Rational Philosophy

On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.

Let’s Make a Deal — Probability Insight.

Yesterday I posted about how our intuition can mislead us. I spent a good while pondering the mathematical problem related in the post — that in a Let’s Make a Deal situation, one will be twice as successful if one switches consistently.

I thought later, too, about the reason the correct answer isn’t intuitive. And, after a couple of thought experiments, I realized that one can generate an intuitive conclusion to a similar problem.

In the Let’s Make A Deal example, the host gives the contestant a choice of three doors, behind one a car, behind two, goats. The contestant chooses, the host then reveals a goat behind one of the doors the contestant didn’t pick and gives him the option of sticking or switching. Counter-intuitively, if he switches the contestant will be twice as likely to win the car.

The trick to this problem is that there are three doors, and in revealing what’s behind one of them, the game tricks us into thinking that the problem is a a simple fifty-fifty shot.

But think about a similar thought experiment: We have a hundred doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the other ninety-nine are goats. We pick a door out of the hundred. The host then opens 98 of the doors to reveal 98 goats. The chance that the car is behind our door is still one in a hundred, but the chance that the car is behind the other door is now 99 out of 100. We’d be foolish not to switch…

The three door game fools us because it’s just three doors. Our minds have trouble processing the likelihood because the probability differences are, relatively, small. But after revealing a goat the method of arriving at the actual probability is just the same as the example with 100 doors — the chance that the car is behind the door we picked originally is still one in three, but the chance that it is behind the other door is two in three.

Perhaps this tells us something about the mind’s approach to processing statistics and risk. In life, we need to process and discard a lot of information. Some choices in life have high probability outcomes. Some have low probability outcomes. For these, the mind needs to have a clear sense of what to expect. For everything else the outcome is a bit of a crap shoot, and we have a much better chance of improving our lot if we work on avoiding dire outcomes. The brain isn’t wired for nuanced probability questions, because, even if it were, this wouldn’t really help us survive. We’re much better at avoiding or mitigating risk by anticipating and avoiding problems. That’s where the high value exists in life.

On intuition and how it can fool us.

In pointing to the problems with what we think we deduce, Dan Ariely, (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions) points to a study showing that whether someone opts to donate his or her organs depends on whether the question asks them to opt-in or opt-out. People will tend to stick with the default presented to them. Not because they don’t care, but because they care deeply but don’t feel able to decide from fundamental principles.
Similarly, a mathematical analysis of the game show “Let’s Make A Deal” reveals that people aren’t very good at intuiting the correct answers to probability problems. When choosing between three options, knowing that one option is wrong affects the likelihood of one’s secondary choice. On Let’s Make A Deal, Monty allowed the contestant make an initial choice between three doors, behind one of which was a car, while behind the other two were goats. Monty would then reveal a goat behind one of the two doors that the contestant didn’t pick. Should the contestant switch or stick? Does it make a difference to his chances of winning? Counterintuitively, the answer is that he should switch. This seems wrong but is born out by the math. (The “reveal” is constrained, effectively tipping off the chooser; if you switch, you win two out of three times; if you don’t switch you win only one out of three times. When explained in this way — 2/3 plus 1/3 = 1, it makes sense, but that is not how it appears intuitively.)

How does this relate to sexism and misogyny? Nicholas Kristof asks whether the routinely brutal and discriminatory treatment of women in many societies is sexist or misogynistic. He gets a lot of comments on his post. But I think that Kristof and his responders maybe miss the point because it offends intuition. Kristof argues that perhaps ritual abuse and discrimination of women is sexist rather than misogynistic.

It seems to me that intuitively we look at the question from a neutral perspective — that women are routinely discriminated against and abused in a ritual fashion yields evidence of sexism or misogyny. But what if it were evidence of something else? Wouldn’t this change the question?

Throughout the natural world, the male and female of the various species exhibit different behaviors. In some species the females raise the young. in others this is the task of the males. In some species the female is multi-hued and splendid, in others it is the male. In mammals, typically, females protect and nurture the young, men protect and feed the group. These are not sexist behaviors, since sexism is a conscious concept; the animals simply behave as they’ve evolved to behave.

Sexism and misogyny begin from but distort the neutral, natural concepts that differentiate females and males of the human species. But why does this happen at all? Humans exaggerate and conceptualize differences in ways that make them feel less threatened, more in control. Men traditionally exploit and codify the differences between the sexes to reduce their fear and feed their self-esteem. Likewise women do the same, but for the most part with less dramatic and harmful results.

Intuitively, we connect the ill-judged and harmful behaviors of abuse, control and humiliation with the concepts of sexism and misogyny, but they are more closely connected with the concepts of fear and defense. We exaggerate and exploit gender differences to counter our fears and bolster our defenses; this happens more readily in societies that have fewer less harmful mechanisms to bring about the same outcome. These defenses then become codified as socially accepted or tolerated or rejected concepts. Enlightenment, insight, education and social change are the only remedies.

On the concept of free will and its application to personal development.

As I watched March of The Penguins with my family the other evening my wife asked whether the penguins, who spend months of each year huddled together in freezing conditions, gradually starving, ever wonder whether there’s something better out there. The film’s accompanying commentary (narrated by Morgan Freeman) often wanders into sappy projections of human psychology, ascribing human thoughts and feelings to the penguins, spoiling to some extent a fascinating documentary.

We can say with some degree of certainty that penguins do not conceive of choice in the same way people do. But how do people conceive of choice and is it an illusion?

As a teenager I was sure that there was no such thing as free will, no such thing as choice. It seemed obvious to me that any response to any stimulus must be pre-determined by environment and instinct. At the most fundamental level, our minds are complex but absolute mechanisms, sets of synaptic switches, and every “choice” is simply the next configuration of these switches determined by the configuration that came before as influenced by a new set of external stimuli.

In a way I still believe this, but I now think that it skips over an explanation for the concepts of free will and choice, and in doing so lets us abdicate responsibility for our actions or inactions.

Perversity, I think, provides one of the clearest ways to conceive of free will: Imagine someone sitting in a temperature-controlled room with a thermostat. The person can raise or lower the temperature in the room by adjusting the thermostat. If he’s cold he can make it warmer. If it’s hot, he can make it cooler. But, if he’s feeling perverse, he can make it colder when he’s cold or hotter when he’s hot.

It’s at this level that free will and choice have meaning. We conceive of a set of choices and decide to act or not act either according to what we feel we should do, or according to what we feel we shouldn’t do. (This is why perversity provides such a good mental template for the concept.) Being conscious and having access to abstract concepts, we can conceive of doing things that counteract our physiological and emotional instincts.
At the next level down a conscious choice may well reflect a pre-conditioned set of psychological and environmental switches, but that’s not the point. We encounter free will and choice as we conceive of an action or inaction and consider them abstractly, consciously.

Now, here’s the trick. We can train ourselves to reset our switches, essentially changing the current conditions of our psychology. You can read this post and go away with a newly set switch, a switch that will permit you to decide to change a behavior that you don’t like. You have then exerted free will and contributed to your own personal development.

The most important part of this insight is that the results of these changes can be cumulative and can snowball. A choice to practice yoga or start therapy or quit drinking, for instance, can lead to a whole new set of experiences that reset a whole bunch of switches in our minds. Small choices can lead to big changes.

This, I believe, is the level at which we experience free will. Acknowledging the power of choice, even if it is mechanistically illusory, can lead to profound and powerful changes that help us get more out of life.

(My book LIFE! contains a more searching discussion of these ideas.)