- Scott realizes that his experience with psychotherapy isn’t anything like those of his colleagues
- Scott’s patients give calm and considered analyses of their problems
- His colleague’s patients all have emotional breakdowns
- Scott’s supervisor notes that he seems to be “uncomfortable with dramatic expressions of emotion”, even when he’s trying to hide that fact about himself
- This means that Scott’s lack of success with psychodynamic therapies may be due more to his own personality than the limitations of psychodynamic therapies themselves
- Paranoia and Williams Syndrome
- Paranoia is a common symptom of many psychiatric disorders, most notably schizophrenia
- The troubling thing about paranoia is how gradual it is
- Instead of thinking the CIA is after you with mind-control rays, you’ll just interpret ambiguous social signals in a slightly more negative fashion
- This can lead to a self-reinforcing feedback loop, as you become more and more standoffish in response to perceived slights from others
- Williams Syndrome is the opposit of paranoia
- People with Williams Syndrome are “pathologically trusting”
- Completely incapable of believing that another person might lie to them or cause them harm
- While it is usually coupled with mental retardation, IQ doesn’t appear to have much of an impact on the severity of Williams Syndrome
- It seems like threat detection is decoupled from conscious analysis
- Psychiatric disorders are often the extremes of normal human variation
- For every person who is diagnosed with Williams Syndrome there are probably a dozen who are just more “trusting” than normal
- Our sense data is underdetermined
- Each data point perceived by our senses can often be interpreted in multiple ways
- This is true both of “low-level” sensory data, like vision and sound, and “high-level” data, like social cues
- Most people are able to navigate this ambiguity by using “context”, i.e. priors
- However, these priors can and do vary from person to person, leading to differences in how two people will interpret exactly the same data
- Just as there’s a spectrum from introverted to extraverted, there may be a spectrum from paranoid to Williams Syndrome
- Bubbles
- 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists
- However, even though Scott isn’t excluding people on the basis of politics, religion or class, he has approximately zero friends who are young-earth creationists
- Some other bubbles that Scott lives in:
- Transgender - people in Scott’s bubble are 20x as likely to be trans as the general population
- 2x as many Asians as the general population
- Half as many African Americans as the general population
- Depression, OCD and autism are overrepresented
- Drug addiction and alcoholism are underrepresented
- Programmers are overrepresented at 10x the Bay Area average
- None of these bubbles were intentionally created
- Some of these bubbles have persisted in the face of conscious efforts to break them
- This phenomenon of bubbles is something that Scott thinks of when he meets serial abuse victims
- Serial abuse victims are people who have been abused by multiple people, often over the course of their entire lives
- Often abused by the person they turn to seek relief from their original abuser
- Offensive explanation: serial abuse victims seek out abusers because they’ve internalized a model that defines an abusive relationship as “correct”
- While this may be true of some victims, it doesn’t seem to be true of many
- Many go to great lengths to avoid abusers, but it doesn’t seem to matter
- Maybe they’re stuck in a bubble of abusers, in the same way that Scott is stuck in a bubble of transgender computer programmers
- Discrimination
- Some women in the tech. industry face a constant litany of harassment and discrimination, whereas other women go their entire careers without experiencing a single harassment event
- Doesn’t appear to be any correlation between industries, companies or physical attractiveness
- Given the baseline rates of discrimination as reported, it’s extremely statistically unlikely that someone would be able to go decades without being harrassed even once
- The two forces of self-selected bubbles and the ambiguity of social cues can combine to create different worlds for different people
- People unconsciously self-select into bubbles
- People vary in how they perceive social interactions
- Discrimination is rarely as blatant (these days) as people being called out for their race or gender directly
- There is usually some room for interpretation (“Was I being harrassed or discriminated against there?”) which means that different people will perceive discriminatory experiences differently
- Are people basically good or basically evil?
- Some say the world is full of hypocritical backstabbers
- Others say the world is full of basically decent people who are hampered by communications difficulties and differences of values
- It’s possible that both sides are correct because they see different slices of the world
- This applies on many axes, not just good/evil
- Are people basically rational or basically emotional?
- Are people welcoming or shunning of outsiders
- The concept of “privilege” gets part of the way there, but privilege has the limitation of insisting that these differences in experience have to line up along pre-determined categories like race, gender, or class
- Knowing that someone lives in a different world from you can go a long way towards making their behavior more comprehensible
- The narrative fallacy
- Typical biographies start out by describing people’s younger lives and try to show how their early lives would inevitably lead to their later success
- Example: pretty much every sports biography has the same form:
- Natural gift for the sport
- Parent or coaches that pushed them to strive for excellence
- Hard work ethic
- Some kind of adversity or life-impacting event
- We don’t stop to ask ourselves why this person achieved this level of success when thousands of other people who have the same background were not able to
- Narratives cause us to miss the influences of luck and timing
- Narratives cause us to ignore the mathematical rules of probability - “Linda problem”
- Narratives cause us to ignore regression to the mean
- All success stories have a fair amount of luck in them
- Eventually luck runs out and performance drops back towards the average
- This doesn’t mean that the person or organization is any worse than they used to be, only that they’re not as lucky as they used to be
- The problem with narratives is that we make them predictive, and by doing so, we make them seem more real than they actually are
- The reason-respecting tendency
- People are willing to comply with those who give reasons, even when those reasons are absurd or meaningless
- This is because reasons allow us to build narratives
- This is why teaching that gives reasons for facts is so much more effective than rote memorization of the facts themselves
- This means that our best teaching, learning and storytelling methods (those involving reasons and narrative) can also cause us to make our worst mistakes
- How do we help ourselves out of this quagmire?
- Become aware of the problem
- The key question to ask is, “Out of the population of X subject to the same initial conditions, how many turned out similarly to Y?”
- “What other hard-to-measure causes may have played a role?”
- Modern scientific thought is built on top of efforts to solve this problem
- The notion of a hypothesis comes from the fact that people recognized that simple narrative explanations were not sufficient
- Narratives have to be experimentally tested before they can be accepted as “true” cause-and-effect relationships
- Another question we can ask ourselves is, “Of the population not subject to initial conditions X, how many ended up with the results of Y?”
- Which athletes had intact families and easy childhoods, but ended up in professional sports anyway?
- Which corporations didn’t follow the recommendations laid out in business books, but ended up successful anyway?
- We can reduce our vulnerability to the narrative fallacy simply by consuming less narrative
- Stop watching TV news
- Be skeptical of biographies, memoirs and personal histories
- Be careful of writers who claim to be writing facts, but are talented at painting a narrative
- When making an important decision, write down why you made it ahead of time, and then go back to see whether your reasoning was correct
- Favor experimentation over storytelling
- Some people just don’t have visual imaginations
- Assumed that when other people where talking about visualizing objects, they were speaking metaphorically
- Got so good at talking about these experiences in metaphorical terms that people with visual imaginations thought that people without visual imaginations were having visual experiences
- Only when Galton conducted detailed surveys did he find out that there is in fact a broad variation in people’s ability to form mental images
- Some people don’t have the ability to smell (anosmia)
- Can go for years without realizing that they don’t have this ability
- Often realize that they lack this sense when they’re asked detailed questions about smells themselvesz
- So what other “fundamental” experiences are people missing out on
- Asexuality - for most people, sex isn’t gross or weird
- Emotional blunting - while on SSRIs, Scott suspects that he might have no emotions or very little emotion
- Just thought that everyone else was being dramatic and overexuberant
- Even when he noticed himself not having emotions, he dismissed it as unlikely
- Only learned later that emotional blunting is a common side-effect of SSRIs
- Passion for music
- Scott doesn’t really enjoy jazz - at most gets a half-hearted tendency to want to snap his fingers to the beat
- Meanwhile, his brother fell in love with jazz and is a professional jazz musician
- The narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything into a story
- The real world has very few examples of linear chains of cause and effect
- Most outcomes are probabilistic, direct causation is rare, and events are complex and interrelated
- Our brains are engins designed to analyze the environment, pick out important parts and extrapolate from there
- In the ancestral environment, simple linear extrapolation was good enough
- Unfortunately, the world is much more complex today
- The ability to cluster, simply and chain ideas is what allows us to get away with a relatively small working memory and relatively slow neurons
- The narrative fallacy shows up as a number of “lower level” biases
- Availability heuristic - we make predictions based upon what we find easiest to remember, and what’s easiest to remember is what has a compelling narrative around it
- Hindsight bias - past events “obviously” and “inevitably” cause future ones
- Consistency bias - we reinterpret past data to fit a narrative created by future data
- Confirmation bias - we only look for information to confirm our pre-created narrative, not refute it
- However, we need a narrative in order to have a single coherent self
- Patients with damage to their frontal lobe lose the ability to construct narratives
- Lose the ability to organize their lives and actions
- In the extreme case, they do not speak unless spoken to and do not move unless very hungry
- While people with other forms of neurological injury lose specific abilities, people who lose the ability to construct narratives lose their selves
- So how do we use narratives without falling into the narrative fallacy?
- Make conjectures and run experiments
- Force beliefs to be falsifiable
- Make beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences