that I don't have very much control over the passions and motivations in my life.  If I'm not interested in something, I can't will myself to be interested in it.  Isn't the same true of romance?  We can't make ourselves be attracted to someone, can we?  The only explanation I have at the moment for why we are motivated in the way we are is that we are affected by a variety of external factors.  Some perfect storm of external events and stimuli makes a permanent or long lasting impression on us, thus directing our attention to or away from certain sorts of things in life.

What this seems to imply is that if we want to change our interests or motivations, the best that we can do is to somehow affect external events so that we experience the combination that produces the motivation.  For instance, if we want to be motivated in eating better, we cannot simply will ourselves to make the decisions associated with healthy eating.  Instead, we have to expose ourselves to the sorts of circumstances that will affect our brain in such a way as to develop the motivation to eat more healthily.  Of course what those circumstances are for any type of motivation is a mystery, and there is no guarantee that experiencing a particular cocktail of events will produce the right kind of motivation.

The Purpose of Education: Part Two

In the post right before this one, I listed two different guiding principles that are commonly associated with education.  First, there is education as scholarship.  Second, there is education as a means to economic advantage.

My current take on education is that it's purpose is civic.  Institutionalized education is supposed to train individuals to be good citizens.  What counts as a good citizen in a democratic society?  There are roughly three parts.  First, a good citizen is informed, has beliefs about what constitutes a flourishing society, is able and willing to participate in reasoned debate with disagreeing individuals, is able to evaluate competing claims, is able to cogently articulate her views to others, and so forth.  Second, a good citizen possesses the skills and the motivation to act on her ideas.  This includes voting, participating in civic discourse, tasks related to her vocation, etc.  Third, a good citizen has the desire and ability to act for the good of others, i.e. she has established a solid moral foundation.

This sort of view on education largely subsumes the other two views.  Being an informed citizen requires that one be educated on matters of all sorts, including topics that may not be deemed "practical" for job purposes.  Being an effective citizen requires that one possess the sorts of skills that largely overlap with skills that are pertinent to obtaining jobs.

Anyways, that's my brief take on the purpose of education.  So where does philosophy fit in?  It seems pretty obvious that philosophy plays a central role in developing the informed citizen.  I tell my students that philosophy is the study of ideas.  Philosophers examine the relationship between ideas and other ideas, as well as the relationship between ideas and the world the we observe, both physical and social.  The philosophical method is simply the method of critical thought.  If you are critically examining some claim, then you are doing philosophy.  People trained in philosophy are, ideally, people equipped to critically examine options on display in the marketplace of ideas.

The Purpose of Education

So earlier I wrote a post briefly musing on what I took education to be.  This post is on what the purpose of education is supposed to be.

The kind of education I have in mind here is what I call "institutionalized education."  This is the sort of education that occurs in publicly and privately funded schools from pre-kindergarten to graduate studies.  Institutionalized education is typically what first comes to mind among most individuals when they consider the meaning of the term, "education."

What is the purpose and function of institutionalized education?  There seem to me two general answers to the question: one is scholarly, the other is economic.

The scholarly purpose of education might be for the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake.  Under this guidelines, schools would train its students to acquire new knowledge as effectively as possible.  This typically entails training students in the methodologies of various fields, like the scientific method, probability/statistics, formal logic, hermeneutics, etc.

The economic purpose of education treats education as instrumental in nature.  Education is the means to which one can achieve a certain socio-economic status in life.  How is this so?  Society has used education as a filtering mechanism for its work force.  I guess the idea is that getting a degree, whether high school, college, or graduate school, is somehow supposed to indicate some kind of success in the workforce, that would be harder to attain without the degree.  Education along these lines typically entails teaching methods and informational content that would considered assets in the job market.

Either purpose is fine when considered independently.  The problems arise when educational institutions are charged to do both.  At least at the collegiate level, institutions regard themselves as being charged with the purpose of scholarly education.  However, education costs money.  It costs money to build classrooms, pay teachers, and procure lab equipment or teaching tools.  So, while many colleges would like to be viewed as institutions of scholarly education, economic realities often dictate that the pursue education along economic lines.  People view education as the means by which individuals and families can obtain economic stability.  This view influences the public funding of education, as well as the enrollment and alumni giving at private schools.

When schools view themselves as providing both scholarly and economic types of education, tensions can arise as to how to distribute limited resources.  When money's tight, do you cut back on departmental budgets uniformly?  Or do certain departments experience greater setbacks?

Here are a few things that I wonder about.  Is it true that most colleges and universities are trending towards a more economic view of education?  If so, is this a good, bad, or neutral thing?  More generally, is education only instrumentally viable, or is the pursuit of knowledge valuable for its own sake?  If we believe the latter, why?

The Original State of Human Nature

In an earlier post, I briefly discussed my thoughts on Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The book attempts to explain why certain societies came to dominate over others.  What I found fascinating was learning how technology developed, and the role that it played in the history of nations.

Now, I'm interested in how culture is affected by technology.  In order to get a better handle on this project, it's helpful to know what culture was like at the dawn of human civilization.  Did individuals during this time have moral beliefs?  If so, what were they?  How can we even know if these individuals had moral beliefs, and if they did, what these beliefs were?

Diamond, in his new book, The World Until Yesterday, speculates on the culture of proto-societies by observing hunter-gatherer groups still present today.  How much one can infer about the state of humans back in the day by observing these groups is a matter of debate.  For one thing, these groups have often interacted with modern societies, thus introducing some cultural contamination.

Another possibility is to make inferences based on archaeological findings.  We can look at the sort of stuff these people had and infer what might be important to them.  The argument goes as follows.  If people are willing to take the time and effort to make stuff, then the function of the things that they make reflect their own values.  Something like that.

I don't know very much about archaeology, but I think I can make some rather general claims about the values of early man.

Early man valued survival.  This much is obvious.  It seems that the first stage in the development of technology was the crafting of rudimentary tools to hunt and to gather food.

Other than survival, what did early man value?  How about procreation?  That would be the second part of the Darwinian theoretical tag team.  It's obvious that early man reproduced.  It might be safe to say that reproduction was important to early man.  But here there are some questions.  Why not reproduction with anyone and everyone?  Was early man selective in choosing their mating partners?  If so, why?  One standard answer might be that human infants are not like other animals in that they can hit the ground running.  They require a lot of care and maintenance before they become independent.  Just making babies without caring for them would result in a lot of dead babies, and a lot of wasted effort.  However, caring for babies is costly.  The woman caring for the baby incurs a large cost, and thus may have an incentive to be picky about who she mates with.

This might explain that it's not just reproduction that matters, but reproduction of a certain kind.  It's all about the guy trying to woo the girl, and the girl trying to keep the guy after.  This narrative is present in all of human history.  I'll call this sort of thing, "courtship reproduction."

So, it might be safe to say that there were at least two values held by early man, survival and courtship reproduction.  A few questions follow.  First, were these the only values?  Are all other values derivative of these two.  Second, how were these values affected by the development of technology?  For instance, the development of technology can make survival easier.  If survival isn't as hard as it used to be, what happens then?  How are human values affected?

Thinking, Fast and Slow, A Catalog of Fallacies: Part 4

Now for the fourth part of the book, and the last part of this series.  This part focuses on the disparity between the image of the rational agent in classical economics and the image of the agent as observed by psychology.

Reference Point
A reference point is a context, usually quantitative, relative to which a person bases decisions involving risk.  For instance, a person with $100 may be offered a bet in which she has 50% chance of winning $70, and a 50% chance of losing $70.  The $100 is the reference point.  People have been shown to behave differently at different reference points.  Someone who has more money is less likely to be risk averse.

Endowment Effect
This describes the behavior of individuals with respect to highly prized items.  Once an individual obtains a sought after item for a certain price, she is unwilling to to sell it at a price that is significantly higher than the price she bought it for.  Our emotional attachment to items prevents us from behaving as rational actors in a market.

Loss Aversion
Occurs when the individual inflates the potential cost of losses.  This is partly derivative of the endowment effect.

Negativity Dominance
A psychological phenomenon wherein potentially negative states loom larger in the mind than positive.

Possibility Effect
Utility increases disproportionately when the likelihood of a desired outcome goes from zero to some small positive number.

Certainty Effect
Like the possibility effect, utility increases disproportionately when the likelihood of a desired outcome goes from some high probability to 100%.  We tend to overweight desired outcomes that are certain, as opposed to desired outcomes that have a high, but not certain probability of occurring.

The possibility and certainty effect also applies to losses.  We tend to overweight small risks, and are willing to pay more to eliminate them altogether.

The bottom line is that improbable outcomes are overweighted, whereas certain outcomes are underweighted.

The possibility and certainty effect combine to form what Kahneman calls the "Fourfold Effect"



This model can be used explain how people behave with respect to rare events.

Disposition Effect
A bias in which an individual makes decisions based on short term gains.

Sunk Cost Fallacy
The decision to invest additional resources in a losing prospect when better investments are available.

Taboo Tradeoff
This describes the resistance individual place against any tradeoff that increases risk, even if the increase in risk is acceptable, and potential gives better yields in the long run.

Fear of losses seems to be a powerful explanatory tool in behavioral economics.

Love me some Shugo Tokumaru.  His music sounds like the soundtrack to a Lewis Carroll novel.  This video sums it up nicely.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, A Catalog of Fallacies: Part 3

Alrighty, stuff from part three of the book.  This part of the book focuses on biases that result in overconfidence about the outcome of future events.

Narrative Fallacy
This occurs when we use flawed stories to construct causal narratives of events, which we use in turn to shape our expectations of the future.  Examples include Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories that have us believe that hard work and indomitable character lead inevitably to success.

Hindsight Bias
When asked to reconstruct their past beliefs, people retrieve their current ones instead, and many cannot believe that they ever believed differently.

Outcome Bias
When outcomes are bad, people often blame decision-makers for not seeing what they took to be the obvious.  However, the obvious only appears after the fact.

Illusion of Validity
Self-explanatory.  There are processes of inference and decisions-making that have been empirically shown to be unreliable, but they still "feel" like they are valid forms of inference.

Illusion of Skill
Derivative of illusion of validity.  It looks like certain jobs and positions are highly skilled, when in fact they do marginally better than decisions made by a computer algorithm.

The Inside View
The perspective taken from within an objective oriented group.  This leads to the planning fallacy.

Planning Fallacy
Committed when forecasts are unrealistically close to best case scenarios.

Thinking Fast and Slow, A Catalog of Fallacies: Part 2

Okay, now on to the fallacies.  In part two of the book, Kahneman goes over what he calls "Heuristics and Biases."  Here's the list.

The Law of Small Numbers
People often generalize from too small a sample size.  What happens is that System 1 looks for some sort of causal explanation to some phenomenon when there really is no causal explanation.

Anchoring Effect
When trying to provide some sort of numerical estimation, individuals can be primed by suggestive numbers.  For instance, when asked how much someone would contribute to a charity, a suggested donation influenced their answers upwards or downwards depending on the amount suggested.

Availability Heuristic
Our beliefs about the size of a particular group or the frequency of a particular occurrence is affected by how many examples we can bring to mind of the group or appearance.

Affect Heuristic
This occurs when System 1 substitutes a question regarding fact and probability with a related question about how an individual feels emotionally about a particular claim.

Representativeness
Individuals will often use stereotypes to determine whether someone or something is a member of a particular group.  They often do this while at the same time ignoring base rate probability.

Conjunction Fallacy
This occurs when someone judges that the conjunction of two events is more probably than any one of those events.

Regression to the Mean
Exceptionally good or bad performances will likely be followed by either poorer or better performances respectively.  This is simply due to statistics, but people often misattribute this pattern to talent or lack thereof.

I'll cover part 3 in a later post.

Thinking Fast and Slow, A Catalog of Fallacies: Part 1

I also just recently finished reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.  For my convenience, I'm going to catalog all of the different sorts of biases that Kahneman observes in our decision making making process.

First, the set up.  Kahneman holds that there are two aspects to the psychology of decision making.  He calls them System 1 and System 2.  System 1 is the fast, impulsive, intuitive aspect of decision making.  System 2 is the slow, deliberative, calculative aspect of decision making.  Our decision making process involves one or both of these systems, depending on all sorts of environmental and personal factors.

Okay, some tidbits about these systems.

First, System 2 expends more mental energy than System 1.  Usually we're not inclined to use System 2 unless circumstances require it.  System 2 is what Kahneman calls the "lazy controller."  One consequence from this observation is that System 1 will make lots of decisions based on unreliable methods, and System 2 will not be called into service because the individual may believe those methods to be sound.

A major lesson here is that we often take the path of least resistance when it comes to decision making.  When are more inclined to decide in favor of x if x coheres with a particular narrative that we've constructed, if x is easier to understand, if x is at the forefront of our attention, or if x is presented by an individual that we are drawn to for whatever reason.  Furthermore, Kahneman notes that many of our decisions are based solely on information we have on hand, regardless of how incomplete that information might be.  He calls this "what you see is all there is," WYSIATI for short.

One aspect of System 1 is that a decision made via System 1 is often affected by information received from the environment just prior to the decision.  A form of this kind of effect is what Kahneman calls "priming."  Priming occurs when environmental factors, regardless of how tangentially related they are, affect your cognitive state, which in turns affects your decision making process.  For example, a recent marital break up can prime an employer to view job candidates differently, without his or her noticing it.

This sort of associative thinking is a big part of the System 1 process.  Often we analogize decision-making factors, even when those analogies are inappropriate.  For instance, we often replace the question we're given with one that seems analogous and easier to answer.  If we're asked, "How much would we give to contribute to save an endangered species?" we might replace this with "How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?"

Okay, so that's about it as far as set up goes.  Fallacies next.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: Reflections

I recently just finished listening to the audiobook version of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.  It's a fascinating book fill with all kinds of tidbits and facts about anthropology.  The book breaks down as follows.

We observe the following:  Some nations have dominated and colonized other nations and groups in modern history.

What best explains this observation?

Diamond divides up the explanation between proximate and ultimate causes.  The proximate causes, i.e. what more directly explains this fact about history is that the dominating countries had the technology, communication via writing, and political structure that provided the means by which they could colonize other lands and subjugate other societies.  Moreover, the germs and diseases carried by members of dominating societies decimated those of the conquered societies.  These proximate causes are what are summed up in the title "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

The ultimate causes are supposed explain why certain societies ended up with the guns, germs, and the steel.  For Diamond, there is one ultimate cause: food production.  Societies that settled down and mass produced food, as opposed to hunter-gatherer groups, were the ones that ended with the means to advance technology, form complex political organizations, and build immunity to certain kinds of diseases.

Much of the book goes on to explain in detail what sorts of environmental factors led certain societies to transition into agrarian food producers.  It also attempts to establish the causal connections between mass food production and advancements in technology, writing, and political organization, as well as the introduction of certain diseases that proved to be fatal to other groups.  The last third book consists of case studies on various groups.

Here are two thoughts about this book.  First, what Diamond deems as ultimate and proximate causes give necessary conditions, but themselves don't seem jointly sufficient.  Stuff like technology gives groups the ability to invade and conquer someone else's land, but technology itself doesn't compel groups to go out and take other peoples' lands.  Why do people feel the need to take over other societies?  Where does this motivation come from?  There doesn't seem to be much in terms of explanation regarding the collective psychological of dominating societies.

This in turn leads to another thought.  The desire to expand and conquer, is this desire innate?  I'm of course interested in the intersection between culture and technology, so it would be good to get some idea of what culture was like at the dawn of civilization.  Did early man have values?  A sense of aesthetic?  In general, what sorts of normative beliefs did the earliest hunter-gatherer groups share?  Having some idea about this helps us to see how those beliefs might have evolved as technology progressed.  This I'll save for a later post.