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The Science of Irrational Decisions
The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
In case you were actually curious which I'm sure you are...
Humans are naturally curious, and we have a love for information. These are great things, clearly evolving to strive for greater knowledge and understanding is a good thing. And a certain level of curiousity is also good. So there are mechanisms in our brain that reward us for gaining knowledge... generally you feel good learning something.
That said, the implementation is terrible. We get rewarded (chemically) for ANY information we learn. There is no natural mechanism that filters out useless information. So at our base we feel equally rewarded learning about britney spears' baby as we do about our political system. This results in you feeling good learning the tidbits of information though they may not be very pertinent to your life. If you are good at trivial pursuit you are likely more of an addict and so on.
This is exactly why I never buy anything that is not previously labeled with a price. I will negotiate but not if I have to contemplate a starting value myself.
Our brains favor consistency over correctness... we're finally coming close to understanding the biological origins of conservativism. Here's hoping this research eventually leads to a cure.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Think about home sales right now, not long ago homes in my area were selling for about $1,000,000. However the price has decreased to around $800,000 to $700,000 and they are still dropping (Yeah the joy of CA). However homes are being pulled off the market and sitting, vacant, not even being rented. Why? Because they have already decided that they need to get more than the current sale price. Logically, they know it is imposable, and that bubble prices won't be back soon enough to make holding on to the real-estate and paying maintenance profitable. Still they are anchored to one million dollars. (PS My area is mostly people who purchased back in the 60's and 70's and have lived in there homes seance then. Mostly homes for sale are inheritance, or some one who is down sizing because the kids moved away. We don't have many people who bought in the bubble and can't afford to sell because sale price is lower than the mortgage)
We are the Borg...
I disagree. I find watching E-Daily, or Entertainment Tonight, or any other celebrity show physically nauseating. It's literally an assault on my brain.
That's because such trivia is designed for children who never really grew up. Y'know, the ones who have adult bodies. That's why they think someone else's personal life is so much more fascinating than their own, merely because that person can sing or dance or act. They don't seem to notice that the truly famous entertainers are some of the most out-of-touch people who are least worthy of this kind of adoration. The doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous, unknown figure by comparison.
They're impressed with the entertainer's ability to entertain and that's their only real criteria; any critical thinking or other evaluation shuts down at that point. Their appetite for the superficial and insignificant is absolutely endless, even though those same mental faculties could be put towards educating themselves, establishing deep and meaningful connections with people like their neighbors, and finding real purpose and meaning in their own lives. They see nothing wrong with this or the waste that it represents.
It's an assault on your brain because the underlying message is "it's okay to devote so much time and energy to something completely devoid of any real meaning." There's also the implication that it's okay to form grossly asymmetric relationships instead of mutual relationships, that there is anything healthy or nurturing about this, like when a person learns all about the personal and romantic life of an actor when that actor doesn't even know that he or she exists. The message is that you should eagerly do such things merely because it's encouraged by the industry that was built around it. If you have any understanding whatsoever, how could you do anything but reject this notion?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yes, we call that generalized anxiety disorder. You probably don't want that.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Studies have shown that 80-90% of everything that humans talk about is gossip. When you think about this from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. We're highly social animals and our biggest competitors are other humans. Sharing information about the members of tribe is a HUGE advantage. Unfortunately, today we have the same brains that our tribal ancestors did and these brains seem to include celebrities in our tribes, so we eat up gossip about them. The implementation isn't terrible, it's just legacy :)
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Exactly. The human brain is like a computer program that has constantly been patched for millions of years. The original intent of the program is completely different from how we use it now. And we have never had a version change or rewrite. Oh and we were programmed by inputting code semi-randomly.
When you think of it from that point of the it isn't at all surprising we have a few hundred stupid flaws.
I'll let someone else come up with a car analogy if they like.
For better understanding on Dan Ariely's point, see this video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
Our brains are wired this way because as predators, it was more successful to continue chasing the same animal from the herd than to continually change targets who were not already tired from the chase. It predates anything we would likely call logic since this behavior is found in lower life forms.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
What's more, I would say it's very unclear that we'd be able to live, let alone become intelligent, without such irrational assumptions. This is something that people miss a lot when they talk about intelligence and AI: irrationality is part of intelligence.
Imagine you didn't generally make basic assumptions that your past actions and beliefs were appropriate. Let's say you wake up in the morning and feel a pain in your belly. Well, yesterday and the day before that, you ate a bowl of cereal with milk in it, and that seemed to make the pain go away. But you're not just going to follow habit or assume that it's a good decision. You're going to wake up every morning from now on and try random things. Maybe you'll try scratching your belly with a stick, or maybe you'll throw yourself out the window. How is intelligence ever going to emerge from that?
People are creatures of habit, and people are mimics. We do what other people around us are doing. We role-play and we follow fads and we talk the way our neighbors talk. We see friends and family and people on TV eating breakfast in the morning, and so we do it too. Our brains then try to tie all of that habit and mimicry up in a nice tidy logical explanation so that we can understand what we're doing, so that we can explain it to ourselves and to others.
Calling a sociologist a scientist analogous to calling a chiropractor a doctor.
Are you saying that there is no scientific merit to studying systems of people people and societies? Or are you saying that sociologists don't know how to apply the scientific method in their studies?
If it's the former, that seems to me an ignorant position to take. Social systems may be messier and less predictable than other physical systems, but that just means the job of trying to derive laws of social science is harder than in the "hard" sciences. If it's the latter, why don't you apply some scientific method and publish some ground-breaking paper that will show those sociologists how it's done and win yourself the Nobel prize?
"something he calls "arbitrary coherence."
And that other call things like behavioral persistance, behavioral momentum, priming, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, etc. He can call it whatever he wants, but that's not going to make the concept his.
"Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
Those are correlations, the magnitude and direction of co-variance of two measures. These are positive so they vary the same directions. Correlations, are often done using Pearson's technique and are then given the variable little r. A handy but of work with r is the ability to tell at a glance just how much of the observed variance can be explained by the scores. To do so, simply square them. So the amount of variance explained in these tests are 0.11 to 0.27 (11% to 27%). That means from 73% to 89% of the observed variance is unexplained. In practical terms, that's poor. I know in psychology we tend to accept such low r's as meaningful, but we're about the only ones.
As to "significance": there is no such thing as "highly" (or any other modifier) significant. The significance score, using the variable little p, is what it is, whether you have a program tell you it's equal to or less than a number calculated from the data, or you calculate it and find it to be less than some arbitrary cut off value. If p 0.001 or if p = 0.9, that is the significance level. You can't use the modifiers because significance depends on things like the number of subjects and/or samples, score variance, multiple comparisons between scores, etc. The significance changes. Even with the same data set, if you calculate a second result, you're doing a second comparison which requires a correction factor and that changes p. What significance means in one data set (how many times Mary punches the Bobo doll after watching Homer choke Bart) has nothing to do with another (how many meters depth on average the Earth's surface would be sterilized by all US vs. all Russian thermonuclear weapons), so some dangling, arbitrary "much much MUCH so" means even less, being of zero import but incorrectly suggesting there is.
So those (.33 to .52) are the r values, In calculating them p was also. It should have been reported. I have no idea of the author ever did or not because the references here consist of two blog posts about the guy's work and one about a book on this subject, and zero that I see on peer reviewed journal articles. Now, I'll be the first to tell you that last bit doesn't count for near what people think, but at least they see to it the formulae are followed, one being proper (as in APA format) quoting of statistics. I might have looked up an article to see if the author gets it right, but I'm not about to read a book by someone who either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that the concept he's examining has already been, in much greater depth and clarity than what's given here.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I was with you all the way up until you wrote "laws of social science". Asimov rest in peace, but no.
it's in my head
Waiting for prices to climb is a lousy reason not to sell right now. There is no guarantee that the values will indeed rise. What needs to happen is for banks to start selling the houses at whatever value causes them to be sold. PERIOD.
We'll never know the value of the houses if they are not sold, and therefore cannot fully understand the depths of how sunk the economy really is. Banks holding onto houses in foreclosure are NOT good for the economy.
IMHO any Bank that took Federal $ should be required to liquidate holdings at auction. Let's just say the limit to hold a house is 365 days, before forced public auction. If they can get the house sold, great. If not, it goes to auction.
Once houses start getting sold again, and the inventory of houses on the market start to reach nominal levels, then we'll know the TRUE value of houses.
And it would free up a great deal of equity currently being held hostage.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well said.
Reminds me of an old saying: Dull people talk about people; average people talk about events; smart people talk about ideas.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE