Evolutionary traps

In this post, Carl Zimmer writes:

We have altered the environment in a vast number of ways, both small and large. And when animals try to read the cues from our human environment, they can get tricked. They can end up doing something that kills them, loses them the opportunity to reproduce, or simply wastes their time. Scientists call these situations evolutionary traps.

This reminded me of an evolutionary trap that Richard Dawkins described in The Extended Phenotype:

Moths fly into candle flames, and this does nothing to help their inclusive fitness. In the world before candles were invented, small sources of bright light in darkness would either have been celestial bodies at optical infinity, or they might have been escape holes from caves or other enclosed spaces. The latter case immediately suggests a survival value for approaching light sources. The former case also suggests one, but in an indirect sense...Many insects use celestial bodies as compasses.Since these are at optical infinity, rays from them are parallel, and an insect that maintains a fixed orientation of, say,30 degrees to them will go in a straight line. But if the rays do not come from infinity they will not be parallel, and an insect that behaves in this way will spiral into the light source (if steering an acute angled course) or spiral away (if steering an obtuse-angled course) or orbit the source (if steering a course of exactly 90 degrees to the rays). Self-immolation by insects in candle flames, then, has no survival value in itself: ...it is a byproduct of the useful habit of steering by means of sources of light which are 'assumed' to be at infinity. That assumption was once safe. It now is safe no longer, and it may be that selection is even now working to modify the insects' behaviour. (Not necessarily, however. The overhead costs of making the necessary improvements may outweigh the benefits they might bring: moths that pay the costs of discriminating candles from stars may be less successful, on average, than moths that do not attempt the costly discrimination and accept the low risk of self-immolation...)

As for using language like moths 'assuming' something or overhead costs outweighing benefits, which may sound as if moths are doing such calculations, see Dawkins' reply to Mary Midgely's criticisms of The Selfish Gene (pdf). 

Was my education a waste? - II

All man's unhappiness derives from just one thing, not being able to stay quietly in a room. - Blaise Pascal 

Emily Dickinson  said that 'Hope' is the thing with feathers. But if you cling to it for too long,  you will fritter away your life chasing mirages. I came across the following passage in this post:

Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, the story of a young, lone survivor of a shipwreck, beautifully captures how Americans should face our political reality:

“I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.”

Thankfully I was a victim of a college education which ensured that I did not fall for the sweet talk of various quacks and gurus selling snake oil quoting scriptures. It is amazing what all fairy tales people will believe when there is a complicated illness in the family. I got interested in reading various things that I didn't know about earlier and decided that I would rather waste my time this way  'while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe'. (Here is a touching story about a man who has lost his memory.)

I had mentioned earlier that the mother of all outlets for frustration is the process of writing this blog. The books and blogs that I read have helped me to tell my story and I have enjoyed the process of writing it. It would not have been half as interesting for me if it were not for the reading which is a direct result of my education. (It is true that education doesn't guarantee that you won't fall for gas. Something about the wiring of my brain helped me to avoid this trap.)

Come to think of it, I would not have been able to enjoy a Wodehouse were it not for the kind of education I received. He refers to Biblical stories, poetry, nursery rhymes, etc. to make his wisecracks.  I had teachers who would occasionally tell such stories and encouraged reading books unrelated to the syllabus. Were they wasting time by doing this? No. In this TED talk, J.P.Rangaswami says that information is like food. By this criterion, I am a foodie suffering from the book lovers dilemma. My sentiment is the same as that of Jefferson when he wrote to Preistley:

I thank on my knees, him who directed my early education, for having put into my possession this rich source of delight; and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, & have not since acquired.

One of the aims of education is to equip students to keep learning after their formal education is over. I don't read about anything I studied after Std. XII but that doesn't mean that those years were wasted. I read quite a  bit about evolutionary theory which uses concepts like cost benefit analysis, utility function, path dependent process, maximising an objective function,etc. Since I was already familiar with these concepts, I could grasp the arguments quickly which sustained my interest in the topic. (Here is Paul Krugman about the similarities between evolutionary and economic theories.)

Aristotle said, "Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity." At present I am little more than a 'brain in a vat' and it is my education that has kept it from dissolving away. (I read somewhere that a brain is a terrible thing to waste and it is my education that has prevented this from happening.)The institutions that I have studied in have given me what Robert Krulwich calls 'The Chumbawamba Principle' in this speech which has helped me to stay in the game.

In the absence of the kind of education I received, I would have moped around the house thinking of sad songs which would not have helped anybody. And regarding the quote at the beginning of this post, education helps to address the problem. To a significant degree, you are the sum of the stories you tell yourself about yourself.

Education is not just about creating what Anthony Grayling called 'clones for a job'. In this debate, Richard Dawkins compares science to music. I think the same analogy can be used to compare education and music: a good education is like good music - it is about much more than merely giving exercise to the violinists' hands.

Was my education a waste? - I

It  has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated. -Edith Hamilton, educator and writer (1867-1963) 

People will often come home and tell Sujit, 'You must study like your father.' In the same breath, they will add, 'But anyway there is no use studying. Look at what happened to your father.' (It is interesting to note that such advice is often for other kids. When it comes to their own kids, many of the same people will have strict guidelines for academic performance.) In the initial confusion, I used to agree  with them.

When my father died when I was studying in first year engineering  in REC, Trichy (now NIT, Trichy), there was a proposal to get me a job in TELCO (now TATA Motors) where my father was working, because there was  no other working member in my family. (This was possible then; I don't think this would happen now.) If the tuition fees that I had to pay at that time was not very low, I would have discontinued my studies and taken up the job. Perhaps that is what I should have done?

I was not intending to study further after engineering. When I was working in Bajaj Auto Ltd., many folks who joined with me were preparing for something called CAT (those days we  did not have dozens of TV channels hunting for some news so I did not see headlines about the CAT exam and interviews with CAT aspirants) and I joined the bandwagon. I attempted CAT because  the tuition fee was very less at that time and I felt I could afford it. (So the ramblings in this blog are the product of a not-so-expensive education.)

Should I have worked for a longer time instead of wasting my time in further studies? If you consider the only worth of education to be to increase your earning capacity, then obviously my education was a waste. But that would be a narrow view to take. In What’s the point of a college education?, Janet Stemwedel writes about Boethius, a Roman patrician who suddenly fell from grace, and was imprisoned, tortured and killed:

Before his execution, he had a lot of time to mope. Indeed, how could he avoid wallowing in just how far he had fallen from having it all?

While in prison, Boethius wrote Consolations of Philosophy, an imagined dialogue between himself and Lady Philosophy. Here’s a synopsis:

Boethius: Boy, it really sucks to be me. I had everything and now I have nothing.

Lady Philosophy: Dude, snap out of it. The stuff that really matters is the stuff that even a sudden change of fortune can’t take from you.

A job is nice. So is political power, a fancy chariot, hangers-on. But you can have all these things and still not be happy or fulfilled. And, if your happiness depends on having such things, you’re pretty vulnerable to sudden reversals.

So how has my education helped me? As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, let me count the ways. Firstly, I would not have met most of the people I know now and who have been instrumental in my being able to deal with changed circumstances. One of the outcomes of studying in good institutions is the friendships that you make, relationships that endure throughout life.

I was encouraged to develop the reading habit in school and the books I have read have enabled me to while away the days and nights without getting bored stiff and this has  helped me to gradually get used to the changed circumstances. It has increased my joy-to-stuff ratio. (I heard of a POW who practised mental golf during his incarceration.By the time he was released, he had  improved his game by 6 strokes. Similarly, I have been practisinsg my straight drive and if it is not as Tendulkar's was in his prime, it is not due to want of trying.)

Pyramid of choices

There is a gift  giving culture in Mumbai during Diwali time which I was unused to when I first started working there. One day a gift of two shirts from a company was sent home - one for me and one for a colleague. Both of us were making the Prospectus for the company for a Public Issue.We were uneasy about the whole thing and wondered if there was any quid pro quo expected but we couldn't figure out what it could be since both of us were at a junior level and couldn't have influenced anything.

We wondered whether it would rude to return the gift to the company. We finally decided to to keep them unopened and see what happens.  Over the subsequent days we met the company officials several times in connection with the Public Issue but they never mentioned anything about the gift, not even to ask whether we liked it or not and we gradually concluded that our trepidation was unwarranted.

At the other end of this scale of inducements lie scams of thousands of crores that one regularly hears about in the news. How does one progress along this scale probably without even realising it? The authors of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) explain this process through the metaphor of 'The Pyramid of Choice'.

Imagine two young men having similar attributes and clustered close together on the moral landscape. They have similar attitude towards, say, cheating - they think that it is not a good thing to do, but that there are worse crimes in the world. (As an aside, here is Dan Ariely on dishonesty.) During the exam, the two men are faced with the same temptation to cheat. One yields and the other resists.

Their decisions a hair's breadth apart and could easily have gone the other way for each of them.Now the question is: How do they feel about their actions a week later?The one who cheated will feel that it is not a big crime - everyone does it, it is no big deal, after all it was important for his career...The one who resisted the temptation will feel that cheating is more immoral than he thought - actually such people are disgraceful and should be permanently expelled from school,  we should make an example of them...

By the time they are through with their self-justifications, they are far apart from one another and are convinced that they have always felt this way. From the book:

It is as if they had started off at the top of a pyramid, a millimeter apart; but by the time they have finished justifying their individual actions, they have slid to the bottom and now stand at opposite corners of its base.The one who didn't cheat considers the other to be totally immoral, and the one who cheated thinks the other is hopelessly puritanical. This process illustrates how people who have been sorely tempted, battled temptation, and almost given in to it - but resisted at the eleventh hour - come to dislike, even despise, those who did not succeed in the same effort.It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones. 

This  process applies to most important decisions involving moral choices, for eg., whether to sample an illegal drug or not, whether to take performance enhancing drugs or not, to indulge in paid news or not, to take 100 crore bribe or not...All these big actions happen one step at a time. Most people believe they are incorruptible but once you accept the first small inducement and justifies it, you have started your slide down the pyramid.

If you had lunch with the businessman about a contract, why not discuss it on the golf course? What is the difference?Then why not go with him to attend a conference in London?What's wrong with that?From London, why not go to Paris for a week's holiday?After all, I am going with a friend. By the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, having accepted and justified ever-larger inducements, the public is appalled at the scale of the corruption. The authors write:

When the person at the top of the pyramid is uncertain, when there are  benefits and costs of both choices, then he or she will feel a particular urgency to justify the choice made.But by the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, ambivalence will have morphed into certainty, and he or she will be miles away from anyone who took a different route.

 This process blurs the distinction that people like to draw between"us good guys"and "those bad guys".  Often, standing at the top of the pyramid, we are faced not with a black-and-white, go/no-go decision, but with a gray choice whose consequences are shrouded. The first steps along the path are morally ambiguous, and the right decision is not always clear. We make an early, apparently inconsequential decision and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice.This starts a process of entrapment - action, justification, further action - that increases our intensity and commitment, and may end up taking us far from our original  intentions or principles.

In the Milgram obedience experiment, if people had been asked to apply the maximum shock initially, many may have refused to comply. But since they are asked to increase the shock step by step, it becomes easy to to justify one's actions at each step and ending up far away from one's initial position.

This metaphor illustrates why I am not so hot about Anna Hazare type movements. In Pakistan, Imran Khan says that he will end corruption in 90 days which is extremely naive. If successful, it will punish people who are already at the bottom of the pyramid but this won't stop  corruption. That will happen only if many people at the top of the pyramid (which is where most people are initially) don't feel compelled to slide down its slopes and easily justify their actions.

Cognitive dissonance - II

When you hear discussions about economics, politics, climate change, GM crops, etc., people will keep espousing the same views that they have held for years. As John Kenneth  Galbraith said, ' I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case. 'It is rare that people will publicly repudiate their long-held views and say, unlike Mark Lynas, 'I am sorry, I was wrong.' It takes too much emotional energy to do so.

I would not have believed before reading this book that it was possible for an innocent man to be made to confess to a crime he did not commmit. But the book shows how it happens. The Innocence Project is a record of people in the US who have been wrongly convicted. In The Central Park Jogger Case,  five men confessed to a rape they did not commit. They were acquitted years later when the real culprit was found.

I have heard many discussions on TV about the evidence against various people for the crimes they have been accused of committing. But I don't recall hearing a discussion about people being wrongly convicted due to reasons other than malice. With a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, it would be naive to think that this does not happen.

It is not surprising that people who have been religious for a long time find it very difficult to give up their faith and perform incredible mental gymnastics to justify their beliefs. (For instance, see this video of Dan Barker speaking of the time when he was an Evangelical Christian. Even people as dangerous as the Salafis of Egypt manage to convince themselves that they are doing good by violence and murder.) Their view of themselves as good people (which is often true) is at odds with many things in their holy books and they come up with bizarre explanations to reduce their dissonance.

The brain is often erroneously compared to a computer. And memory is erroneously compared to the RAM with incidents in our lives being stored and retrieved on tap. But that is not the case.Memory is a self-justifying historian that resorts to confabulation, distortion and plain forgetting to preserve our core self-images. (Slate had an 8 part series on memory manipulation.)

It is not that people are deliberately lying. The memory automatically deletes embarrassing actions of the past. The authors quote Nietzsche: “Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.” The authors of autobiographies may remember incidents a bit differently from what actually happened. "If mistakes were made," say the authors, "memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else." The contents of political memoirs have to be read with the same skepticism as what the writers of Yes Minister/ Yes Prime Minister (my favourite television series) said about Jim Hacker's diaries:

We believe that these diaries accurately reflect the mind of one  of our outstanding national leaders; if the reflection seems clouded it may not be the fault of the mirror.Hacker himself processed events in a variety of ways, and the readers will have to make their own judgement as to whether any given statement represents 

(a) what happened

(b) what he believed happened

(c) what he would like to have happened 

(d) what he wanted others to believe happened

(e)what he wanted others to believe that he believed happened. 

As a general rule, politicians' memories are less reliable about failure than successes, and about distant events than recent ones.

People in privileged positions often look down upon those who are less privileged. They are wont to say that their success is due to hard work and that luck has nothing to do with it. The curious aspect is that when those who are on the other side of the fence find themselves in a position of privilege, they think and behave in the same fashion that they had despised earlier. The authors of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) write:

All of us are unaware of our blind spots as fish are unaware of the water they swim in, but those who swim in the waters of privilege have a particular motivation to remain oblivious. When Marynia Farnham achieved fame and fortune during the late 1940s and 1950s by advising women to stay at home and raise children, otherwise risking frigidity, neurosis, and a loss of femininity, she saw no inconsistency (or irony) in the fact that she was privileged to be a physician who was not staying at home raising children, including her own. When affluent people speak of the underprivileged, they rarely bless their lucky stars that they are privileged let alone consider that they might be over privileged. Privilege is their blind spot. It is invisible; they don't think twice about it.; they justify their social position as something they are entitled to. In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if these privileges are temporary. Most people who normally fly in what is euphemistically called the 'main cabin' regard the privileged people in business and first class as wasteful snobs, if enviable ones. Imagine paying all that extra money for a short, six- hour flight! But as soon as they are the ones paying for a business seat or are upgraded, that attitude vanishes, replaced by a self-justifying mixture of pity and disdain for their fellow passengers, forlornly trooping past them into steerage. 

'It is a good Divine that follows his own instructions', said Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Not many are that wise. What it all boils down to is that, in spite of the splendid achievements of many individuals down the ages, we are not much more than flawed primates recently descended from the trees which had made Bertrand Russell remark," It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."  Here is Carol Tavris talking about her book at Point of Inquiry.

Cognitive dissonance - I

Mistakes were made (but not by me) is a book about cognitive dissonance and the effect that it has on decision making in various fields like medicine, criminal justice etc. It is a term coined by Leon Festinger to explain the behavior of the members of a doomsday cult when their prophesy failed. Cognitive dissonance occurs when an individual holds two views that are opposed to each other. He then goes through various mental hoops to reduce the dissonance he feels between these views.

 All of us try to reduce cognitive dissonance all the time. For instance, we will use office time to surf the net. But we want to think of ourselves as good, ethical human beings so we come up with self-justifying reasons - we are not paid enough, everybody does it, anyway the boss doesn't appreciate our handwork...The difference between the self-justifications of most of us and those of powerful people is that the latter has big consequences. Dissonance theory has some disturbing implications:

1. Severe initiation rites increases  the loyalty of a member. So if a person undergoes severe ragging before getting into a group, his loyalty to the group increases.
2. If we come across any information that is consonant with our views, we will view it positively. If the information is dissonant, we will view it as biased or sloppy. The confirmation bias ensures that even absence of evidence is evidence for our beliefs.
3. People become more certain of something that they have recently done if it is irrevocable. So, asking a person who has recently purchased an expensive item whether you should buy it is not a good idea.He will be highly motivated to persuade you to buy it.   A person who has jut spent a  lot of money on something is unlikely to say that it was a waste.
4. The escalation of  brutality by perpetrators will be more if victims are helpless than if victims are  armed and able to strike back. When I see scenes like these, this is the explanation that occurs to  me. Such penchant for cruelty is shown in the Stanford prison experiment. It is sobering to think that given the right conditions, I could also behave in the same way.(Here is a You tube video about the Lucifer effect. Warning: A little bit of it is NSFW.)

We often hear from powerful people about say, police reform, military purchases, etc. They will rarely admit that they made a mistake. The first impulse will be to deny any mistake for the obvious reason of protecting one's  job, reputation and colleagues. But there are powerful internal reasons for such denial: they would like to think of themselves as honourable, competent people who would never commit the errors that they are accused of.They thus convince themselves that conditions were different back then, funds and staff were insufficient, situation was more complicated than realised...Admitting to the error would be very difficult because it would be antithetical to their perception of themselves as competent individuals.

When the atom bomb was exploded, Einstein said, “The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” The problem is that this way of thinking is hardwired into our brain.

Neuroscientists have shown that biases are built into the way the brain processes information.Self-justification is not the same as lying. It is lying to oneself. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done. It minimises our mistakes and is the reason why everybody can see a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite himself. (There is my excuse for the hypocrisies that you have seen in this blog - I don't  know that they exist! But I can see the hypocrisies in others' statements every other day!) The authors write:

The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting delusion that we,  personally, do not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots - of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behaviour or their convictions.Along with the confirmation bias, the brain comes packaged with other self-serving habits that allow us to  justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic and unbiased....We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way as we do.If they disagree with us, they obviously aren't seeing clearly.

One year later

It is about one year since I started using the neuro headset. Since then there have been a couple of changes which have made things easier for me.

Initially, the software could be implemented only on the laptop. There is a pen drive which has the software for the headset. When it was inserted into the desktop, it was not able to receive the signal from the headset for some reason. Since all my files and bookmarks were in the desktop this caused some problems. I used to type some matter in the laptop, mail it to my Gmail account, open it in the desktop and copy/paste it in the relevant place.

Around a couple of months ago, Sujit accidentally discovered that the distance between the pen drive and the headset was too big for the signal being generated when the pen drive was connected to the desktop. He brought a cord from a friend to which the  pen drive can be attached to bring it closer to the headset and checked if this works. (I didn't know that such a cable existed.)  When this was done, the headset worked smoothly in the desktop.

Before activating the headset, 16 nodes moistened with a saline solution have to be attached to it. This takes some time especially since it was becoming difficult to attach the nodes to the headset since the threading had worn out. I then discovered that I could move the mouse pointer without the nodes being attached to the headset. I cannot use the blink function without the nodes so I cannot surf the net like this.

The on-screen keyboard has an autoclick  function. When I position the mouse-pointer over a letter and wait for a second, the letter gets typed in the word processor that I am using. I found that I can type much faster like this without using the nodes because different windows don't keep popping up and the cursor doesn't suddenly go  elsewhere because of inadvertent blinks. I can now concentrate on the keyboard  knowing that the cursor will remain in the correct position. I used to ask Jaya to save whatever I had typed whenever she came into the room.

Fool that I am, I had not realised that I could use the keyboard function 'cntrl + s' to save on my own. Once, before the s/w had been implemented on the desktop, I was typing some matter in the laptop and Jaya had gone to sleep. I thought that the laptop was connected to the inverter and so I could relax and save everything after Jaya got up. Of course, I thought wrong.

The laptop had inadvertently been connected to the wrong plug point and consequently, had been running on battery for some time after the power had gone off. (In Coimbatore, load shedding is at least 10 hrs. a day.) Suddenly the battery was exhausted and the screen went blank. I had lost whatever I had typed for 2 hours. In Very Good Jeeves!, when Bertie Wooster encounters an unexpected hitch while executing his well thought out plan, he muses:

You know, sometimes it seems to me as if Fate were going out of its way to such an extent to snooter you that you wonder if it's worth while continuing the struggle.

Being a glutton for punishment, after the dazed look that one normally gets after a blow on the solar plexus had passed, I typed the whole thing again, this time making sure that the laptop is connected to the right socket. Now I use the keyboard function 'cntrl + s' to save after typing every line. Fate, Ha!

The long and the short of all this is that you have no escape from my regular doses of wisdom. But I know that you folks are a resilient lot who can take the rough with the smooth with equanimity treating both those impostors just the same so I have no  worries on that score.