Deciding / acting, and experiencing

decisions, actions, perceptions and the experience of life.

Life has two aspects which differ on many counts.
Decision making, acting.
Experience.

Deciding needs realism. Long terms calculations. Cynicism? (you want to see clearly what will happen on every action - sentimentalism distorts realism). Rationality.

Experience is immediate, folds moment by moment. Irrational. Emotions are important.

One cannot get away avoiding rationality in decision making. You want to get your goals in actual reality. At least for practically important goals (getting your bread, shelter, healing yourself etc.).

So far no problem? We experience life as it is, and we care for our goals. But there are many contradictions.

Attention is a powerful force. When we focus on details of the world that are relevant for actions and for our goals, we may ignore other aspect of life.
Especially for the inner experiental aspects of life.

One comes to a painful trade off. Looking at the realistic technical sides of the world, may help in managing life and attending our goals, but brings a cost in the experience of life. You see the practical you may lose your experience.
It has many other experiental effects.

Deciding "should" essentially go by expected results. Ends are the only thing in mind, and everything else is instrumental. There is no heart to the decider. What is best achieving my goal.

Experience is life. "Life is what happens when we plan other things".

Problem in my view is when the decision making side gets hold on the whole person.
When the mind is full of what is "right" to do. and cares all day long about what and how to do, and so on. Then, the person has no life other than his plans and future prospects. There is no present. There is no experience (aside from the experience of stress.... - ok maybe some minor emotions too)

But not living emotionally one's plans etc. can lead to forgetting them.
I hate thinking about all these needed actions and tradeoffs. But the terrible trade-off is between caring and paying the price of caring, and not caring thereby no doing. There is no decisive claim for either (except in the extremes). But whatever you do you win and lose.

Theoretically, one can have his psych caring with less cost, in various ways. For example: Having a "to care" list but forgetting it and experiencing life without lingering worry. But until one manages to move into this psych state, he has the above trade off.


Realistic understanding of the world is considered by some as "cynical". They are right. Real life is heartless. The processes that make things happen do not have a heart. We have feelings for them. But the underlying process is inhuman. It is there.
Humanism is about feelings we have towards people and things. Realism is about how they operate.


There can be a contradiction of sorts. When you attend to the underlying process, you feel differently towards it.
I had a good friend who was using me emotionally (i.e. without giving back fairly). I am not sure I can easily analyze her actions logically and feel emotionally the same.
Realistically, avoiding analysis leads to being taken advantage of.


A pragmatic thinker (who thinks he can decide whetehr to attend to reality or not...) would say that there is an optimal trade-off point. i.e. attend to reality to some extent but no more (i.e. optimal for happiness or for some other measure)

Another approach is to change glasses. sometimes you entertain reality, for practical purposes. Sometimes you just experience it.

Reconciliation is the most interesting in my view. Not sure how realistic it is. You can see clearly the self interest of your counter-party and still feel he is human and have empathy to him. I think some of it is being approached in meditation traditions. You are supposed to be fully awake to what happens, and still have compassion to others. Even compassion to difficult persons is praised there.

These methods relate to a wiseful kind of thinking that we can plan our lives. We cannot so easily. We may have to accept the idea that we are what we are. And that we generally ought to treat the trade off s they are. i.e. there is a cost. You cannot easily eat the cake and have it.

Example. Music, novels, and movies are fun. The experience is enjoyable for many.
There is a mental cost. These medium promote bad perceptions about love and life. The rehearsal of these stupid things is bound to change your mind in a way that may have a negative effect both on your decisions in life and on your experience.
You get experience and you lose some of the quality of future decisions and experience.

If you are obsessive aobut not having mistakes in your mind, you will avoid all of these. Is the cost worth it? Probably not. Hours and hours of good experience are worth to get somehwat less smart.

There is much to think about this example. But the idea is the point. It is worth to lose some of our "wisdom" to enjoy life. I wise I had the guts to fulheartedly follow this route.



PS.
1) There are aspects of our goals where delusional progress is relevant. Whenever the goals are psychological in nature and the warm glow comes from our thinking we make progress, one may side with delusional progress and goals. But if and when the truth comes out, it can fire back (but not always)

2) Experience is composed of many parts (goal acheivement, involvement, meaning and stories, body, emotions, more).
Some are related to decision making, others to result, and otehrs are stand alone (bodily sensations, moods, ........ )

Some kinds of experience are related to thinking and perceiving. Many of these are ultimately about experience that is independent of the thoughts. When meaningful thoughts lead into a bad mood, we care usually about the bad mood rather than about the meanings themselves. One can theorize and argue more about that. At any rate, much of experience is about experience - the feeling.

PS. Interestiglly people do actually act similarly in self-enhancement. unrealistic self-enhancement is good for well-being and mood, but may harm decisions. It turns out that people actually self-enhance most of the time, but become more realistic when they near a decisions!

Doing smart things for stupid reasons. The intermedia for doing things.

In A future post.... I showed the idea of ways of action that are best for achieving our goals. I like to name these actions "positive expectation dids". actions which result are expected to be good.

But people do not act just via these simple calculations. They may do the right thing with other constructs of reasoning. These constructs may guide towards desirable ends, but without actors being aware of the actual logic.

Exercising the eyes seems to me a very rational activity. relaxed and strong eyes are a great thing for me. Computer addict. Reader. and with sensitive eyes that pain at times.

I am doing these exercises next to a friend. He stares at me "you are out of your mind. Who is doing these shit?"

I wondered. This guy goes to the gym to inflate his muscles, action with less clear value. How in the world doe she find exercising the eyes strange?

OK. He has culturalized terms of what makes sense and what is normal.
Gym is manly etc. exercising the eyes is inexplicable.

But inflating one's muscles is not really stupid. It helps to get laid. It is rational. Similar to the reason of exercising the eyes.

But the guy does not think with ultimate utility in mind. He thinks with how things look like. Somehow, gym is great. Other strange things with stories attached are ........

Still, his gym time can be rational, even if he does not think clearly the calculations. Even if his line of reasoning has nothing to do with common sense.

Good action can come about via strange routes. This is how humans act and think. reasoning may be less common than we philosophers fantasize.


Implications:
1) It does not always make sense to eradicate stories and customs that do not have inner logical validity. They maybe useful without being inherently true.
2) Seeing people acting correctly, does not show that they know what they are doing.
3) Beware the process.
4) More implications I do not have on my tongue now.

PS. example was a little blown out of proportions. The guy may have made some clever calculation about his gym time. He just may have not understood my strange things. Not understanding my logic, does not imply there was no logic in his actions.
My point is still valid at times. People do things that are good for them, for reasons and thoughts that are only indirectly related to the usefulness logic.

how smart are you?

We tend to judge ourselves smart when being right on something.

The trouble is that issues judgments and opinions are very diverse.
Being right on one thing is a weak evidence for being right in another.

(that aside from the strong random variable, that can make you right by pure chance)

Be careful.

PS. Similarly for mistakes, we tend to over punish ourselves for mistakes. If yo can learn from a mistake, ok. But feeling entirely stupid for a single mistake is unwarranted.

Ad-hoc but relevant

Some scientists and many regular folks believe that "ad-hoc" solutions are uninteresting.

In artistic terms they have a point. Art is subjective, and if someone beleives that green color is better than orange, who am I to argue?

In practice, waht coutns are results, not elegance.

A good freind of me is consulting me about his various personal and financial troubles. I am usually listening confusingly, trying to illuminate a point, suggesting what feels for me a straight-forward idea, or, at times, suggesting a trick out of my magic hat.

It happened that I helped this guy immensely. And with those simplistic half thought-out advice. Nothing spectacular. Just a compatible idea in the right time.

In many areas there is already lots of knowledge. What is needed is good application. Finding the right values for the parameters (i.e. how much anger is optimal when you are brain washed with ad-hoc theories of me, all aspects and long term dynamics factored in).

relevance is what counts. Nobody cares about how "smart" a theory is. We care about its usefulness. Ad-hoc tricking is frequently the best thing to do by far.

Humans care about what they care about, and allow elegance and fiction to take care on itself.

Empathy and biases

Kahneman showed that people tend to think on their life in terms of generalization that are inaccurate if we look at their actual moment to moment experience.

If you ask someone "how happy are you" he will look much more at his salary than at his amount of annoyance at work. He looks of the story "how good is my job?" and not at the relevant experience on a momentary base.

Same problem applies to the understanding of other's experience.
We tend to define a situation in generalized terms.

A trip to Paris must be a great experience. Working at the supermarket as a cashier sounds negative.

The experience does not follow our streotypes. Some people have quite a nice time at the cashier desk. A trip when you are atressed as hell can be a terrible experience.

But nobody understands you when your feelings are out of the stereotyped response.
A vacation is fun. Point blank. Go argue.......

A person may even not understand himself in these cases.
Why have I suffered in this party? Something is wrong with me. I should try it again.
But why is the supposed fun of the party of any relevance?
Because we beleive these generalization and stories too much.

Life is the experience. And experience is not fixed by situations. Different people can feel very differently in the same activities. And between different times.

The academic bias

Assume a person who believes that testable ideas are the most interesting ones. Or (weaker form) that stuff that can be laid down in a very neat and logical way or is testable has a strong superiority.

He will devote all his time etc. to this kind of questions, thereby creating a whole body of knowledge that has been selected not on the basis of importance, utility, reality & truth, but on the basis of what meets the technical criteria.


This may create a very distorted world view. and a off the mark body of knowledge.

Even more extreme oddities will emerge in the dynamics of knowledge and learning. When there is more literature and more people talking about a minor question that happened to fit the "science" criteria. Now other people will develop their life, perception and research in this direction, deviating even more form the more relevant issues that do not fit into technical handling.

These dynamics may create a very biased world view. As examplified elsewhere, small innitial biases may contribute to great deviation in the end.


A great example can be seen with happiness research. Put aside what is "correct" for happiness, it seems plausible that even just because some happiness measures are more "neat" and handy, they become "the currency of trade" in the research community.
AFTER they have become "the currency" of the research, they have several advantages including "framing" (i.e. they are written on the wall of the mind all the time as happiness strengthning their imagined relavance). The other advantage of is that even if you disagree with the idea, you will use it just because there is so much research based on that.


On balance, we have many reasons to value technically collected research. We should as well remember that our goal is not being technically correct. We want certain things from life, and should remember that technical science and logic can handle only part of reality.

Reality is there as it is. It does not care what we want it to be. Sometimes, reality even fights back to those trying to ignore it.

On Balance - Importance of an encompassing opinion

Understanding things on balane. Not just narrow opinions!

It is relatively easy to say a highly confined statement (it is cheaper to drive this way).Harder when more considerations come into play (include cost of driving. time. emotional effects. etc.)

Because it is hard to have clear cut evidence about the "on balance" issues, it is easy to build contradicting opinions + finding evidence upon request to satisfy whatever needs/interests you have.

The opinion that is general_all_summed_in is what counts in real life.Alas, it is harder. Hard to feel sure about. Complex.

Reality is that. Reality never apologizes and leaves no prisoners. Admit it, or escape into the territory of delusion. It dreams much better out there......

See my piece above on "the academic bias", regarding how being technically right absolutely can drive your attention to narrow/irelevant places.

The Metaphor of Mean-Variance

Sitting on the beach with a friend, we discussed the eternal topic of how much beauty one should look for. It is known that for the same "price" you will get either more beautiful and less smart and vice versa. Those with beauty and wits, will look for a higher quality lad than you.

Friend says that everyone looks for different kinds of beauty.
But there is a common element!

There is no contradiction. If you ask different people to rate beauty, you will find some correlation between them.
Common element + individual/deviant element.

Mean-variance is very relevant to every knowledge. All we know is partial, and depends on conditions (the correlation between the beauty in my eyes an African man is lower than between me and other Israelis, I guess. But there also there is a strong correlation! again. three quantities: common to all, more common for Israelis alone, and variable). It can go on...


Intuition can be true. However, without thinking it out, we suspect it a little. Its reliability is probabilistic (any knowledge is probabilistic. Anyone not understanding it should see a doctor). On average ("mean") it has certain chance to be right, but a good probability to be a mistake = unknown


Many controversies come about because of not understanding. Evidence to an effect does not say it is exclusive, and the same for counter examples. Many counter examples disprove just the generality of the rule, there may still be a partial generality (sometimes a generality is dependent on various conditions and other problems. Long story).


The mind does not like half truths, continuous gradients of stuff, etc.
Baumeister (the cultural animal) explains: Most decisions and actions in life are discreet. You either order the cake or not. tell the joke or.... tell first three words and see reactions.... (this is the continuous way, but most do not use it). Our mind May have a adapted to this reality.
Simplification of information is another reason. I surmise that both explanations are right.


PS. To make Nassim Taleb happy, I state that variance can be a crazy distribution/fractal/unknown/jumpy or whatever. In another sense, the idea of mean and variance above, reflects the idea of commonalities between things, while there are differences and possibly big ones. Sorry reader. It is not me complicating matters. It is reality that is opaque making our minds dizzy.

Darwin's Epistemological insight: Unreliability of probabilities.

What are the probabilities of our existence?

OK. There could have been many "existence" so the question should be asked "what is the probability of an existence that is 'interesting'" or something like that.

Technically, we cannot calculate, because we have no knowledge about the variety of processes that could have happen.
But we may try intuitively, with some understanding of the space of possibilities, to gauge. Where are the odds going to land?

In short, I see that it feels that the probability is very low. Not 1 / 1 ^ infinite zeros. But rather 1 / 1 ^ very many zeros.

Darwin killed 99.9999% of the improbability of existence.

But I believe, that while we may (and have to) intuit about these probabilities, we should learn from this experience is how far our estimates can be from the ultimate numbers.

Before Darwin, if asked what are the odds for this world, reply would be infinitely low. Because the probabilities for all these species and their complexity and efficiency is so impossible.

One good algorithm of Darwin (gradual process of evolutionary selection) dumped the probabilities infinitely. They still seem low, but in relation to the odds we had before Darwin, the odds are infinitely more probable.


Statistically, Darwin taught us how a not thought of process can change dramatically our subjective probability assessments.


We Know that our estimates are terribly unreliable. That is, after Darwin

Epistemologically, that is Darwin's most important lesson!

The problem of being gifted

Geniuses are able to invent explanations on all fronts with no apparent difficulty. When those guys come up with a nice theory, be skeptic. They have the capability of making up endless kinds of theories explanation and combinations thereof. That is a big problem.

The selfish opinion

John Bargh [1] is now pushing the idea of "The Selfish goal" where our mind is composed of various half-independent goals each of whihc is actually caring on its own, and that our actions and behavior is the composite of all this.

It made me thinking about "selfish opinions" implying that we have multiple competing opinions perceptions etc. which create the final opinion by aggregation. Just like Bargh's goals theory.

That way overstated "irrational" intuitions may combine to an optimal aggregated opinion.
Compatible with what we know that people are quite overreacting with specific questions (like stereotypes or heuristics generally). But these opinions are usually reality compatible (most stereotypes are true says literature).

When one makes a decision his mind sum up a bunch of overstated discrete-like opinions, and the decision is their (kind of) sum. An extreme statement when mixed with twenty other opinions may turn out quite representing reality. (The overstated opinion is actually diluted to 5% and in this amount it corresponds to the real values).

Generally this is compatible with the idea of ecological rationality of Greg Gigerenzer and dan Goldstein. In this view, heuristics that may not be "correct" in laboratory settings (like in Kahneman & Tversky's experiments) may still be very efficient for real life situations, because in the complexity of life there are various parameters etc. that make our seemingly incorrect intuitions reasonably efficient.


[1] (father of the research showing the enormous power of the unconsciousness in making us do things taht look exactly the same as if we did them consciousely + showing how easy it is to make people do things by unconscious means like showing flags (Hassin) putting a suitcase mnear the door or giving them to play with words)

Mathematics, logics, and "correct thinking"

A known sceintist told me that "mathematics teaches you to think straight".
Probably assuming that thinking logically correct thoughts is what one needs in life.

Focus on the logical ignores at least the following very important parts of reality:

1) things that cannot be quantified, cannot be abstracted. can you put love into logic? can you define the specific ffeeling you got today near the tree?

2) the unknown. There is so much we do not know. we should be aware of it. look for it. manage life while knowing that there is a lot unknown.

PS. I did not wrote a few weeks. I hope to resume writing soon. I apologize toward those looking here continiousely.
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