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Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking
explosivejared writes "Humans don't always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.' This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making — and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall."
Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, show that people violate the sure thing principle of decision theory. These paradoxical findings have resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. A quantum probability model, based on a Hilbert space representation and Schrodinger's equation, provides a simple and elegant explanation for this behaviour. The quantum model is compared with an equivalent Markov model and it is shown that the latter is unable to account for violations of the sure thing principle. Accordingly, it is argued that quantum probability provides a better framework for modelling human decision-making.
The human brain is a complex organ. Unfortunately the kind people at the "Royal Society for Articles Only People with Money Can Read" would not allow me to review this research. I would have found this research much more compelling had they reported a much more thorough sample analysis. I'm going to predict that people from different walks of life would respond differently to the Prisoner's Dilemma game. For instance, if you did this on regular citizens with no history of jail time versus convicts serving sentences, I would expect you to have to adapt your model.
Because you encountered some percentage of "wishful thinking" does not necessarily make that a tried and true percentage unless it is true for human beings in different groups that may affect this decision making. If it truly is quantum mechanics at work, I would suspect that you would see the same percentage in convicts vs non-convicts, Russians vs Americans, women vs men, scientists vs priests, orphans vs parented children, etc. For you see, I'm going to make the assumption that people are deciding on wishful thinking based on their history of interacting with other humans.
I'm also noticing a disturbing trend in "quantum mechanics" being spewed whenever we don't understand something. I caution you that people in the future might look back on this and laugh that such crude research could in any way conclude that quantum mechanics is at work. It's almost as if we assume we understand other possible explanation so it must be the one we don't understand very well. We don't understand photosynthesis --> must be quantum mechanics! We don't understand the human mind --> must be quantum mechanics! etc. Am I saying quantum mechanics has nothing to do with these things? No. I'm just saying I have seen no conclusive proof.
My work here is dung.
The same mathematical model does not necessarily mean that thought processes are driven by anything quantum mechanical. Quantum theory uses probability models as do psychological models. They are defined by probability theory and not the other way round. i.e. quantum theory uses models that existed before the discretization of energy was even considered.
Or is that just wishful thinking?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
which is why I make sure every cat I put in a box has been killed beforehand. Suck on that, Schrodinger.
Classical decision Theory *does* account for human's decision making. "Personal bias" (aka values) are very much accounted for.
I'm sorry, but, like Brownian motion.. it doesn't affect me or anyone else on a daily basis... there are so many other macro effects going on around me that I'm sensing that will overwhelm any minor quantum effect that may be happening.
(subconsiously) Hearing a baby crying in the apartment four doors down and one floor up will subtly alter my thinking more than this.
.. that might explain a fact that has been too obvious for so long: humans do not act rationally, but are driven by other factors, such as greed, feeling of superiority, fairness, or whatever.
Since chemistry, electricity and matter at the level of cells, neurons, ganglia, etc. behave deterministically, if free will exists at all the root of it MUST be found at the quantum level.
I'm not, however, convinced that we have to discard determinism in this case. The article says that humans don't always make the most rational decisions, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction.
The thing is, no decision is made in a vaccuum. For an adult, each new decision carries the weight of millions of old decisions and their results as inputs. Who knows what combination of life experiences and consequences shape a new decision the most?
The rationality of the decision might be a smaller input than the fact that a similar decision in the past REALLY went wrong for some reason.
Greed is not a side effect of quantum mechanics, its an evolutionary trait.
I've been flamed for this stance before but I stand by it. Humans are selfish by nature. Thus we try to make every decision we make benefit us even to the detriment of society as a whole. We can of course override that predisposition and there are decisions which have either short or long term benefits/detriment depending on the choices. So if Quantum Theory causes us to be selfish then yes that may explain our decision making.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That's my quantum wishful thought of the day. I wish they could find the Higgs.
This is my sig.
That seems a much simpler explanation.
Especially when I see contestants on Deal or No Deal who turn-down $50,000 "banker payoffs" and end-up with only $100 or less in their cases. Pure logic dictates that your odds of winning the big prize is almost nothing, and you should take the banker payoff, but people don't use logic. They use emotion. They "feel" their way through life instead of thinking.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
People choose the obvious choice that would lead to the greatest perceived payoff. Kind of Ironic since op's article starts off with a Prisoners Dilema. A cursory glance of the article shows that the Quantum theorists only managed to re-create the classical model. Just because I add complexity to solve 2+2+2 by multiplication instead of addition doesn't mean I've done anything exactly groundbreaking. If anything I suppose this confirms that Quantum Theorists have their basics correct.
Makes you think if we have Free Will or we just fallow defined rules.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I really wish I could believe that.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
It's all well and good to use the mathematical techniques of quantum mechanics in other fields but the math by itself is not quantum theory. I get really annoyed with the "Ohhh something weird and mysterious we don't understand it must be because of QM" nonsense. Hello, decoherence anyone? Outside of carefully prepared states, large collections of particles behave classically. You know, that's why we discovered classical physics first.
The way that people parrot Quantum Theory at the moment (in an attempt to explain anything vaguely unexplained) has parallels with the Victorian reliance on the Luminiferous Aether.
This explains why I'm never sure if I want the ice cream or the banoffee pie, until the waiter brings it over, and I realise I've made the wrong choice.
Unfortunately the kind people at the "Royal Society for Articles Only People with Money Can Read" would not allow me to review this research.
Damn you RSAOPMCR!
Now we'll have to find another acronym for "Read Slashdot's Article Or Present a Meaningful Counter/Rebuttal".
In other news: a recent study by the American Wave Mechanics Society suggests wishful thinking may explain quantum mechanics.
Obligitory XKCD comic
The all-enveloping philosophical uncertainty of the human mind, and the uncertainty of quantum theory may describe similar things, and the statistics may even appear to match human decision making - but I'll paraphrase the classic line and say correlated statistics don't imply an actual relationship.
Just like you can have rather startling symmetry between two structures in different creatures (convergent symmetry/evolution), when they were developed in drastically different ways (but facing the same need/phenomenon), the uncertainty in the human condition is based on our need to model the world in a quick and dirty manner. We need a way to model the ocean of unknown that houses our tiny plankton of knowledge.
The uncertainty in quantum theory always seemed different as I understand it. It's unresolved variables, waveforms that haven't collapsed. Human minds may function with some electromagnetism, but decisions tend to be made on a larger scale than quantum uncertainty is going to have a large role in changing.
That's a risk with quantum/string theories - they simplify the way we can view the world, in a way that can often conform with observation, but they still aren't a description of the world we actually live in. The simplicity and accuracy in some places is captivating, but they don't and shouldn't take the place of direct observation. We should NOT expect to get a special understanding of, for instance, the human mental state from theories on such phenomena we can only model but not test. It could happen - but this doesn't seem a valid path to connecting the two.
Ryan Fenton
Opinion words I use when I see people who disagree with me as pathologies.
This pap is not science.
Roger Penrose hypothesized this 20 years ago.
...thought of this before...
Whenever I read about the (non-repeated) prisoner's dilemma, someone claims that the "rational" choice for either party is to defect, because it yields the highest payoff for one player. This seems to ignore an important point:
The game involves three players - "prisoner one", "prisoner two" and "prison". If the prisoners form a team, it will be better for the team if both of them cooperate. There doesn't have to be any wishful thinking, but simply a goal of doing better for the team. You can never improve the score for the team by defecting.
What is irrational or not always depends on what your goals are.
So are they just saying that the mathematical tools of quantum theory are used to explain the effects or are they alluding to quantum mechanics itself being important to understand people's decisions? It sounds like they are saying they are just using the math, but it is a little unclear.
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I'm just waiting for the day that scientists are startled when they prove "prayer" works on either a quantum or string level.
I have RTFA, and, better than that, understand it. Before you guys all go nuts with logic based on "oooohh, quantum brains mean we're special after all" realize they this paper does NOT deal with quantum physics. Full Stop.
All they're doing is using math like that which is used to describe quantum physics to describe psychology. Fluid dynamics equations can also be used to model different psychological problems (fleeing a fire indoors for example), yet surely nobody here is so stoopid as to think we're special because our brains run on water (which is just as true as saying our brains run on quantum physics).
This paper is nothing more than a clever new approach to psychological modeling.
This type of decision making might simply be an evolutionarily-selected random seeding.
For example, when running an evolutionary algorithm, it is vital to have randomness seeded into the mix. This allows for the system or algorithm to escape from local maxima.
Douglas Adams had a great quote at the end of one of his last lectures regarding humans' re-invention of everything - nothing is ever 'good enough': http://www.guba.com/watch/3000053272
Perhaps this is all that just random, unpredictable outcomes from a horrendously complex system we call the brain, which has emerged out of a random, unpredictable and horrendously complex universe.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
There are a lot of "are people rational" experiments along these lines, and my gut tells me that many run afoul of an incorrect understanding of the context in which experimental participants are making their decision.
For example, if I choose to defect and screw my opponent, will I be exposed as a cheat when the results of the study are published? What will the experimenter think of me? Will that hurt my chances of an advantageous trade with the experimenter in the future? Am I likely to face reprisal from my opponent? What moral ground will I have gained in subsequent negotiations over an opponent who I knew cheated me? What does it do to my opinion of myself now that I consider myself untrustworthy?
The brain has to balance innumerable factors such as this when considering the consequences of social actions. My suspicion is that these experiments teach us less about whether 'homo economicus' exists, and more about how hard it to design experiments to reveal him.
This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade.
It's called free will. That, combined with stupidity, can lead to all sorts of hard to fathom decisions that people make all the time.
I'm sorry, but if peoples' decisions were so easily predictable, the future would be largely known and advertisers would need to be experts in advanced math. Because free will and stupidity exist, they don't.
The human mind is not a special and unique snowflake. You are a computer. I am a computer. You are a computer. The brain is literally a quivering mound of hacks: look at fMRI studies sometime. We operate according to the same laws of physics that govern that boiler over in the corner. Get over yourselves already.
Look: maybe it was acceptable in the 18th century to imagine some special mechanism for the human mind, but no longer. There are simply no mental phenomena that require quantum mechanics to understand. It's far easier to suppose that we are simply flawed creatures that sometimes make bad decisions using heuristics adapted more for the African savannah than New York.
I checked my pocket to see if I had any money and the measurement collapsed my wishful thinking wave function into an economic dystopia defined from negative infinity to positive infinity (sorry everybody).
I wish I had checked my mail instead. I might have resolved the universe into a superposition sqrt((depression**2 +/- boomtime**2) / 2).
Humans aren't rational and neither is quantum probability
Didn't RTFA like good slashdot reader, but I can smell it without reading.
Those of you that get kick out of jumping on creationists, spaghetists, etc., why don't you take a whack at this? Bad science is much worse than religious dogma.
Btw, "irrationality" of human behavior is bogus. It's akin to saying "if she was smart like me, she would do otherwise". Even the lunatics have their reasons, and information she has is different than yours. The economists came up with the concept of utility function, that can pretty much discard the distinction between rational/irrational, and "irrationality" seem to keep popping up in the discussion of economics.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"How would free will be explained on the quantum level? Randomness or probability doesn't account for free will, either. Free will is simply magic of the mind, a sort of god-of-the-gaps for not knowing the complex web of the interaction between heredity and environment and the many antecedent events acting upon it."
I completely agree. What I'm saying is that "if" there is free will at all, the mechanism that enables it cannot be deterministic. As far as I can tell, it's only at the quantum level that an individual event is no longer tied to determinism.
But yes, I am of the opinion that free will, in the classic sense, doesn't actually exist.
will this help me to win at rock, paper, scissors?
It all comes down to this: People always do what they think will make them happy.
Considering how quantum processes might effect mental decisions is a rather intriguing notion, but it isn't likely to have practical value in understanding human nature.
You don't need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain why a bunch of software written over a period of several billion years using a random walk algorithm and just about every bad software development model (cargo cult programming, spaghetti inheritance, copy-and-paste, ...) doesn't always follow the optimal course of action.
I blame Penrose. Not because I have a logical reason for it, but because blaming Penrose makes my R-complex feel good. Yummy.
"People put Free Will and Randomness in the same basket because they are both non-deterministic. But that's all there is in common. Free Will and Randomness are two completely different things. Random events at the quantum level inside your brain are no different than having randomly-firing electrodes implanted in your brain. It will make your brain's output unpredictable, but it does not constitute Free Will. Or are you suggesting that the Mind somehow controls these Random events at the quantum level?"
Not at all. I'm merely drawing a line in the sand, and stating, "Everything above this level leaves no room for free will in the classic sense, because determinism rules."
That type of free will bucks determinism. Therefore, if free will exists it must be rooted somewhere past the deterministic threshold.
For what it's worth I'm not defending the linking of free will to quantum events. I don't believe that. I'm just pointing out the point at which free will could begin to enter the picture - not the place where it actually does.
Why the need for a one size fit all explanation for the whole class of problem? This result could easily be explained by a combination of factors, like...
People do not understand the problem fully, and are therefore simply unable to make a rational decision.
People acting simply on past experience. Last time I player I won, so I'm likely to win again by choosing the same decision. If I don't know the results of my last decision, my next decision will also be uncertain, and in the event of historical uncertainty I choose not to play.
People adding their own values to the problem. Since I don't want to go to jail, it will not matter if it is for 5 or 10 years.
...and probably several more. Since the actual reasons can interact in a very complex way and everyone have their own unique combination of reasons, the decisions might appear slightly random because they are in fact slightly random?
Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game....
The way people answer the prisoners dillema game has absolutely nothing to do with wishful thinking or not. The whole idea of the game is that "all rational players will play defect, all things being equal." The thing these researches are forgetting is the last part - all things being equal. All things are NEVER equal when playing the game - because anyone who is thinking rationally knows that the person on the other side of the game has just as high odds of themselves behaving irrationally as behaving rationally. Therefore, it really is a total crapshoot if defecting is beneficial to you or not.
The prisoner's dillema is nothing mroe than a logic puzzle, it is not useful to apply in any given case. The only people who would answer consistently in the prisoner's dillema game are psych students - and that is just because they are trying to show off.
Chalking everything up to quantum mechanics is a result of quantum mechanics. Didn't you know?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Seems a social species that has members that act in their own best interest all the time would simply implode. We're bound to others so it's not surprising that some of us would chose the net gain solution instead of the self gain solution. I don't think it's at all rational to choose the self gain solution despite the articles insistence that anything else is irrational.
People who screw over others for a small benefit damage society and weaken our species, those are the irrational ones.
..fear of prison..
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a generalized model for decision-making in a non-zero-sum game (net cooperation must yield more than net defection.) A story involving prisoner's and jail time is only the most popular canonical representation for the game. While I've nothing to say in defense of the researchers' intelligence: to levy criticism that the researchers have perhaps overlooked subjects' aversion to actual prison time is to suggest that the researchers are, perhaps, extremely stupid, and have no idea what they are doing at all.
*If* some researchers are right, (not saying they are) and the brain is actually something like a quantum holographic recorder, storing data and memory in the zero point field, (rather than chemically I suppose), I can see how quantum math would apply in this case - it sounds very similar.
Okay, cue the hate for quantum mysticism..
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Quite simply, if enough Americans at once buy into the housing market with wishful thinking (yeah, I can make housing payments that are 80% of my income), then when things fail, they use group think to take the wealth of others and recoup their losses.
In other words, the wishful thinking may pay off in gang-type situations.
I had this happen to me in college, when a 2-credit-hour class was demanding reports that took 25 hrs per week. I did it, and most of the others didn't, but mine were all 2 days late. So when the end of the class came, and not one had been cracked by the GTA, he simply assigned grades of 90 - 10 * (# days late). This was supported by the faculty, on the basis that if they graded them appropriately, most of the students would fail, while if they accepted the GTA's decision, most of the students would have a B, while I had a D.
The key, though, is that your wishful thinking has to allow you to hide out in a crowd, and more specificially the biggest crowd around.
Of course, that's what 94% of all lemmings say when polled by American Research Corporation (translations applied by Google Translation).
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Pothos and Busemeyer's results are published in a recent issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Royal Society B? Are there Royal Societies A-Z? Do different subject areas get randomly-assigned letters of the alphabet? Does this have anything to do with James Bond's Q and M?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
My first reaction on reading this article? Of *course* quantum theory is closer to human thought than Markov modelling.
Markov theory (assuming I understand it correctly) involves discrete separable states with transient (but still separable) intermediate states. Quantum mechanics involves superpositioned states -- states that are not separable, of which several can exist at the same time.
Have you ever felt angry and sad at the same time? Happy and excited? Hungry and in pain? The human brain doesn't do discrete, separable emotional states. We're always some superposition of emotions, thoughts, and needs.
As for wishful thinking, it's a state of hoping for one outcome while being mentally prepared for its opposite. Wishful thinking is, by definition, a superposition of mental states. Of course QM describes it better.
When you think about it, this entire line of research deserves one big 'Duh'. But then, I suppose most great insights seem obvious after they've been discovered.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Check back after the Singularity.
Or even, "What the Bleep do we know?". Since when does pseudo-science gets on a peer-review journal?
Oh yes, Cold Fusion. sorry, carry on.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
The human mind is not a special and unique snowflake.
It may be a computer -- in fact, it certainly *is* in the original sense of the word. However, even if classical computation is all it does, it's still a pretty special and unique computer relative to state-of-the-art human invented technology.
You are a computer. I am a computer. You are a computer.
Check your program for looping errors. ;)
Certainly, the brain does classical computation. Whether that's all it does, however, is speculation. And in any case, a modern electronic computer is not a particularly apt metaphor.
We operate according to the same laws of physics that govern that boiler over in the corner.
I don't think anyone -- not even people on the edge like Penrose -- argues otherwise. There is, however, some discussion over what comprises said laws of physics, and hopefully will continue to be until we really do approach a more useful approximation of having Everything Figured Out(TM).
Tweet, tweet.
The map is not the terrain. The model is not the phenomenon. No matter how detailed and accurate, this remains true. A particular model may describe something and have nothing to do with the real world.
Wishful thinking is far more easily, accurately and realistically described by the well proven phenomenon cognitive dissonance supporting another well understood function that causes rapid jumps to wrong conclusions, heuristic problem solving. When done in a social context, the primary attribution bias would definitely contribute.
The researchers in TFA, as psychologists, are certainly well aware of these facts. To present such an outlandish, unsupported and non-parsimonious construct when well understood and supported theory already explains more than their "model" (I find it highly unlikely they've actually constructed one) is to take science, dress it in miniskirt, knee high boots and too much make up, and send it out to walk the streets.
http://www.humantruth.info/thinking_errors.html
http://www.experiencefestival.com/cognitive_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If decision making can be calculated by quantum mechanics formulas then we may have the start of prehistory!
From TFA:
the scientists added another component to both models, which they call cognitive dissonance, and can also be thought of as wishful thinking. The idea is that people tend to believe that their opponent will make the same choice that they do
You've got two rational people given the exact same problem to solve, so why is it wishful thinking that they arrive at the same conclusion? It's called symmetry. The classical analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemna completely ignores this.
All I see from this research is that the average person has a better intuitive understanding of logic than your average researcher.
we're encouraged/manipulated to pursue the big 'dream', which has now turned into a fairytail nightmare of unrepayable lifelong debt. so, it would be hard to measure one's cognitive ability unless they were operating in possession of the facts. better days ahead.
Human beings are complex wehile decision theory is pretty simple (in comparison). Modelling humans with decision theory sounds like utter nonsense to me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Personally I think it is just that humans are hard-wired with a predilection for wishful thinking. You don't have to be alive very long to notice that when a person has a conflict between what they want to believe and established facts that it is usually the facts that lose.
And these guys aren't the first to turn to QM to explain human behavior - Penrose had his theories many years ago and was perhaps not the first either.
Here we are faced with a real dilemma - if we are deterministic constructs then there is no free will but so far, outside of religion, the only alternative offered up is quantum mechanical which is saying we are stochastic in nature. Nice choice - we are deterministic automatons or random systems. I think "free will" is pretty much a tautological concept and de facto relies on realms outside of science. Although I remember reading of some fascinating experiments that show that the parts of the brain thought to be responsible for concious decision making don't fire up until after a decision has been made - it appeared that the role of conciousness was that we act and then invent a "rational" reason for having performed the action.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
There is an implicit assumption by the mathematicians that people are not being rational because they are not choosing the mathematically optimal result.
But I would argue that they are choosing the evolutionarily optimal result.
Consider this: All game theory experiments in which the participants were likely to encounter the same players more than once during the experiment have indicated that the optimal strategy in the prisoners dilemma was an eye for an eye, with a tendency to cooperate or reconcile. That is, they would be inclined to trust the other guy, unless the other guy defects. This offers the best chance of achieving optimal results over multiple games.
This is exactly what the participants did in the math study. And this is how people generally behave in a social society.
Contrast that with a game where the participants are never known to one another and unlikely to encounter each other twice. In those scenarios, the optimum strategy was to screw your neighbor (defect). This was the strategy considered optimal by the mathematicians in the article. Since this is an unnatural environment, it is small wonder that the participants appeared to behave irrationally. But you don't need special math to describe it.
We are hard wired to cooperate.
That IS rational.
Or then again, it may not.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
As long as you don't take it out of your wallet and check the numbers, it might be a winner.
Have gnu, will travel.
Most people do not act rationally in the face of something like the prisoner's dilemna for one of two reasons:
They don't know how to think rationally any more, or
they don't know how to do the math.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Even if it's quantum mechanics math and not actual quantum mechanics, it's still trying to invoke something exotic rather than simply admit some of their assumptions are not simply wrong, but are so obviously wishful thinking in their own right.
The human brain evolved in an environment where there there was almost never a safe strategy available, and there was never a single ideal course of action. Hence, a natural suspicion of things too good to be true, and a certain pattern of guesswork. Some people make optimistic assumptions, some pessimistic assumptions. We (as a species) have both because neither is perfect. In real life, you do not have perfect information, and you have to fill in the gaps, even at the risk of being wrong, perhaps fatally wrong, because not doing so also has a risk.
Researchers get frustrated with the "prisoner's dilemma" simply because they won't admit that the "irrational" choice people make is actually correct. The best answer in the real world is to think ahead and assume a 'rational' jailer who will double-cross both prisoners no matter what.
Women think that they have more bargaining power than men, and that they can wield this power more effectively by pretending they don't realize they have it. Women are correct in their thinking.
we're encouraged/manipulated to pursue the big 'dream', which has now turned into a fairytail nightmare of unrepayable lifelong debt. so, it would be hard to measure one's cognitive ability unless they were operating in possession of the facts. better days ahead.
If your "big dream" includes racking up a nightmare of unrepayable lifelong debt, then you're doing it wrong. The American dream was never about having hopes and wishes rewarded, it was about being rewarded for hard work, despite your birth caste. The problem is that too many people have truncated the "hard work" and simply see "American dream is to be rewarded". The gold rushes that the lazy partake in will always leave ghost towns and hobos in their wake. The real estate/loan gold rush is over, and you will see ghost towns emerge, micro economies collapse, businesses fail where they were booming, and those operators of business either move on, just as they moved into their gold-rush-supported businesses, or die hungry.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
your wishful thinking comes true and you get what you wished for because you were focused on it.
For example say that I want to run a small business and earn a profit. My wishful thinking gives me a positive attitude that my customers connect on and they like me for it. Since they like me I get repeat business. Verses the negative thinking that I cannot succeed in which it gives me a negative attitude and the customers catch up on it and avoid me and go to my competitors instead.
Still it does not explain why big banks fail, large insurance companies like AIG fail, and the government has to bail them out via a stimulus bill. I would think that one needs a working business plan in addition to the wishful thinking. Most of the banks, AIG, and automakers have failing business plans and all of the wishful thinking in the world won't help them until they get a working business plan, nor all of the bailout monye either.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Richard Feynmann said almost exactly the same thing in his remarks to the 1975 Nobel award ceremony audience after being chosen winner of that year's prize in physics.
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
This is just one more thread seeming to show quantum mechanics and psychology are two threads of the same fabric; metaphor weaves them together.
The brain simply picks the outcome that maximizes survival the most, using pattern matching on the available data. If the available data are not good, the brain is fooled to select a non-rational decision.
It's as simple as that.
Yes, most of us Humans call it 'hope'. Why don't you write a thesis about it ? Oh, you did ? Good for you...How useless
The logic circuits in my head all said "don't reply to this article" but I don't know how ended up replying anyway!
Does anyone here know any recent research into such illogical actions?
How is this different from, say, other sciences that claim to explain why people make irrational decisions?
Clever and witty sig.
So, slashdot is more in tune with the universe than I thought.
...a butterfly flapping its wings MAY trigger a tornado on the other side of the world.
We don't know that it does though...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
.
It's simple, eldavojohn. Let me explain it to you as it was taught to me.
In the beginning Quantum Mechanics created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Quantum Mechanics moved upon the face of the waters.....
But seriously, very insightful post.
I guess not. The interesting thing here is that participants were told they were on the second round of the game. 1/3 were told their opponents had cooperated in the last round, 1/3 were told their opponents had defected, and 1/3 were not given any information as to their opponent's last move. The point is that people were more willing to defect if they had information than not, regardless of their opponent's last move. This does not seem rational: something like 85% defected if their opponent did, 75% if the opponent cooperated, 55% if they didn't know. But if you don't know, wouldn't you just make a decision that is somehow a weighted average of the two possibilities? Apparently real humans do not.
They are invoking quantum mathematics to explain why human behavior in ignorance is not a classical superposition of the individual options.
Maybe this is less about wishful thinking and more about narrow-mindedness. We tend to expect others to act as we do because our own behavior is a very salient and ever-present prototype of human behavior in general. This is linked with what are termed social value orientations. These describe how you value your outcomes and the other person's outcomes. Individuals can categorized into three groups: cooperators, individualists and competitors.
Cooperators: They like to maximize joint gain or make sure that they and the other player get as much as possible collectively.
Individualists: They maximize their own gain or are concerned with only how much they get and not what the other player gets.
Competitors: They maximize relative gain or how much more they get than the other player.
Thus, depending on your SVO, you may see a matrix game such as the Prisoner's Dilemma in a different light and consequently you may expect others to value outcomes as you do.
There was a study that examined how we develop these valuations: Van Lange, Otten, De Bruin, & Joireman. (1997b). Development of prosocial, individualistic and competitive orientations: Theory and preliminary evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(4), 733-746.
This is VERY interesting work: it has the effect
of replacing an old theory (original sin) with a
known phenomenon, susceptible to experiment,
as the probable cause for Adam and Eve tasting
the fruit and getting expelled from Eden.
By Occam's razor, there's no reason to hold
on to the "original sin" hypothesis, since the
alternative is simpler. I wonder when we will
hear from the Vatican on this development?
There's no need to resort to quantum theory. The results of the gambling study mentioned in the article can be explained by human superstition and belief in "luck." Even when told that the odds of winning each trial are exactly 50%, average humans will let the outcome of the previous trial influence their perception of the odds.
* Subjects who are informed that they had won the first game tend to think, "I am lucky at this game. It is in my interest to play again." Hence the 69% participation rate.
* A different irrational notion affects subjects who are informed that they had lost the first game. They tend to think, "I'm not likely to lose again." For some of them, the incorrect aphorism about "lightning doesn't strike twice" may have come mind. Hence the 59% participation rate. [69 + 59 > 100, so it's numerically obvious that some of the same people who would have chosen to play in the first scenario, also choose to play in this case.]
* Neither of these phenomena comes into play when the subject is not told the outcome of the first game. These people tend to think, "I don't know whether I'm lucky at this game or not." They make the cautious, guarded choice: not playing at all. Hence the 36% participation rate.
I don't doubt that the researchers' quantum interference formula happens to closely match these results, but to call its application "rigorously justified" is quite a stretch!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Someone please tag this as anathem!
I know more than you drink.
"That's wrong. Just because determinism rules in physics above the microscopic level, that doesn't mean that determinism is also true at other, larger, levels. The determinism of classical physics would only entail determinism of psychology if psychological concepts were reducible to physical concepts, and the jury is still out on that."
If you want to expand the argument to the philosophical why don't we throw religion into it as well? Then we can really muddy up the waters. I read the article. I won't pretend I understand all of it right now - I'm sure it'll take more than a couple tries before I really get the gist of it. However, this strikes me as a philosophical mind exercise, and not particularly useful, or even applicable.
Until somebody points me at concrete evidence, I have to believe that psychology is a product of the physical brain. Anybody who has watched a parent descend into dementia in old age can testify to the fact that as the brain changes, so does the person, often completely.
But unless I've REALLY been out of the loop, can you tell me where there is evidence of a macroscopic event that doesn't behave deterministically? If there is one, I'd like to know. If there isn't, you cannot declare somebody wrong by pointing to a completely hypothetical case. You can only say that I might be wrong if this other thing turned out to be true.
I hereby nominate you for the "funniest-very-short-reply-to-a-very-long-rambling" trophy.
Literally.
Sure, defection has a higher expected value, *IF* you assume the other guy is flipping a coin to make his choice. But if you assume the other guy is very similar to yourself, you should expect the other person to reach the same conclusion you do as to what action to take, whatever that may be. Thus instead of looking at the payoffs for each column, look at the two places where each player makes the same choice. In those two places the cooperative choice results in a higher payoff for both players.
-- Conserve binary trees; recycle your email. --
And the winner was ... random number generator.
Bullshit
This was killed as a possibility in Philosophy of Mind about 100+ years ago as even a remotely viable explanation for human behavior or the mind.
When I was an undergrad in Philosophy, it seemed like every semester we would get one or two lost psychology majors wonder in to the department for a class and start spewing that quantum mechanics crap (that they almost never understand) to explain human behavior, and every semester we would beat them like a redheaded step child until they ran back to the psychology department. It seems every year some psychologist with too much grant money writes a paper to try and shove that square peg in to that round hole, and it trickles down to people that should not be allowed to read that crap.
I can not even believe slashdot let that crap get this far.
Living in Chile
This looks suspiciously like what happens when people work outside of their field (which is good) and don't talk enough to people inside the field they're working in (which is bad).
I haven't hammered through the paper's math yet, but this catches the eye: "quantum probability models allow interference effects that can make the probability of the disjunction of two events to be lower than the probability of either event
individually."
Folks in (non-classical) decision theory have worked with similar ideas for quite some time--it's sub-additive probability and is often used to model things like the Ellsberg paradox. I don't see anything in the paper indicating they're familiar with this.
Hopefully what they've come up with is good, in any case. It's just strange to see things tauted as phenomenal new insights which appear to be old hat.
Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, show that people violate the sure thing principle of decision theory.
The authors are wrong on what the optimal decision is for the Prisoner's Dilemma, so the deviation they think they need to explain doesn't exist.
Humans don't always make the most rational decisions
Logic is a tool, and it is put to use intentionally by someone who knows its value and has the skills to do so. It requires the decision to utilize. It is not a background process. Some people just choose not to think logically or rationally, and their biology supports them 100%. And in many instances, even the smartest among us simply do not have enough time or energy to fully engage in a logical decision.
There is one correct answer only when the information available eliminates all other possibilities. When the information is any less, there are multiple answers, which is the case most of the time. Hence our actions are based on guessing, impulse, and a glimpse of immediate gratification, more often than not.
This paradoxical human behavior
Our behavior is not what is paradoxical, it is just misunderstood. This conclusion is what is paradoxical because we are concluding we are paradoxical, when we actually are not, yet we've somehow rationally and logically managed arrive at that decision!
I find it amazing that so called, smart people, still confuse idealised systems with reality. Point of fact, the human is a complex system that will exhibit non-linear behaviour. Expecting people to always behave like an idealised system is just plain retarded. We forget things and/or don't fully understand things and/or ... which can profoundly alter the end decision.
And what about the mentally ill? Do they have more QM in them? How about women with PMS? Do they have intermittent bouts of more QM?
In all seriousness, I think that any time we see "researchers" try to apply QM to medicine, etc, we should all get a rolled up newspaper and bat them on the nose and say, "NO. NO."
Now, I know this thought might be new to some people. But, how about try to understand how the hormones, etc, effect mood, decision making, etc, /before/ we go after explanations like this. Because, I gotta tell you, having people that don't have a clue about QM and/or biology isn't going to lead to a good place. Perhaps, just perhaps, we should work on understanding one before we go and try to meld the two. Because, we still don't have a clue about the how/why the brain works even on the macro level.
It's wishful thinking that may explain quantum theory.
one by one the emotions are burned up and consumed.
What once would move by its own design
associated and mixed with the memories of experience
in arising ceases to move and gradually fades
nostalgia is the last one to go
is the grammar in your last paragraph correct?
what type of thing cannot be approached logically?