JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

You can find online a study guide to Cognitive Biases.

The descriptions of the biases themselves leads one to think of comedy. Seinfeld could have done, (and by indirection often did), storylines illustrating these irrational paths we all follow in trying to arrive at a rational decision.

Here are some of the biases which could be attributed to those engaged in the partisan wars — apply this to whatever affinity group you wish — they will fit like a glove:

Outgroup homogeneity bias
Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
False consensus effect
The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
Just-world phenomenon
The tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people “get what they deserve.”
Hyperbolic discounting
The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Negativity bias
Phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
Illusion of control
The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
Framing
Using an approach or description of the situation or issue that is too narrow. Also framing effect – drawing different conclusions based on how data is presented.
Moral credential effect
The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Bias blind spot
The tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.
Wishful thinking
The formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appeal to evidence or rationality.
Reactance
The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.
Disregard of regression toward the mean
The tendency to expect extreme performance to continue.
Overconfidence effect
Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of question, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.
Authority bias
The tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., an art performance) according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic.

So, we are irrational creatures. Not out of ill intentions, but out of heuristics: the mental shortcuts we use to make decisions. The best we can do is to find the particular errors to which we are most prone and try and compensate.

Social function clicks in though. If you are struggling to be fair and objective and others seem unconcerned, but out of ego are pursuing their irrational goals, you have lost some edge in the argument. But then your own thinking was similarly distorted, so you may be wrong as well and it is ego that drives the argument, on both sides.

This is why the arts deal with ambiguities and not declarations of conceptual truth in trying to express the human condition.

There is no objectivity, in the humanities or even in the sciences, where at one time, it seemed, science was the sole oasis of objectivity.

In a recent op-ed David Brooks compares careerist automatons of a certain age with Elena Kagan.

These [are] bright students [at elite universities] who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities…If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life.

Perfectly smooth and sanded, without a fissure or crack of interest — nothing to disconcert. Pure calculation and skillset, not much in the way of depth. Brooks says this recent instantiation of the 1950s, with its conformist impulses and happy surface, is disturbing. He says of Kagan,

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.

In this sense, the same criticisms could have been levied against George Bush The Father. In his many high ranking offices, almost comical in its aggregate status — culminating in the presidency — it was often noted that Bush “never left a track in any office he ever held”.

If the system wants a certain type, the factories which produce those types, the universities, crank them out. This is like saying the sky is blue.

Charlie Rose interviewed Ian McEwan recently. Listening to McEwan speak is such a civilized pleasure.

“Humor is such a delicate and changing thing,” McEwan said, in the flow of conversation — a brilliant throwaway — saying why he did not like comic novels. Comic novels try too hard.

McEwan expressed his admiration for the moving ending of Joyce’s “The Dead.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Awesome, the way the rhythms and resonant depth of the paragraph and story resolve, in the last line, and then spreads out, into more than itself: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The battle between Apple and Adobe over Flash is unusual, both in the public nature of the argument, and the strength of the feelings expressed.

“Go screw yourself Apple,” wrote Lee Brimelow, an Adobe platform evangelist, on his personal Web site, The Flash Blog…Adobe, evidently, was at least aware of the blog post just as it went live. The second paragraph mentions that a line was edited out on behalf of Adobe. The earlier version of the post apparently stated that “What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5.”

Steve Jobs today personally replied ,

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short…Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games…New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

These are technical issues; Jobs’ reasoning made sense to me. You do wonder why, if Adobe wanted to port Flash produced apps to Apple devices, they didn’t just develop a Flash HTML5 compiler.

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In general the powers that be let everyone else fight for the crumbs while behind the scenes they make a profit and deflect. Now, it is almost as though the sour air of dispute, evident nearly everywhere in the media, has even poisoned the air of corporate board rooms.

Normally corporations are all about profit, all the time, and could care less what anyone thinks. They leave that to their public relations departments. But this battle between Adobe and Apple feels personal.

In his appearances on Inside Washington Evan Thomas has always been a square shooter. He doesn’t seem to have an agenda, is pretty much immune to the trendy conformity of partisan opinion, and so can reasonably be listened to as an honest broker. He seeks to tell the truth without a fluorish and appears to have little need for contention. Thomas just wants to offer his take.

Thomas is the author of one of two books under review @NYT about Teddy Roosevelt.

The reviewer, a distinguished historian, applauds Thomas’ book,

In his absorbing narrative of men who found duty or fulfillment or personal meaning in a war for empire — and of other men, like William James, who feared that such a quest would rot the nation’s soul — Thomas has illuminated, in a compulsively readable style, a critical moment in American history. This is a book that, with its style and panache, is hard to forget and hard to put down.

The men in question are the aforementioned Teddy Roosevelt, W.R. Hearst and the patrician snob Henry Cabot Lodge. The review points out that the motives of these men were different in their desire for war with Spain over Cuba, and uniformly, their motives were without merit and the war a disturbing trumped up affair.

In Roosevelt’s case (for whom “just about any war would do”), Cuba offered an irresistible means for ego gratification, masculinity enhancement and self-promotion. With politicians pumping for action and journalists inventing tear-inducing atrocities, the nation was primed for war — just so long as it was thrilling, brief and involved little danger.

I had always admired Roosevelt as one of the few who were true scholars among American presidents. Overqualified by resume and exceptionally capable, I thought. This review by Ronald Steel reminds me of the hagiographic haze often conferred on historical figures.

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Update:

Thomas was just on Charlie Rose. I only caught part of it but it was quite good.

Even in the segment I saw though there was much to consider: Thomas noted that he did admire Roosevelt but again asserted Teddy Roosevelt’s war lover persona. He thought it might have something to do with TR being a sickly child and maybe relations with father…

Charlie Rose in theorizing about why Obama was so ineffectual — lost in the shuffle of partisan shouting — said Obama was too reasonable. Thomas seemed to agree.

It isn’t that Obama is too reasonable, but that he is incapable of leadership, as has been true of many recent presidents; a point Thomas did make at one point, although he didn’t parse it accurately: it isn’t the “detriment” of reasonableness, it is Obama’s inability to connect. That empathic connection great leaders have with the public is simply missing.

The local library was rebuilt. It took about two years. Probably something to do with codes. It looks pretty much the same. In fact, frustratingly so, because it still is airless, with an oppressive heat embedded in the new building — an inheritance from the old. Apparently no one said anything to the powers that be, although the librarian’s themselves seem sensitive to the heat, which makes you want to nod off or get out the minute you walk in.

In addition, there was a change in layout which speaks to the time. The stacks were further deprecated; a remant of books on shelves like marginalized visitors, while there are numerous tables for laptops, covering most of the floor space, and a large area devoted solely to children — not so much books as children’s activities, and a reserved book and media section, for pickup.

No more wandering the stacks and picking up books you would not have known existed. Now it is more likely to be media you accidentally come upon, like The Darjeeling Limited, which we borrowed,. Like much in the society, gimmicks and trendiness and multi-media status have replaced content. The House of Books has become a laptop cafeteria sans food with an attached pre-school center and a pick-up point for material reserved on the net.

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The Darjeeling Limited is one of those works that requires you to adjust to its long loping rhythms and quaint perspective before you can enjoy it. It is about three brothers traveling through India as they search for connections. Connections between themselves and their long estranged mother.

Owen Wilson grew up with and is friends with Wes Anderson. Both have the same flattened quality in work and manner — you can see them thinking — they aren’t, blessedly, in a rush. The trust in the audience in this approach is almost touching. Owen and Wes are from another time. It is a welcome change from the quick cut, bang bang chase and destroy movies.

The movie would be maudlin but for Anderson’s ability to be realistic about the intractable nature of human beings; yet, Anderson isn’t afraid of charges of sentimentality — he allows for the possibility of growth. With the gorgeous, unsentimentalized poverty of India as a background, and a slew of characters that break with stereotype, there is much to like about this movie. A great soundtrack, from Ravi Shankar to the Stones, to The Kinks.

The Freakonomics guys are presenting a slickly produced series of iTunes podcasts.

On their most recent episode they hung the show on the premise of a new book called, “Faking It.”

The idea is that we lie to get by. They start by interviewing a woman who keeps kosher, except sometimes, when she orders dishes with bacon added — when not at home. She isn’t really faking it because her husband knows, but this is their example.

Next the podcast presents one of Obama’s faking it moments. A big one. Obama had a lunatic pastor whom he called his spiritual advisor; Obama even named one of his books after one of his pastor’s sermons. Obama said he was a devout Christian but the truth was, according to a reporter who examined the subject, that he scarcely went to church. This tidbit was provided not to extend the faking it bit, but to exonerate Obama from the question that pervaded his campaign, “How could you and your wife sit there and listen to…?”

In this enabling scenario, Obama could not admit his non-attendance because it would put in question the genuineness of his beliefs. So, according to the logic and value system of the host, this was a minor case of faking it, because the cost of admitting the truth, that he had never heard Pastor Wright’s rants against America, would be politically costly. (You do wonder if before the birth of his children, when he was attending Wright’s sermons, if Obama did hear the sermons he claimed not to have. Do you doubt it?)

According to this logic, which rescusitates an unpleasant part of the campaign for the sake of chatter rather than insight, it is a minor thing: professing religious belief for advantage. An odd standard. There is also the odd moral equivalence between someone of another religion not observing a dietary law and Obama’s manipulation of religious belief for political advantage. We are back in moral equivalence land — a familiar media landscape.

Although the Freakonomics guys are more interesting than Gladwell, even if of the same stripe — because their ideas lead to some deeply needed irreverence in a conformist America — they then try to cover over uncomfortable truths.

There are real issues here. The issues have to do with social pressure, conformity, the personal impact on character of faking it, and how to determine the acceptable white lie from the character vitiating conformist curtsy to gain personal advantage.

Well, the election is over. It is too bad this unpleasantness needs to be brought up again. In many ways, faking it most pertains to the impetus to gain status and the costs and benefits to society of that impulse . That is, if you want to take the idea as presented seriously at all.

I was a fan of Chris Rock and then heard a discussion on TV where Rock was described as needing to get over himself. It did turn me off. But Rock’s recent appearance on Tavis Smiley made me change my mind.

Some wit and wisdom from Chris Rock:

On being your own judge:
Chris said, in answer to a question about rave reviews and taking them to heart, that if you do that, then, when the same source criticizes you, you have to accept the criticism as valid. So he doesn’t believe in raves and therefore is not honor bound to accede to cavils. I agree with him. Only you can decide how good what you do is.

I just compiled a book of quotations — Saul Bellow said the same thing. Bellow’s context was that early criticism and rejection is good for a writer because it forces him/her to decide for themself what is good.

On other people’s negative opinions of you:
Chris said his mother had said: “If they don’t pay your bills and they can’t whup you, then why do you care what they think?

He said, and you can tell it from the richness and openness of Rock’s comic persona, that he is influenced by everyone — not just black comedians — which is an attitude he disparaged as ridiculous. Among the pantheon he mentioned: some expected, and even required, like the great Pryor, and some seldom mentioned, like Steve Allen; it shows he knows whom to turn to for models. Identity politics never works if you want to do your best. Exaggerated and sardonic truth telling is what comedy is about and that characteristic belongs to no single group. Rock said, “I embrace everyone.”

{ via consumerist.com ]

A guy goes into a restaurant whose gimmick is really really large sandwiches and on first bite sustains lockjaw. He is wisked to the hospital. His friend eats his sandwich.

No joke

This brings to mind the following comedic references, as follows:

Stuttering John on Howard Stern saying that he once yawned so hard that he dislocated his jaw.

And the behavior of lockjaw guy’s friend reminds me of Seinfeld’s Elaine at a movie theater, upon hearing her boyfriend was in a car accident, stops to buy candy before leaving to see him at the hospital. (They broke up.)

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Enough for the affairs of the world, time to watch one of the best shows on TV: Supernatural

The bizarre world of advertising — its amoral landscape — is nakedly betrayed in the recent tone-deaf Tiger Woods advertisement for Nike in which his father counsels Tiger from the grave. Now just that description, using a deceased parent to regain endorsement contracts, would ring alerts for most people’s sense of decency, but it didn’t for Tiger, and certainly not for Mad Men where tactics and technique seem to trump most everything.

The most articulate of the commentators quoted by the NYT said of the commercial that it…

… pretends to be a quasi-religious, spiritual statement, [but is actually] a vile economic rescue mission.

Well said. When money is at stake, anything goes. The fact that Woods signed on, was okay with this use of his dad’s voice, also, once again, deprecates Tiger The Brand, not to mention the man.

Freeman Dyson’s doubts about global warming were dismissed, ridiculed, and he was attacked personally. Such is science these days — in many ways, little different than the raucous general society.

Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

The insights in Dyson’s statement should be the basis for all education: the development of critical intelligence. The uneducated run to and give credence to experts, but make no distinction; ultimately true believers parrot what they hear, using the expert as the unassailable proof. People forget that they are quoting people, expert or no, with all their frailties.

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I have to include this anecdote about Dyson — it has a theatrical feeling. It is almost a set piece, except it is true, and funny:

…taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.” The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.

Dyson is smart, and then some, but more importantly, Dyson seeks insight.