How To Break Anything

2

27 Dec 2010

The beginnings of a rough thesis on limitation/value/meaning/evolution/complexity
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My mother wrote me an email on Christmas, and since it's been awhile since talking about I've been working on I decided to explain, captured below:

Hmmm what about myself. Well, I'm working on this lofty thesis of how people come to define 'value.' The direction I'm taking begins with an understanding of fundamental human limitations, and using those to help illuminate why one thing might be more valuable [in some cases] than another thing.

So an easy example is: why are data visualizations suddenly so popular? Well, we now have lots and lots of data available thanks to people sharing information of all sorts online - it makes sense that it's more valuable to us as charts as opposed to numbers, because 25% of our brain is occipital lobe dealing specifically with vison, and significantly less of our brain is devoted to dealing with more abstract things like numbers.

(That said, I like this one project I ran into recently, a team a MIT that made a prototype machine that takes in weather data from the internet, and depending on the change in temperature from the day before, mixes and dispenses different flavors of toothpaste. The idea is that if your toothpaste is minty as you brush in the morning, you'll know it's colder than the day before. If it's cinnamon, you'll know to dress for warmer weather. I call this 'data tasteualization.')

So the limitation is that biologically we're built to navigate the world in certain ways; a natural extension of that reality is that we find certain things useful/meaningful/valuable and other things less so. Ultimately my hypothesis is "limitation is meaning." Basically in the way rules create meaning. Do you remember Second Life? It was a virtual world circa 2002 or so (still is, actually), where the premise was that you create a digital second self.... and then you can do anything in that world. As you might imagine, the problem is that if you tell people they can do anything...they do nothing. No one knew what to do.

This is why games are fun, and Second Life was not fun: games come with rules that limit you to doing a certain number of things. And from that limitation comes meaning, and value. Hmmm, in fact, sometimes I think about that button Dad made when we had the button-making machine, it said "no keys, no lock; no rules, no game."

It's all started with trying to understand decision-making, which lead me to this notion that humans are notoriously and consistently bad at thinking about time. That got me thinking about our capacity for thinking about time as a natural limitation on the way we make decisions. The quintessential example is illustrated by the following:

1) Which would you rather: $50 now or $300 now? (easy)

2) Which would your rather: $50 now or $50 in one year? (easy)

3) Which would you rather: $50 now or $300 in one year (difficult)

So that limitation got me thinking about what some loosely call "feedback loops." That is the notion that in order to feel like you're impacting the world, you need to intuitively see some kind of feedback from your actions. That's easy enough with turning on a light switch, or putting your hand on a stove (or deciding to take the money now), but not as intuitive when it comes to eating less and losing weight later, or translating the value of reading a book into future wisdom.

So "intuitive feedback" has become a kind of value to me, because of our limitations in the way we interpret causality. $50 seems like a causal agent when I put it into a bank and get interest 5 years later (money is intuitive because it easily translates into numbers), but it doesn't *seem* like a causal agent when I use that $50 to buy a smart book (even if 5 years later I have an intelligent and meaningful discussion with someone important because of it).

Obviously, *seeming* is the critical term here. Lately I'm fond of saying "reality is just reality, and it doesn't really care if you understand it or not." Aldous Huxley said something similar, although somewhat pessimistically toned: "facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored." So because of that I've grown to really like illusions and paradoxes (I consider all paradoxes to be illusions). That's why I put "[in some cases]" in brackets up there in the first paragraph; the interesting thing about studying value is that you find all sorts of seeming paradoxes.

So an example: why is Katy Perry so popular? Well, because she sings about things everyone can relate to. If "popular" is valuable, it's because there is value in accessibility. But then think about a deeply complex work of art, a literary masterpiece. These things are valuable in the esoteric complexity, their ability to be accessed only by a few. Put more simply: scarcity is value.

So, scarcity and accessibility are at odds. This is a paradox, but I suspect it's just an illusion.

To get a bit more complicated, that thesis is actually just kind of a starting point for thinking about how the universe has solved complex problems. Something like "how nature, humans, and technology have been working over time to solve different kinds of the world's complex problems - almost in a passing of the torch sort of way, like relay racers." It's pretty rough thinking right now, but I think about how we only have to solve problems like cancer, because evolution already took care of the simpler problems like basic diseases. Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired) recently wrote "What Technology Wants," and has been talking about he doesn't worry about what some might call "the rise of technology" because maybe the world needs other kinds of minds, maybe kind of like how different kinds of human cultures enrich the world.

The notion seems somewhat lofty on its face, sure, but then I think about things like the Eureka Machine. It was first most known for being able to watch a swinging pendulum, and from studying the movement mathematically, it was able to determine the fundamental laws of classical Newtonian physics.

They then put it in front of one of our mathematically toughest current challenges: the double pendulum problem. That is, attach a pendulum to another pendulum, and the motion that results is - for all human purposes - chaos. There was a point where the Eureka Machine was studying the double pendulum problem and defined it mathematically. I don't think any human had done the same to that point. Although I might have that confused with another example, one concerning cell biology. As you know, cell biology is *astronomically* complex. We're talking sub-atomic complexity, the preciseness of which determines exactly how cells and cell parts function. The Eureka Machine had at some point predicted the behavior of cell development or replication or something to that effect, to such a degree that the researchers observing it ran into a critical problem: they knew the end formula, but they themselves couldn't explain the formula. Thus they couldn't publish it; it'd be like writing a dissertation and when asked to show your data responding with "it was magic."

Last I remember, I think the researchers are still struggling with that problem. And it makes me think: someday a problem much more complicated than cancer is going to present itself to the world, and it seems plausible that our natural limitations inhibit us from solving them as humans. That's not such a bad thing; after all, even the force of evolution is limited as well, primarily by time. But if you take a step back and think of evolution as just one part of reality, and humans as just another (that evolution created), then it's not such a "scary" prospect to think of technology as just yet another part of reality (that humans created). It might be that this problem is in fact the *result* of human limitation/biases/shortsightedness - climate change and the upcoming challenge of food production come to mind, but I'm sure reality can think of many other things that I can't.

Long story short, I'm thinking of putting this all into a book at some point as it brews in my head. I expect to do lots of research on this that will sometimes validate but more often challenge my thinking, and I expect the results to point me in an entirely new direction. I'm collecting all the cognitive pieces at http://www.howtobreakanything.com. Or maybe I'll nurture some relationships at Columbia while I'm here and maybe do a nice formal thesis/dissertation or something. I don't know, I'll figure it out as I go along - I'm not very good at thinking about time ;)
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18 Dec 2010

Decision-making study cleverly built into a Facebook game
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Dan Ariely and the team over at Duke's behavioral economics program have just launched a game on Facebook called Friend Measure. From what I gather the idea of the game is to answer one question a week about how you would act in certain situations, and then see if you can correctly guess how your friends would act in the same.

Simple enough, and it draws on the quiz-like appeal of being able to expose tiny details about yourself to your friends and capture the same of others, sort of a staple in this category of Facebook games.

Coming from the Duke team it's almost certainly more than a game, it's more likely a clever disguise for research into decision-making. Which is an interesting development in academic research - the notion of using natural social behaviors on digital networks to fuel data points for a study. Quite resourceful, no?
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15 Dec 2010

An Experiment In “Choice Architecture” Exposes Ideas Around Consumer Decision-Making
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JustBuyThisOne is a shopping site that approaches the problem of the paradox of choice by limiting a shopper’s options down to one, featuring the ideas of behavioral economist Barry Schwartz who coined the term in the title of his 2004 book on consumer decision-making. Powered by the review aggregator ReeVoo, the site essentially displays the top item reviewed among televisions, vacuums, computers, and other electronics frequently turned to for gifts.

Browsing through the site one immediately gets the sense that the solution to “too many choices” isn’t necessarily “having only one choice” – the feeling that you as an individual have cognitively made a decision about what the best deal is turns out to be a critical part of the decision-making process. An interesting solution to this problem is the site’s Room Service feature, in which they promise to handle all the details of returning, refunding, and replacement.

Another idea exposed is around the notion of curation; while there’s potentially value in capturing the #1 reviewed item from everyone, though sites like Svpply and Of A Kind show the value of showing only items selected by a like-minded community. While JustBuyThisOne’s straightforward and simple approach may turn out to appeal to a number of people, it’s likely that as an “experiment in choice architecture” it will end up highlighting the importance of constructing a balance between too many options and too few.

JustBuyThisOne

[via @rorysutherland]

via psfk.com
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27 Nov 2010

How our limited understanding of causality impacts daily decision-making
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The above is from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas; I'm presently studying causality. I sometimes think it's the only thing worth studying*.

Especially considering the nice little bit inside this article on Malebranch's thinking in The Search For Truth, where he defines a real cause as "something between which and it's effects, the mind perceives a necessary connection."

'Perceives' is the critical word here. The foundation of a thesis that is slowly brewing in my mind is that the human brain is distinctly, consistently, and measurably limited in a number of interesting and important ways - this has profound implications on the things we perceive, and therefore the things we believe (subtext: we should have little expectation that the things we believe correspond with reality).

Another way of thinking about this is that if we're limited in the way we perceive things, then the connections we make between causes and effects aren't necessarily the reality of what causes an effect. The connections we make just happen to be the ones that are most intuitive to us.

What follows from this is that if our conception of cause and effect is suspect, then we should be careful about the way we think of something a little more tangible: decision-making.

That is to say, if we are aware of our limitations in understanding the impact of our decisions, perhaps we can be a little more careful about judging what "right" and "wrong" decisions look like.

One idea I really like around this topic is Frank Gavin's notion of Chronological Proportionality, which I take as a framework for illustrating how the decisions and events we think are important almost never are.

*I don't think this all the time, obviously. Studying general concepts gives you a high-level scope, like looking down on the world from the furthest zoom on a digital map; useful for understanding the world, not so useful for understanding how to get from your house to the mall. When I say "making things a little more tangible" in the above, I'm essentially saying something like "zooming in a little bit."
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25 Sep 2010

Dan Ariely: Designing Systems To Help People Make Better Decisions
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Dan Ariely is a professor and behavioral economist whose work studying decision making has taken him from MIT to Duke University. Dan’s work highlights the irrational (rather than rational) nature of human cognition, and how with an understanding of our limitations, we can design systems that work to help people make better decisions. Thursday evening he was invited to speak at the Deutsch offices in New York, where PSFK was able to take part in a conversation around what insights marketers and advertisers can glean from Dan’s learnings.

A couple of key ideas stood out, captured below:

Data vs Experimentation

Ariely noted that he is always surprised how little experimentation is done in the marketing world. Much of the industry prides itself on the insightful intuition of strategists and creatives – and of course Dan spends much time warning about the fallibility of intuition. The other half of the industry heralds the availability of data and metrics from digital or interactive work, or the foundation of decisions in primary and secondary research.

Dan says there’s a couple of problems here. First, research is often conducted with methods that themselves are based on intuitions – it’s assumed that focus groups provide direct insight into consumer preferences when they are in fact very removed from the real context in which people make decisions. More importantly, Dan stresses that there’s a difference between data and experimentation- and the two are often confused. The availability of data is helpful, and can guide hypothesis, but it’s not the same as a robust method of experimentation in which researchers have a crystalized idea of exactly what limited variables they are testing.

Designing Environments For Healthy Living

Dan notes that wine is something that our physical bodies are biological conditioned to abhor, and yet interestingly enough it has long weaved itself deeply into the social fabric of many cultures. Dan’s current work is looking at the social consumption vocabulary we have developed around wine to differentiate it amongst ourselves – we talk about tannins and acidity and nose and body, all as part wine’s complex role in our social interactions.

Dan’s team is wondering: what if we could develop the same kind of vocabulary around vegetables? How would that impact they way people think about and consume something that contributes to their long-term well-being? Dan’s work has long been rooted in understanding the way that we can architect environments that help us make better decisions – his latest hypothesis is that a consumption vocabulary which creates social value in discussing vegetables would be a part of a social environment that fosters healthy eating.

Watch video of Dan sharing other thoughts from the gathering below:

On how increasing numbers of choices can confound actual purchase decisions:

On how we make comparisons only based on the options intuitively available to us, and how similar options impact decisions in unexpected ways:

Dan Ariely

The Upside of Irrationality

image via Boston.com
this post originally appeared on psfk.com
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1 Jun 2010

From: Brooklyn Brainery!: Irrational Decisions wrapup
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Kyle's How To Make Irrational Decisions wrapped up on Monday. I took plenty of notes, so let's go through the things that complicate the choices we make, then look at what we can do to make our decisions easier!

Why Making Decisions Is So Hard

Every time we make a decision, we're looking at two different parts of the result, what we get and when we get it. Sometimes deciding between the two is easy. Do I want $50 or $80? I'll take $80, thanks! Do I want it now or a month from now? Now, obviously!

Life isn't like that, though - the whats and the whens get all mixed up, and the decisions get harder. $50 now or $80 a month from now? Sure, having $50 in your hand right now feels a lot better, but an extra $30 sure makes waiting attractive. Let's illustrate this with adorable children waiting for marshmallows:

There are three different ways to focus your energy - the past, the present, and the future. Would you just eat the first marshmallow? You're present-oriented. Would you wait for the second? Future-oriented. Things like studying hard in school or saving for retirement are good examples of being future-oriented out in the non-marshmallow-related world.

But oh, oh, oh, it gets harder, even! Once uncertainty comes into the picture, everything gets much worse. Do you want $50, or a 50% chance at winning $100, but if you lose you get nothing? Math gives us a way of comparing the two - multiplying the probability by the payout gives the "expected payoff". $100 times 50% is $50, and $50 times 100% is also $50 - math is telling us the two are the same, but our brains sure don't think that way. (Confused? Check this out, or just trust me!)

Once outcomes are uncertain everything becomes a lot more personal. Do you just need $50 to buy a pair of new shoes, or do you really need that $100 to make rent? Are you a risk taker? This is all under the umbrella of risk aversion, which gets a lot more complicated if you head over to Wikipedia.

Now, once we start thinking about how "personal" a decision is we need to start thinking about what that really means. We have an idea that we operate in our own little sphere and are in complete control of all of our ideas and actions, when that's really not true at all.

If you ask someone to write down the word "see" half of people will write 'see' and the other half will write 'sea.' If you make a waving motion with your hand, though, suddenly everyone's writing 'sea.' Right, waves! Every decision you make is influenced by things you've experienced recently, and this is called priming (Wikipedia). Holding a cold drink will make you think more negatively than a hot one. If you just watched a romantic comedy, it might be harder to break up with your boyfriend. You don't make decisions in a vacuum.

Priming doesn't necessarily make decisions easier or harder, it's just something that complicates the idea of making a "best" or "rational" decision - what you think is a perfectly thought-out decision right now might not be the same an hour later after you've had to sit on the subway for a while, or look at an ad, or aren't nearly so hungry. Realizing that in every moment your choices are going to look a little different can go a long way in relaxing about decision-making.

While talking about the "best" decision, regret is an important aspect. Once you've made a decision, you're locking out all the choices you didn't make. You might have a tendency to fixate on everything you've lost out on when you make a decision - this is called the opportunity cost. If you buy this shirt you can't buy those shoes, or how taking one job prevents you from taking another.

Another big thing is sunk costs, which is anything you've spent on something that you can't get back. These costs usually make you want to go further with something, even if you don't like it: spending years in a relationship is a deterrent to leaving it, spending thousands on grad school makes you determined to work in a specific field. I think these are big big big factors when dealing with long-term, important decisions.

Okay, enough depressing stuff, let's talk about how we can make some better decisions!

How to Make Better Decisions

The most important thing about making better decisions is acknowledging that there are a lot of factors at play, and nothing you do is the One True Best Awesome Decision.

The past, the present, the future - all of these are different times to revel in, and one isn't necessarily better than the other. Saving for retirement is a good example: partying down now might seem wasteful to some people, but you don't know if you'll even be alive in 50 years to enjoy the money that you've saved. Maybe spending that money on seeing a band is going to mean more to you than an extra night on a Seniors Cruise down the line. On the other hand, giving up that extra drink might be worth not living in a cardboard box later down the road. Chances are you're looking for balance.

Uncertainty isn't always a bad thing. Understand that there are always unknowns. While we used the $50 or 50% chance at $100 example before, nothing in life is ever that clean-cut. Uncertainty exists along the way, just not in the results. When you go to grad school, you aren't just taking a gamble that you'll get a fancy job when you get out of school - you're also meeting new people and experiencing things you wouldn't have if you were just out in the working world. In the same way, if you get a job instead of going to school you're amassing experiences and business contacts, and each of those interactions changes where your decision is taking you.

Kyle brought up chaos theory as a way of thinking about this - life isn't just X causes Y, it's X sends you towards Y, A interrupts, steers you towards B, but then C edges you back in the direction of W, and etc etc etc forever and ever. No matter how well-informed you are, you never have perfect information about what a decision is going to do and what it is going to mean in the future.

An important take-away from the class for me was that when you are making a decision, you aren't determining the result. When you pick someone to date, that's all you're picking - you haven't secured them in eternal marriage, you don't know if you'll hate how they fold laundry in six years, you don't know if you'll fall for an especially charming gas station attendant. All decisions can do is guide you in a direction, not guarantee an outcome, so you definitely have room to relax.

We talked about priming before, the idea that everything around you is affecting your decision-making. I think the best way to deal with this is to just acknowledge that it exists and move on. Understand that even though you might love to be 100% in control and perfectly rational all of the time, it just can't happen. You can try to look around and see what recent experiences are influencing your decisions, but don't stress out about it too much. Experiences are what make us who we are, and a decision influenced by them is no more or less natural than something perfectly "rational."

The most important thing to remember about sunk costs is that sunk costs are sunk. You are not getting them back, no matter what, so just ignore them! You buy tickets to a baseball game, but it's raining. Don't go. You're miserable in your relationship, but you've been there for 5 years, and you feel like you owe it to all of that effort to keep on going. You don't. You aren't getting your time or money back, so go ahead and make the decision that will make you happiest in the future. Realizing that sunk costs are so much of the reason you want to go to the game or stay in the relationship will help empower you to make the tough decision to ignore the costs and do what will make you happy.

A fun idea some people brought up was the mindset that "Every Decision I Make Is Right." Instead of worrying about your decisions, you just make them, and trust that you've done the right thing. Just like the fox and the grapes, sometimes the way you think about things is even more important than what actually happened.

The toughest part about making a decision is the period before you actually make it. You stress out, you overthink things, you take ages of pain to come to a conclusion. Just decide! There are enough unknowns out there that neither can really be the best, I promise. My rule of thumb is to take the path that seems to give you the most options down the road - even if you didn't make the "right" decision right now, one of those choices later on is sure to make up for it. So just embrace the fact that there's a lot more going on that you could ever account for, take a deep relaxing breath, and go on making those irrational decisions!

via brooklynbrainery.com

Jonathan Soma over at the Brooklyn Brainery posted this fantastic write up of the How To Make Irrational Decisions class. A nice blend of topics I introduced, and how those are interpreted by someone other than myself.
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25 May 2010

One possible heuristic for optimizing decisions
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Yesterday at my Brooklyn Brainery class on decisionmaking, the discussion got to the point where people were asking about optimization. The question here is primarily: "given that when making a decisions, too short of a time perspective is meaningless (caring only about petty things), and too long of one is equally meaningless (caring only about 300 years in the future), is there some optimal time perspective (or shifting of time perspective) that will lead to the best decisions? What heuristics do people use?"

I essentially answered "there are none." I later got to thinking that this isn't entirely true.

The temptation to answer that way comes from the too-simple and too-common perspective that every decision is the best decision. That is to say, no decision is better than any other.

That is to say, deciding to sit on the couch all day is just as much as "right" decision as deciding to go out and change someone's life.

I think when it comes to thinking about value, and what experiences are valuable, the "every decision is right" approach is plainly absurd.

The right heuristic might be: if it's something you don't want to do because it makes you uncomfortable, it's definitely the better decision.

(There's actually a lot deeper thinking available on the matter, that makes the above look like the perspective of a 3rd grader: What Is Wei Dai's Updateless Decision Theory?)
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19 May 2010

Better financial decisionmaking through contextual data feedback
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Merry Miser is a mobile application that helps its users to make better decisions about spending. The application uses the context provided by a user's location and financial history to provide personalized interventions when the user is near an opportunity to spend. The interventions, which are motivated by prior research in positive psychology, persuasive technology and shopping psychology, consist of informational displays about context-relevant spending history, subjective assessments of past purchases, personal budgets, and savings goals.

via web.media.mit.edu
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25 Apr 2010

"The future has no place to come from but the past, hence the past has predictive value."
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More thoughts on "the future is in the past," this time from Neustadt and May of Thinking in Time: The Uses of History For Decision Makers.

The above appeared in the notes section of Tyack & Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia.
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23 Apr 2010

A thought on what people are 'deciding' upon when choosing/not choosing to share (re: Open Graph, privacy, etc)
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And what about privacy?
Is this another nail in the coffin of the very concept of privacy? In the future will we really share everything? Ultimately people will be the ones to decide what they want to share and with whom. But now it will be not only what happens on Facebook.com, but everything happening outside it too.
via wearesocial.net

The above from We Are Social's longer synopsis of Facebook Open Graph.
What I'm interested in is the statement above on privacy. Particularly re: 'deciding.'
It illuminates the question: what is it exactly that you're 'deciding' upon when you "decide what to share and with whom"?
Rather, I should ask: what are the conditions within which you are deciding?
I'd imagine you'd be making a completely different decision between choosing to what to share within two different environments:
1) no one shares anything about themselves online (10 years pre-facebook)
2) everyone shares everything about themselves online (10 years post-facebook)
And ultimately that has little to do with the 'decision' itself, and much more to do with the conditions within which the decision is made.
Just something to consider as you decide ('decide'?) how this all makes you feel about 'privacy.'
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19 Apr 2010

Quick thought on cultural influence re: what counts as a decision, from The Art Of Choosing
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Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit or custom be a choice? When Iyengar asked Japanese and American college students in Kyoto to record all the choices they made in a day, the Americans included things like brushing their teeth and hitting the snooze button. The Japanese didn’t consider those actions to be choices. The two groups lived similar lives. But they defined them differently.

via nytimes.com

The NYT reviews Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing. The above is one of my favorites of the many excellent ideas expressed within.
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18 Apr 2010

A few minutes ago I used Mechanical Turk to ask people about the best decision they've made in the last 5 days
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Already getting some great responses. Going to be using Mechanical Turk much more often.

(didn't really mean to highlight that last one, it just happened to be where my mouse was. Plenty of other insightful responses)

UPDATE: I've included the final results in the excel sheet below.

Almost all the responses are about jobs - quitting jobs, deciding on jobs, declining jobs, changing careers, etc.

Almost all the rest are about relationships.

Click here to download:
Results_-_Best_Decision_You've_Made_In_Last_5_Days.xls (49 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:
Results_-_Best_Decision_You've_Made_In_Last_5_Days.xls (49 KB)
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14 Apr 2010

April 13, 2010: Kyle Cameron Studstill - the3six5's posterous
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[This post originally appeared on the3six5.posterous.com]

I think a lot on decisionmaking, so today I asked my Twitter friends what they think of as the best decision they've made in the last five years. Interested primarily in comparing this to decisions made in the last five days I was surprised when someone asked the same of me, but I managed to come up with "deciding to floss every day" as my response.

Decisionmaking is primarily about "want," and flossing every day exemplifies the idea that the word "want" is such a ridiculously lacking term to express the phenomenon for which it has been charged to capture. This is primarily because "want" expresses nothing with respect to time; a critical shortcoming, because on a short enough timeline, nobody "wants" anything.

In the moments leading up to the flossing is it really something I "want" to do? Not particularly. I find it annoyingly time-consuming.

What I "want" is a certain feeling - it comes along with recognizing that following through on decisions is an unexplainably easy and incredibly rewarding thing to do. Well it is if you're looking in retrospect, anyway - it's a future "want."

This is one of the best decisions I've made because I can apply it to everything that seems uncomfortable in the present.

It's why I woke up immediately to my alarm this morning after (very) minimal sleep, stood right up and got on with the day. There's always that part of me that doesn't "want" to get up, but there's a more clever part of me that knows my RSS reader is as good as coffee and once I fire it up I'll have forgotten the feeling altogether. I read the latest lesswrong.org post everyday and today's was dreadfully dense - as always - but after fighting that short-term "want" I walked away with a piece of something intelligent - as always.

On a short enough timeline most worthwhile things seem unnecessary, uncomfortable, ridiculous, like wastes of time/effort. The bad news is that feeling never goes away; we're naturally inclined to see the world in short moment-to-moment timelines.

The good news is that shifting one's perspective is completely in our control, and entirely worth it. Ask Walter Michel.

[img via Oh, The Temptation]
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28 Mar 2010

Yesterday I asked people what superpowers they desired. Result: some thoughts on time travel, decisionmaking, happiness
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Typical times children begin to ask questions, from a lecture at the Medical College of Georgia that @ashleydickinson passed along to me:

"what" 2 yrs

"where" 2.6 yrs

"who" 3.0 yrs

"whose" 3.0 yrs

"why" 3.0 yrs

"how many" 3.0 yrs

"how" 3 ‐ 6 yrs

"when" 4 yrs

This could be interpreted as either a rough scale of abstractness, or a rough scale of what is most salient and critical. Either way, is it surprising that "when" ends up so late on the list? "What" something is, that we can grasp relatively easily. But our concept of time and how we operate within it, that's something we're still so completely far off from understanding.

"A Rough Scale Of The Abstractness/Salience Of Questions" via howtobreakanything.com

I was told yesterday that time travel is the ultimate superpower; through time travel you could address every other desire imaginable.

The respondent began by pointing out how time travel could be used to approximate super speed, strength, and all the other traditional superpowers, but this also speaks deeply to the idea of want/decisionmaking/happiness.

As you may have heard me say/will hear me say again, the problem with those three things is that we have little capacity to think about them with respect to time. If you shift the time perspective among any of them, their meaning is completely different.

Consider a basic example of this:

I 'want' to go back in time to redo x/y/z 'decisions.' That will leave me feeling more 'happy.'

A small and incomplete list of problems that happen to come to mind:

1) it's highly likely and in fact guaranteed that you will 'want' something else later when the conditions of your situation have changed (see: "Decisions are about comparison. If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.")

2) decisions are never made in the moment. They are made in the past. (see: "There's not just one decision; "I'm here because of a long chain of events"")

3) deciding what "happiness" means is the messiest part of talking about free will (see "free will, decision making, and happiness"). This is partially captured by the idea people are trying to express when they say ignorance is bliss. Consider the thought here in reference to the PSFK post Phone App Diagnoses Disease Through Sound:

What superpower would you want? (Or should I ask "want"?)
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13 Mar 2010

Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis on improvisation and imagination, related to choice/rational decisionmaking
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"...where there might only be noise. Insisting on more when one already has enough is usually considered greed. In the case of choice, it is also a sign of the failure of the imagination."
[from The Art Of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar]
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8 Mar 2010

Decision-making in multiple contexts, as told by Herodotus in The Histories
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[Herodotus on the Persians in The Histories]
Some of you who have talked to me recently on making decisions may know that I tend to talk about making decisions in multiple contexts. The idea is that if you make a decision once, you're assuming every fruit of that decision is going to be consumed in the exact same context in the future. This is absurd, of course.
Ideally, in order to effectively avoid regret, you'd be able to consider the outcomes of a decision in every context you might experience those outcomes in the future.
This is of course impossible, but the idea is to experience as many of then as you can as you think about your choices. Let's say you're considering whether to take a job across the country; the strategy would be to consider the proposition when excited, when depressed, when frustrated, when scared about the future, when glowing from positive feedback, and so on.
The relevant cognitive bias here is probably an iteration of the availability heuristic, in the sense that we tend to believe the way we feel right now is how we'll feel forever.
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20 Feb 2010

There's not just one decision; "I'm here because of a long chain of events"
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via johnsonbanks.co.uk

I originally clicked through to this link because of a tweet:
"@brainpicker: Lovely, design students answer on anonymous post-its why they want to be designers http://ow.ly/19lWC"

But to me the above speaks to a lot more than just design.

We tend to think that decisions are made in the moment. They're not. Your next action (the one you're deciding on right now) is the product of all the decisions you've made leading up to this one.

There's not just one decision.
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20 Feb 2010

Time-orientation: decisionmaking is not just about what matters; is also about when it matters
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via amber-rae.com

Essentially, the idea behind time-orientation is that the decisions we make have a lot to do with our perspective on time; specifically: what matters when. Phillip Zimbardo has some excellent thoughts on this here:
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12 Feb 2010

Decisions are about comparison. If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.
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Decisions are fundamentally about context, in the sense that context refers to the conditions in which decisions are made.

The easiest way to think about this is that making a decision is by definition the act of comparing conditions.

Change the conditions, and you change the decision.

The classic example of this is the comparison one makes between three similar items of low, moderate, and high price. The smart menu planner adds an item of high price that no one will ever buy, simply so that the mid-level item can be priced higher and still seem like the best choice by comparison. This is one example, there are thousands of others. Dan Gilbert gives loads of them here in this video:

Change the conditions, and you change the decision.

If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.
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8 Feb 2010

"Choice," engineered and constructed like a well designed building
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Behavioural economics is described (by Thaler himself) as ‘ libertarian paternalism’. This is the idea that while people should be able to live their lives as they want, “it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better”.

via wearesocial.net

I find the counterintuitive reality of how we make decisions compellingly beautiful.

If you'd like, there's a rather wordy explanation of behavioral economics below:
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