Wasteful qualifiers

Users of languages improve them by adding new words. Often languages would also be improved by taking away words – not so much such that nobody ever uses the word, but just so it is not necessary to convey a certain meaning. For instance since it is very rare for a claim to be meant with one hundred percent certainty, it would be more efficient if a speaker had to add ‘certainly’ in that case, rather than adding ‘probably’ or ‘I think’ for every other case where they are only claiming a best guess.

Robin Hanson explains the retention of such extra words by people being stuck in a signaling game: if you don’t add the extra words in the normal cases, then people mistake you for those who really are making extreme claims, since everyone else adds the extra words when they are making the ordinary claim.

That seems correct. But why would this begin? How did everyone ever come to use the long, complicated sentences for saying ordinary things and the succinct ones for claims that almost nobody ever wants to make? Perhaps we just especially notice the half of times when the signals are assigned the inconvenient way around?

Another plausible theory is that the usual cases are complicated, whereas simple cases are unusual and extreme. Adding qualifications allows you to say something much more specific and nuanced. And we usually want to refer to specific, nuanced state of affairs. However for uncontroversial issues nobody seems to have much trouble interpreting simple statements as the obvious more complex ones. If you say ‘roofs in England have steeper slopes than roofs in Australia’ most people would interpret this as indicating some sort of general tendency for steeper roofs in England. If you want to say the extreme thing, you have to say something like ‘literally every roof in England is steeper than every roof in Australia – no, I mean it literally. I know, it sounds insane! Look, I’ll send you these seven review articles summarizing the research.’ Whereas if a person says ‘women are less interested in engineering than men’, listeners seem to often interpret this in such a way as to make raising counterexamples a reasonable response.

So it seems closely connected with controversy. It appears that people making uncontroversial claims are much more scared of being misunderstood and thought controversial than people making controversial claims are the opposite. Or at least they are willing to pay more to avoid being misunderstood. So the controversial people can snap up the short, efficient signals without worrying about confusion, leaving the uncontroversial people to run away to awkward, qualified corners of signal space.

But it’s not obvious why uncontroversial people should be more afraid. The probability of misunderstanding seems to be much lower for them, because there are so few controversial people. A random apparently extreme claim is much more likely to be an error of speech than a random apparently moderate claim is. So to make the risk from potential misunderstandings higher for people making moderate claims, the cost of being misunderstood needs to be a lot higher for them. Why would this be?

Honesty

One answer is that more controversial claims are just more costly to make – everyone would prefer to make non-controversial claims, but some people are forced to make controversial claims by honesty. If they are misunderstood, all the better for them. This seems to have an element of truth, but doesn’t account for the apparent glee many people exhibit while making controversial claims.

Taking back

Another thing you might wonder about such models is why anybody should be much worried, given the possibility of clarification. Nobody fears being too misunderstood about roofs, in part because if the audience appears to be taking the statement the wrong way, it is cheap to clarify. Most conversation seems to involve plenty of this. Yet it seems to me at least that if you say something apparently controversial you are much less allowed to take it back than if you say something non-controversial. The audience is suspicious. Perhaps your slip of the tongue is  taken as telling, regardless of your conscious corrections. Whereas saying something uncontroversial first is not taken as much of a sign about you. If you correct your non-controversial statement to a controversial one, listeners are generally willing to allow that you are controversial.

Selection

Another possibility is that people are basically selected into making extreme claims or not according to whether they are terrified of other people criticizing them. Naturally the uncontroversial people are more scared of being misunderstood as controversial because this is what being uncontroversial is about.

Signaling

When talking about controversial topics, your words are taken as a sign of what side you are on. Perhaps to show that you are on the side considered more virtuous, you need to pay higher costs. People who believe controversial things might prefer to look like those who don’t, but their lack of passion for the cause means they can’t be bothered adding all the qualifiers, or feel more uncomfortable doing so. The people who truly believe the ‘virtuous’ claims can be bothered, and do so to set themselves apart.

This would also explain why listeners wouldn’t allow you to take back controversial sounding claims – if you could say things cheaply and only elaborate when you were caught, it would be much cheaper, so may not signal your devotion correctly.

It doesn’t however explain why you would have to do this particular costly act, instead of some other. But that is rarely explained I think.

Status

I discussed this with Robin, and he suggested a status explanation: making controversial claims is generally a bid for status. If roofs were controversial, then by claiming that roofs in Britain are steeper than roofs in Australia, you are taking the initiative to ally your group with ideas that the current powers consider enemy. So you are making a bid to increase your own importance in the group, as well as trying to change the status of other groups and ideas. People respond strongly to bids of status. If you want to do something that looks a bit like a bid for status without being beaten down into your place by all around, you have to do some sort of accepted submission dance at the same time to make it not like a bid for status. This seems intuitively somewhat plausible, but leaves even more questions unanswered: why does this behavior convince people around you that you are not bidding for status? Why doesn’t clarifying later work? Why are you so aggressively interpreted as bidding for status anyway, instead of making the nearest probable, non-controversial claim? 

Responses

What to do about this? One intuitive possibility is to replace words instead of just removing some. For instance we could introduce the usage:

Qualifiedly: with all due qualifications, and some more

Then instead of saying ‘he sometimes seems a bit silly, to me, but I might just be biased, and I don’t really know him that well, and I’m sure we all have different preferences anyway, and that might be relevant..’ you could just say ‘he seems qualifiedly a bit silly’.

I’m not sure if this would work in any of the above models though. It probably won’t work if the point is to pay a cost, or do a special dance. In the signaling case there is probably no way out, unless non-controversial people can find a cheaper way to set themselves apart, that is still expensive enough to keep out the controversial people.

If the important thing is just to say something that can’t be interpreted badly the first time, something like this has a better chance of working.

Turning it around, how you expect such a change of words to go says something about which theory of inefficient qualifications is correct.

What celebration is

I’m back! And to celebrate being back, I shall discuss celebrating. I actually have not much idea why people celebrate things the way they do, but the practice has many interesting features.

Stylized facts about celebrating stuff:

1. It generally happens at the beginnings and ends of differentiated periods of time (e.g. a year, time living in a particular area, time on a particular project, a lifetime), and on annual anniversaries of those.
2. It usually requires most of one’s time, for between a couple of hours and a day.
3. If it is repeated, it tends to be ritualistic and traditional, containing roughly the same activities every time, but different ones for different celebrations.
4. The activities tend to be enjoyable, social, ones. They tend not to have other obvious purposes, besides eating.
5. Celebrating seems to generally express the importance of a subject. Celebrating a thing indicates approval for it.
6. Celebrations tend to involve more symbolism than your usual activity.
7. Many celebrations are shared by large numbers of people. Of all the social activities people engage in, most of the largest scale coordinated ones seem to be celebrations.
8. Celebrating seems normatively expected to be social. Celebrating a thing alone is often considered a sad sign.
9. Celebrations are more often associated with a religion than the average activity is, though many are not.
10. Celebrated entities are often humans, or significant human events. But there are also celebrations of beer and dance and so on. I’m unsure what unifying feature these things have. Perhaps just they are popular enough in some group to get general approval for expressing support for them. But it seems something like idealization or identity comes in – many mundane things are popular yet largely uncelebrated. e.g. double glazed windows.
11. Not celebrating stuff that others are celebrating is seen as somewhat antisocial, serious, and passionless. Yet not a terrible sin.

Why would you have an activity like this? One where periodically large numbers of people – often many perfect strangers – stop what they are doing and enjoy themselves socially in repetitive and symbolic ways that are understood to express approval regarding a particular thing?

The large scale coordination in expressing approval for a thing seems potentially useful for strengthening social norms around that thing. That everyone affirms the value of X every year in public lets you know that X has widespread support, and also makes this support salient. This probably makes dedication to X seem more important. But exactly what force would bring about things that are useful for strengthening social support for random things? And how true could this be of e.g. birthdays? It doesn’t seem obvious that people have birthday parties to encourage everyone to publicly reaffirm their support of the birthday haver.

If this kind of thing is the purpose though, it would make sense that celebrations are generally enjoyable. If you want a group of people to publicly affirm their support for a thing, an easy way to increase the number of people who will do it is to buy them off with cake. If the cake comes with a story about eating cake for ineffable reasons of great spiritual importance, all the better. And so you eventually end up with elaborate celebrations where many participants aren’t quite sure what the point was, and everyone slightly suspects that the others are there for the cake. Then at some point it becomes common knowledge that everyone is there for the cake, at which point the whole thing becomes embarrassing to continue and you go home.

Note that this need not be intentional – just those celebrations that are enjoyable tend to grow. Also note that the norms being supported need not be exactly the things celebrated. Celebrating features of a certain culture – e.g. beer – might strengthen embracement of that culture in general.

This would also explain the mystery of why there are as many celebrations as there are, and not more. Given that people seem to like the ones they have, and don’t seem to suffer much waning interest for extra excuses to party, it’s not immediately clear why we don’t just have some more celebrations. The explanation would be that the bottleneck is widespread belief in the virtue of celebrating a particular thing, which is hard to manufacture, rather than enthusiasm for a day off.

As for the repetitiveness, symbolism, and tradition, these things seem to be roughly how humans always behave when they feel particularly superstitious. Which they seem to do when things seem important, and they don’t understand them. At least that’s my tentative guess.

More theories?

Weirdos and foreigners

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Maybe this is old advice, or so obvious that everyone figures it out. But handy tip for if you are strange, and you want others to not think you are strange: hang out with foreigners.

To foreigners, everyone from your culture is strange. It could easily take them years to realize that some of your peculiarities are actually your peculiarities, not quaint oddities of your backward culture.

They don’t need to be actually foreign in the national sense for this, but they do need to be at least fairly unfamiliar with your culture. People from a distant generation or social set should also work.

I have tried out this advice a bit when house-sharing. Usually I find sharing houses somewhat uncomfortable. One reason is that I have fairly obsessive-compulsive kitchen-use tendencies. When I first moved to Pittsburgh I lived with two of my Chinese colleagues. Amongst the mutually alien methods of cooking, and alien foods, and alien eating arrangements, and alien hygiene protocols in general, who bats an eyelid if you happen to wash things a couple of times more than the usual American? This made things more comfortable, modulo the fact that some foreign cooking habits don’t mix well with OCD.

Of course, the foreigners you hang out with are unusually likely to be following the same strategy. If you rudely want to avoid hanging out with strange foreigners while gaining the benefits of hiding your own strangeness, you should hang out with more foreigners. That way you can compare foreigners against one another and distinguish individual strangeness from cultural strangeness. Relatedly, you should avoid hanging out with more locals at the same time.

When seeing X suggests ‘generally ¬X’

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Suppose nobody has ever told you that they like you. Suppose you are relatively uncertain about how often people like other people, and also about how often they will disclose it when they do. Suppose you are confident that these facts about your ignorance and social inexperience do not bear on whether other people like you. So as it stands you are fairly uncertain about your popularity. Suppose also that you have a deep and insatiable need for people to like you, and your pleasure is roughly linear in the number of people who like you.

Suppose one day a person tells you that they like you. If you are given to expressing emotions or making inferences, one thing you might wonder is whether this should be cause for happiness.

This is not as obvious as it first seems. A person telling you that they like you is more probable if:

1. This specific person likes you.
2. People like you in general
3. People are given to expressing their liking for other people

The first two are promising. The third makes the fact that nobody else has ever said they like you a bit more damning. Just how much more damning depends on your probability distribution over different possible states of affairs. For an extreme example, suppose you had even odds on two extreme cases – people always saying they like people who they like, and people never doing so – and that many people have had a chance by now to tell you if they like you. Then you should be extremely sad if anyone tells you that they like you. The apparent update in favor of people liking you in general will be completely overwhelmed by the reverse update from flatly ruling out the possibility that all those people you have already met like you.

In general, seeing an instance of X can make X less likely, by indicating that X tends to be visible:

• Hearing your neighbors have loud sex might lower your estimate of how often they have sex.
• Finding a maggot in your dinner might reassure you that maggots in dinners are relatively visible (this is just a hypothetical example – in fact they are not, especially if your dinner is rice)

Conversely, failing to see X can make X more likely, by increasing the probability that it is invisible:

• If you have never observed a person lying, it might be more likely that they are an excellent and prolific liar than it would be if you had seen them lie awkwardly once. Though not once all the excellent liars realize this and stumble sheepishly over a white lie once in a while.
• Failing to observe phone calls  from friends for too long will often cause you to suspect they have in fact been calling you, and there is rather something wrong with your phone.

Personal experimentation: summary

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I asked how it could be that experimenting in my own life could be worthwhile, given that if such things were worthwhile other people should have already figured them all out. My suggested explanations:

1. I am strange: nerdy, recent, young
2. Innovation: there are constantly new things to experiment with
3. Findings are not spread: or so much noise is also spread that the information is lost
4. Context-specificity: your findings don’t apply to me, because people are unique or situations are complicated
5. I am wrong: it’s easy to underestimate nebulous costs, to overstate fleeting or illusory benefits, to want to be the kind of person who tries new things, or to be too hopeful that life can improve fast

It seems to me that 3 is the biggest: results are collected so badly as to be often worthless and are aggregated poorly. It’s not clear to what extent this is because of 4: other people’s findings are just not so useful. Personal experimentation seems worth it even without good aggregation, but probably only if you avoid the same errors of measurement yourself. It could be worth it even with purely placebo gains, if you enjoy the placebo gains enough. But in this scenario, the gains are much smaller than you imagine, so you are probably over-investing a lot. There also seems to me a real risk that everything is so context specific that what you learn will be worthless as soon as you change many other things (4).

Explanations that involve others finding experimentation a lot less worthwhile (e.g. 1) seem unlikely to help much because it looks like others often find experimentation worthwhile. The problem seems to be somewhere between others making such efforts, and me having useful information as a result. Innovation (2) seems a bad explanation because it doesn’t explain the lack of information about age-old lifestyle questions. It seems likely that I have overestimated gains relative to losses in the past (5), but gains still seem larger than losses (it’s hard to disentangle causes, but my lifestyle has obviously improved substantially over the last  year or more, some of which seems directly attributable to purposeful experimentation and the rest of which seems at least not terribly damaged by it).

What motivates cognition?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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When I was a teenager, I think I engaged in a lot of motivated cognition. At least in an absolute sense; I don’t know how much is common. Much was regarding trees. Before I thought about this in detail, I assumed that how motivated cognition mostly works is this: I wanted to believe X, and so believed X regardless of the evidence. I looked for reasons to justify my fixed beliefs, while turning a blind eye to this dubious behavior.

On closer in(tro)spection, this is what I think really happened. I felt strongly that X was true because many good and smart adults had told me so. I also explicitly believed I should believe whatever my reasoning told me. I was inclined to change my beliefs when the information changed. However I knew that I did this, I feared that my reasoning was fallible, and I was terrified that I would come to believe not-X even though X was the truth. Then the truth would come out, or more evidence at least (and obviously the truth would be X), then all the good people who knew X would consider me evil, which was equivalent to being evil. They would also consider me stupid, for not seeing the proper counterarguments. So it was sickening to not be able to come up with a counterargument, because such a failure would immediately turn me into an evil and stupid person. Needless to say, I was quite an expert, especially on counterarguments.

So unlike in my usual model of motivated cognition, my arguments were directed at persuading myself of things I feared doubting, rather than justifying fixed beliefs to others. How often is this really what’s going on?

Personal experimentation: I’m wrong?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I’ve been wondering why experimentation seems worthwhile. I’ve given some explanations in my last few posts. The last category of explanations to consider are the ones in which my judgement is wrong. Where experimentation seems worth it because I don’t see the costs, or because I overestimate the benefits.

A lot of the cost from experimentation is plausibly nebulous and hard to account for well in a simple explicit analysis. Life can’t run smoothly on habits when they are always in flux. Mental effort is used up in keeping track. Every new thing takes a little while to do well, and to integrate into your lifestyle.

It’s easy count the costs of living in Oxford for a month in airfares and flight times, and forget the freezing afternoon you might spend negotiating to reclaim your foreign credit card from an ATM that ate it. Or the hassle of urgently buying boots, or of running up the high street looking for a working internet connection to finish your Skype call, or the sleep loss due to alien fire alarm policies at the college where you are staying. It seems to me that I have tended to underestimate such costs in the past substantially.

I mentioned in earlier posts some reasons I might overestimate the benefits. Innovation is less worth finding if it is quickly obsoleted by context specificity or further innovation. Informal data collection seems to see benefits too easily in every change. Nerds may underestimate the wisdom embodied in tradition. The first of these seems unlikely, given my experience. The others seem dangerous, but I do guard against them.

One might also overestimate the benefits if one is motivated to do so. Being willing to try new things is a telling sign about a person, or often taken to be one. Often it is a sign you should want to send. This hypothesis is supported in my case by the observation that many people I know seem to find experimentation particularly useful. However I rarely talk about this kind of stuff, and feel a bit silly when I do. Which doesn’t fit a signaling hypothesis well. Though this blog sequence undermines my claims some.

One might also be biased by other motivations. For instance if you badly hope that life can get much better, it might be hard to accept a route to that which involves sitting by and waiting when there are so many ways to aggressively search. I admit I would probably have some trouble accepting that this is as good as it gets, but I think I would at least be aware of discomfort around the topic if this was what was going on. So this seems unlikely to account for the observation.

To me underestimating the hidden costs seems by far the biggest danger.

Personal experimentation: context specific?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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A last way that personal experimentation could be worth it for me, yet not already completely covered by others, is that most of the facts one is likely to learn are quite context-specific. That way, everyone in history might have figured out for themselves what the best time and sugar-content for lunch is, and it would be worthless to me.

This also seems quite plausible. It could either be that people are so varied that there is just no good answer to whether it is better for productivity to eat snacks throughout the day or a few big meals for instance. Or it could be that which value of one parameter is best depends on all the other ones, so if you tend to eat more sugar than me and sleep less and laugh more, exercise might make you less sleepy than I.

The latter possibility bodes poorly for those who would experiment a lot. After you have determined the best quantity and timing of exercise, you might go on to try to optimize your sleep or sugar intake and make the original finding worthless.

This explanation would also seem to explain the observations in the last post: that many people do seem quite keen advise on the details of one’s life, but that the content of such recommendations seem a bit all over the place. Perhaps each person’s discoveries really do work well for them, but just look like a sea of noise to all the other people.

Personal experimentation: not shared?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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I’ve been talking about how personal experimentation could be worth it for people like me, without relevant info being depleted long ago.

My next potential explanation is that people do experiment, but results aren’t aggregated and spread, so everyone has to reinvent everything.

This is exactly what you would expect in a simple model where people benefit from information, but bear a net cost from spreading it. Without incentives to contribute one’s own findings to others, there is no reason information should spread. But on closer inspection this is roughly the opposite of what the world looks like. There is a lot of advice about how to run the details of a life. Sometimes it is offered for money, but often so enthusiastically and freely as to make the most curious life-optimizer want to run away. The problem seems to be more that there is so much advice, advising pretty much the full range of behavior. There are apparently incentives for spreading such ‘information’, but not incentives to actually find any information to begin with.

This is doubly puzzling. It’s not surprising if all the possible self-help books exist. But for folks volunteering their own time to tell me about whatever relaxation technique or diet, spreading random misinformation seems low value. And again we have the question of why it wasn’t worth it, for their own benefit, to get some actual information to begin with.

A plausible explanation to me for both of these things is that just about any random innocuous change makes life seem better, and people are genuinely trying to be helpful by telling others about such ‘discoveries’. So the problem then would be widespread use of informal data collection, which is much more unreliable than people think. In which case, my own experimentation is just as likely to fail if I rely on such data collection. Experimentation in general would not be as useful as suspected – continually experimenting would make you feel like things were good, but none of your efforts would have long term payoffs.

This leaves the questions of whether and why people would be misinformed about their abilities to casually collect information about the effects of interventions on their lives. What say you?

Personal experiments: fueled by innovation?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Another way personal experimentation might be worth it for me, yet not used up by those before me: there is so much innovation that there are constantly new things to test, even if people experiment a lot. Beeminder and Workflowy are new. The abilities to prompt yourself to do things with a mobile phone or eat Japanese food or use your computer in a vast number of ways are relatively new.

I doubt this explains much. The question applies to many things that have been around and not that different for a long time, e.g. wheat, motivation, reading, romantic arrangements. And even if Beeminder is new, many of the basic ideas must be old (e.g. ‘don’t break the chain‘). As a society we don’t seem to have a much better idea of the effects of wheat on a person than we do of Beeminder.

Another way innovation could explain the puzzle is if all kinds of innovations change the value of all kinds of ancient things e.g. prevalence of internet use changes the effects of going to bed early or sitting in a certain way or doing something with your hair or knowing a lot of stories. If this is the case, experimentation is worth less than it seems, as the results will soon be out of date. So this goes under the heading ‘I’m wrong: experimentation isn’t worth it’, which would explain the puzzle, except the bit where everyone else perceives this and knows not to bother, and I don’t. I will get back to explanations of this form later.