Game Theory

A friend recently complained that the SCOTUS doesn't use "game theory" in its decisions. This provoked an odd discussion, and it was not until the lunch was nearly over that I figured out that what he meant was gaming something out. The topic was abortion, and he was irate that many members of the court appeared not to care about the practical consequences of their decision. Women were going to find it harder to get abortions, with resultant tragedy, he assumed.  "And look what happened!" 

As conversations often go, I was torn among asking "Why, what happened?" betting that he was completely unaware that the number of abortions had actually increased slightly, explaining that thinking one move ahead is not Game Theory (or not much of a game...*), pointing out the legitimacy of interpreting the Constitution in terms of what it says rather than what outcome we desire, or just not answering at all.  Our time was near up, I just let it ride. I later looked up "game theory" to make sure, and learned that the phrase is indeed moving in the direction of vagueness, though not so generally as he used it. 

With that introduction, I pass along two articles from Rob Henderson that are more like game theory. 

The Two Big Games at "Overcoming Bias," I site I used to go to years ago, which discusses business group decision making, with consensus vs outcome games. 

Many orgs probably rot via consensus games slowly displacing outcome games. At first the founders and first employees are betting on the firm, but later folks are betting on rising in the firm, not so much on the firm itself.

Plausibly the key strength of capitalism is that it makes outcome games matter more. People good at consensus games resent that, and want to cut capitalism to prevent it.

The Paradox of Power at Optimally Irrational.

Game theory teaches us that cooperation can be self-enforcing—it does not necessarily require a third-party enforcer like a state or magistrate. Instead, cooperation can emerge as an equilibrium, where acting cooperatively builds a reputation for reliability, encouraging others to reciprocate. It is the fear of losing that reputation—and the benefits it entails in the long term—that makes continued cooperation advantageous in the short term.

I just ran across a third one that is somewhat gamesy,  Jerky Men and Crazy Women at Fake Nous. Humorous in places.

*If he had meant "people will move...there will be movement toward a Constitutional Amendment...more impulsive women will give birth..." then looking at what each of those might result in would seem more like a full game.

 

Elon Musk's IQ

Ann Althouse comments on a linked article in the NYT speculating about Elon Musk's IQ. It is obviously rather high.  Amanda Hess, writing for the Times clearly does not understand much about the subject. But what irritated me was how little the commenters at Althouse know.  There are a few who have read the actual research on the subject, or at least the summaries of the work of real researchers, but most just repeat the ill-thought-out objections one can find anywhere. I expected more.

Ignoring for the moment the connection with Elon, because that is news, which I am abstaining from, I just want to go over some basics.

I now prefer to think of IQ as a colloquial term that also has a specialised definition in the world of psychometric testing. But it is general intelligence, and however you nuance that with crystalised versus fluid or other refinements, it is still a pretty tight window.  It is horsepower of the brain, and like horsepower, it is no good to say "Yeah but it doesn't tell you anything about torque." Or "Yeah, but it doesn't tell you anything about friction." It doesn't tell you about the mass of the object that the horsepower is applied to, nor whether it was a good idea to try and move the object at all, or anything other than what it is. If what you really want to talk about is speed, as of a car, then say speed, and confine yourself to talking about speed.

Likewise if what you want to talk about is success, then say success; if accomplishment, then say accomplishment; if wealth, or value to society, or inventiveness, or any other thing that might be related to intelligence but is not actually general intelligence, then say that thing. However, it would be comical if it weren't so irritating to play whack-a-mole against the objections.  But IQ can't be intelligence because it doesn't include self-discipline. It's rather like saying the ocean doesn't have any water because you didn't mention the salt, the tides, and the life within it. Or the poetry about it and the paintings of it, don't forget those. 

IQ is not "untethered" as in the article.  It is tethered to years of education, longevity, income, general health, not going to jail and literally hundreds of other good things.  It tells you something. It doesn't tell you everything. But I've known people with a high IQ* who had businesses that failed.  And I've known people who made really wise decisions and had great lives that you would never think of as having a high IQ at all. Remember that the other possible name for this blog was "Do I Have To Pull This Car Over." I'VE seen a frog that wasn't green.  I'VE seen something green that wasn't a frog.

I would say that I'm done once and for all, but my longtime readers know that I can't keep that promise.  I will take the bait again.

*How do you know? Have you seen the scores? If they told you, how did they know? Do they seem like IQ people in some way?  What way? Could they be pretending or copying?  Could you just not be understanding someone smarter than you? Maybe they're just jerks. Intelligent jerks, but still jerks.

Love-Hate Relationship

 This version makes me cringe, but I can't take my eyes off it. And it sounds wonderful.

 

Wayfinding

Not only is Wayfinding an interesting topic in itself, including both practical experience and brain research, but it is a romantic-sounding name. I have long been attracted to both.

 

The whole wayfinding series, mostly from 2011.  I did quite a bit of research for this and made a number of observations I think are still interesting.

How We Give Directions

Wayfinding - general
Wayfinding - Hunter-gatherer

Old Route 28

More Wayfinding

Wayfinding and Gender Differences - Evolution

Wayfinding and Stonehenge

Inner Navigation

Inner Navigation II

Update: A recent paper on spatial navigation.
More Wayfinding 2013 
Note on Wayfinding 2012
Mapmaking 
Spatial Memory 

Honking

Honking tends to be a bit opaque from a little distance.  It is hard to tell from the honking halfway around the rotary which was the jerk who took the space they shouldn't. I tend to be charitable when I can, not faulting a person for getting an ambiguous assessment wrong.  The approaching car may have looked like it was slowing.  They might be from out-of-town. Sometimes it is more than clear, like the kid staring you down as they cut you off. (I wonder if I just picked off a particularly egregious offender from time-to-time that the rest would get the message.  Haven't done it yet.)

I am not especially tolerant of honking tailgaters, especially if they are leaning on the horn and closing the gap rather than just tooting a bit of annoyance.  But I think I am increasingly seeing something different, of the tailgater getting very close, then holding down the horn only as they are separating, one going one way and one going another, or as the one behind finally gets a spot to pass. It's one last scream by the guy behind. This seems a cultural deterioration. The tailgater doesn't get anything, as he might have from a "Wake up, dude" couple of toots.

Maybe I'm just old and want those kids to get off my lawn.

Franklin Pierce

Growing up in NH, and with a wife who taught NH history to fourth-graders for three decades, Franklin Pierce was always part of the furniture in discussing mid-1800s history.  He's not part of your furniture, I know. But the homestead is a tourist attraction nearby, and his picture is on things.  Just what you'd expect from a small state that has to date sent only one president to the White House. We do know that it would have been better if Daniel Webster had gone instead, but events at the time didn't allow that.

What the children are taught is that he was the 14th president, and his years, that he was a Brigadier General in the Mexican-American War, and the sad stories about his son and wife. Only later does it leak out to them that he was no friend to Abolitionists and drank too much in his later years.  My overall impression is that he had been rather feckless.

I am reading Heyday with one of my book groups, and "feckless" would have been an improvement. Oh, we can't buy Cuba from the Spanish? Maybe we should encourage revolutions instead. In fact, let's take the whole Caribbean and half of Mexico to make new states. I'll bet cotton will grow there.  Oh, those will be slave states?  Tsk, tsk. You don't say.  At least they won't be British.  Maybe the Russians will help. This William Walker fellow seems just the trick. 

Too Easy

It looks like T99 really shone around here in 2011. Not only the inspiration for the post, but a good corrective in the comments.

********

Texan99, posting over at Grim's Hall (always on sidebar) links to a WSJ article with Steve Jobs quotes. Jobs had this on the networks, though it fits well for conspiracy theories in general.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

I had to chuckle. Conspiracy theories, though they rely on arcane knowledge, have as their root the idea that if we could just get rid of a few evil people who are gaming the system, everything would go smoothly.* It is not only liberals and fundamentalists who think that way - you can find libertarians, antisemites, greens, and just about any group with a swath of people who think like that. Beware the too-simple explanation.

Interestingly, while that has always been my strongest objection to the Religious Right, even while I have one foot in it, it is the too-simple gospel of the Religious Left that has me looking nervously over my shoulder these days. They seem to believe - or at least, they put forward the idea - that their program would be really hard, but worth it to get the church to improve itself and society. Giving up material things is hard. Tolerance is hard.  Being willing to forgive is hard work. Resolving to share requires commitment. These expressions of the radical gospel, radically following Jesus, are very hard, which is why people won't do it.

No they aren't. I did that.  You get all kinds of strokes from your pals for being that guy, and the warm self-righteousness is very precious and addictive. It's not humble at all. It's narcissistic. I know. I've been there.  The religious left is wrong, not because its gospel is too radical and difficult, but because it's too easy and hackneyed. 

*Is the phrase "99%" occurring to anyone with that?  Well, it should.

Unawareness Versus Denial

Grim's recent post Blindness put me in mind of things I wrote years ago.  This was the first post in what eventually became the series "May We Believe Our Thoughts." I don't think I'm going to reprise much of that, but I thought I would put this in anyway, partly because of the comments there.

***********

Because of the neurological research coming out over the last decade or two three, psychiatry is increasingly making a distinction between denial and unawareness. Some of the research is being done up at Dartmouth MS by folks I admire and used to work with, so I keep up with this more than other areas.

Everything has been in the "denial" category since Freud, or before: the idea that mentally ill people really do know, at some level, what reality is, but hide it from themselves. Therapy was a way of developing insight, and having the courage to accept the unpleasant.

Unawareness, in contrast, is the idea that certain brain dysfunctions make the owners of those brains unable to see their illness, no more than a blind person can see, or even more exactly, than a color-blind person can distinguish colors. Like an amputee who feels a phantom limb, or like Oliver Sacks, losing the sense of ownership of a limb after injury, they cannot perceive their illness, regardless of the evidence submitted. Dr. Flashman gave the example of the patients who believed he had implanted chips in their brain, shown their chipless MRI's. The responses were varied - my sort of chip doesn't show up...that's not my MRI...you doctored the photo... but none were able to muster even a 0.1% acceptance of the no-chip idea. Not even in theory. Not even as a "what if" scenario.

We are moving lack of insight from the "denial" pile into the "unawareness" pile, for psychotic disorders certainly, but even for mood disorders when they are untreated. How far will this go? Will it turn out that no depressed people ever respond to any offered advice or insight, but only to the intervention of attention, of exercise, of medication, of practicing agency? Lincoln's comment that people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be might turn out to be completely untrue, and useful only for the reminding the folks outside the depression that nothing, absolutely nothing they advise is going to have the slightest effect.

I am increasingly convinced of this for many illnesses, and it makes me feel shame at the conversations I have had over the years with patients, attributing (usually, but not always, unconsciously) their lack of insight to some stubbornness or cowardice on their part - a refusal to engage reality rather than a biological inability to perceive it. It's not just a waste of time. It's thirty-plus years of unnecessary cruelty.

If you absorb this, you will see that it makes things both better and worse. If the patient is not going to be convinced, whether you explain for two seconds or two hours, why bother to give any explanation at all? Or if you listening to her for two hours will make no more difference than listening for two seconds, why listen at all? Isn't it just a waste of time and ultimately cruel, pretending to a patient that her opinion makes the slightest difference when if fact it doesn't? So let's just ignore everything she says until we get a guardian then, and hold her down and give her medicine and be done with it. Why any charade?

I don't think it takes much imagination to see that as a chilling scenario, and an enormously bad precedent to set.

But is badgering a deaf person because they can't hear any better? Because even if the mental health practitioner is speaking in the kindest tones, is really rooting for the patient to "get it," and has the best intentions, if we really think that underneath it all they are denying reality, that some trick or intervention on our part will help them turn the corner and begin to see, then badgering is what we are actually doing.

It gets worse. It may apply to a high percentage of all beliefs, not only to mental illness.

Update: Roper's comment reminds me that I have at least a half-dozen professionals reading here, so I should provide some links. Xavier Amador looks like he'd be pop psych, but he is not. His books cover a fair bit of the brain research. (as of 2011)

Laura Flashman

Thomas McAllister

Dependence

This must be oversimplified.  It can't actually be the truth, it must only be a cynical wisdom. Yet doesn't it seem that the best way for a government to make its populace dependent on it is to mistreat them? That way their their only relief is to petition another part of the government to make it stop. Wages, housing, civil liberties - each is now the government giving with one hand and taking with the other.

Suricata suricatta

I used to post meerkat pictures, partly to drive traffic in the early days and partly because I just like 'em. I think this was the best one.