Posts tagged with psychology
Murray Gell-Mann became annoyed with Richard Feynman
(por Muon Ray)
Lucas’ “rational expectations” revolution in macroeconomics has been tied to the ending of stagflation in the world’s largest economy, and to the reintroduction of “psychology” into finance and economics. However, I never felt like the models of “expectation” I’ve seen in economics seem like my own personal experience of living in ignorance. I’d like to share the sketch of an idea that feels more lifelike to me.
First, let me disambiguate: the unfortunate term-overlap with “statistical expectation” (= mean = average = total over count = ∑ᵢᴺ•/N = a map from N dimensions to 1 dimension) indicates nothing psychological whatever. It doesn’t even correspond to “What you should expect”.
If I find out someone is a white non-Hispanic Estadounidense (somehow not getting any hints of which state, which race, which accent, which social class, which career track…so it’s an artificial scenario), I shouldn’t “expect” the family to be worth $630,000. I “expect” (if indeed my expectation is not a distribution but rather just one number) them to be worth $155,000. (scroll down to green)
Nor, if I go to a casino with 99% chance of losing €10,000 and 1% chance of winning €1,000,000 (remember the break-even point is €990,000). “On average” this is a great bet. But that ignores convergence to the average, which would be slow. I’d need to play this game a lot to get the statistics working in my favour, and I mightn’t stay solvent (I’d need to get tens of millions of AUM—with lockdown conditions—to even consider this game). No, the “statistical expectation” refers to a long-run or wide-space convergence number. Not “what’s typical”.
Not only is the statistical expectation quite reductive, it doesn’t resemble what I’ve introspected about uncertainty, information, disinformation, beliefs, and expectations in my life.
A better idea, I think, comes from the definition of Riemann integration over 2+ dimensions. Imagine covering a surface with a coarse mesh. The mesh partitions the surface. A scalar is assigned to each of the interior regions inscribed by the mesh. The mesh is then refined (no lines taken away, only some more added—so some regions get smaller/more precise and no regions get larger/less precise), new scalars are computed with more precise information about the scalar field on the surface.
NB: The usual Expectation operator 𝔼 is little more than an integral over “possibilities” (whatever that means!).
(In the definitions of Riemann integral I’ve seen the mesh is square, but Voronoi pictures look awesomer & more suggestive of topological generality. Plus I’m not going to be talking about infinitary convergence—no one ever becomes fully knowledgeable of everything—so why do I need the convenience of squares?)
I want to make two changes to the Riemannian-integral mesh.
First I’d like to replace the scalars with some more general kind of fibre. Let’s say a bundle of words and associations.
(You can tell a lot about someone’s perspective fro the words they use. I’ll have to link up “Obverse Words”, which has been in my drafts folder for over a year, once I finish it—but you can imagine examples of people using words with opposite connotation to denote the same thing, indicating their attitude toward the thing.)
Second, I’d like to use the topology or covering maps to encode the ignorance somehow. In my example below: at a certain point I knew “Rails goes with Ruby” and “Django goes with Python” and “Git goes with Github” but didn’t really understand the lay of the land. I didn’t know about git’s competitors, that you can host your own github, that Github has competitors, the more complex relationship between ruby and python (it’s not just two disjoint sets), and so on.
When I didn’t know about Economics or Business or Accounting or Finance, I classed them all together. But now they’re so clearly very very different. I don’t even see Historical Economists or Bayesian Econometricians or Instrumental Econometricians or Dynamical Macroeconomists or Monetary Economists or Development Economists as being very alike. (Which must imply that my perspective has narrowed relative to everyone else! Like tattoo artists and yogi masters and poppy farmers must all be quite different to the entire class of Economists—and look even from my words how much coarse generalisation I use to describe the non-econ’s versus refinement among the econ’s.
These meshes can have a negative curvature (with, perhaps a memory) if you like. You know when you think that property actuaries are nothing at all like health actuaries that your frame-of-reference has become very refined among actuary-distinguishment. Which might mean a coarse partitioning of all the other people! Like Bobby Fischer’s use of the term “weakies” for any non-chess player—they must all be the same! Or at least they’re the same to me.)
Besides the natural embedding of negatively-curved judgment grids, here are some more pluses to the “refinement regions” view of ignorance:
In conclusion, I’m sure everyone on Earth can agree that this is a Really Nifty and Cool Idea.
I’ll try to give a colourful example using computers and internet stuff since that’s an area I’ve learned a lot more about over the past couple years.
First, what does ignorance sound like?
HMTL, sure!”OK, but I wasn’t that bad. In workplaces I’ve been the person to ask about computers. I even briefly worked in I.T. But the distance from “normal people” (no computer knowledge) to me seems very small now compared to the distance between me and people who really know what’s up.
A few years ago, when I started seriously thinking about trying to make some kind of internet company (sorry, I refuse to use the word “startup” because it’s perverted), I considered myself a “power user” of computers. I used keyboard shortcuts, I downloaded and played with lots of programs, I had taken a C++ course in the 90’s, I knew about C:\progra~1 and how to get to the hidden files in the App packages on a Mac.
My knowledge of internet business was a scatty array of:
sudo apt-get install
So I knew I didn’t know everything, but it was very hard to quantify how much I did know, how far I had to go.
A mediocre picture of some things I knew about at various levels. It’s supposed to get across a more refined knowledge of, for example, econometrics, than of programming. Programming is lumped in with Linux and rich programmer kids and “that kind of stuff” (a coarse mesh). But statistical things have a much richer set of vocabulary and, if I could draw the topology better, refined “personal categories” those words belong to.
Which is why it’s easier to “quantify” my lack of knowledge by simply listing words from the neighbourhood of my state of knowledge.
Unfortunately, knowing how long a project should take and its chances of success or potential pitfalls, is crucial to making an organised plan to complete it. “If you have no port of destination, there is no favourable wind”. (Then again, no adverse wind either. But in an entropic environment—with more ways to screw up than to succeed—turning the Rubik’s cube randomly won’t help you at all. Your “ship” might run out of supplies, or the backers murder you, etc.)
Here are some of the words I learned early on (and many more refinements since then):
This is only—as they say—“the tip of the iceberg”. I didn’t know a ton of server admin stuff. I didn’t understand that libraries and frameworks are super crucial to real-world programming. (Imagine if you “knew English” but had a vocabulary of 1,000 words. Except libraries and frameworks are even better than a large vocabulary because they actually do work for you. You don’t need to “learn all the vocabulary” to use it—just enough words to call the library’s much larger program that, say, writes to the screen, or scrapes from the web, or does machine learning, for you.)
The path should go something like: at first knowing programming languages ⊃ ruby. Then knowing programming languages ⊃ ruby ⊃ rubinius, groovy, JRuby. At some point uncovering topological connections (neighbourhood relationships) to other things (a comparison to node.js; a comparison to perl; a lack of comparability to machine learning; etc.)
I could make some analogies to maths as well. I think there are some identifiable points across some broad range of individuals’ progress in mathematics, such as:
![Central Limit Theorem A nice illustration of the Central Limit Theorem by convolution.in R: Heaviside <- function(x) { ifelse(x>0,1,0) }HH <- convolve( Heaviside(x), rev(Heaviside(x)), type = "open" )HHHH <- convolve(HH, rev(HH), type = "open" )HHHHHHHH <- convolve(HHHH, rev(HHHH), type = "open" )etc. What I really like about this dimostrazione is that it’s not a proof, rather an experiment carried out on a computer. This empiricism is especially cool since the Bell Curve, 80/20 Rule, etc, have become such a religion.NERD NOTE: Which weapon is better, a 1d10 longsword, or a 2d4 oaken staff? Sometimes the damage is written as 1-10 longsword and 2-8 quarterstaff. However, these ranges disregard the greater likelihood of the quarterstaff scoring 4,5,6 damage than 1,2,7,8. The longsword’s distribution 1d10 ~Uniform[1,10], while 2d4 looks like a . (To see this another way, think of the combinatorics.)](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/isomorphismes/615407591/1/tumblr_l2peow4jCW1qc38e9)
∫ , ‖•‖, {x | p} — there might be a point at which chalkboards full of multiple integrals look like the pinnacle of mathematical smartness—
I think you’ll agree with me here: the more one learns, the more one finds out how little one knows. One can’t leave one’s context or have knowledge one doesn’t have. And all choices are embedded in this framework.
We can have a concept of lying without being aware…that, in practice, we must have a style of lying. We can have a concept of quarreling without being aware…that in practice, we must have a style of quarreling.
(Source: cmnotes)
Another reason for economists to take a close look at inequality, social rank, envy, greed, dreams, social or cultural messages/expectations, and so on as determinants of experienced utility.
Sapolsky’s observation is that human beings engage evolutionary stress hormones in response to purely psychological stimuli. Looking at babboons, who cause each other stress as we do, he finds that lower ranked (submissive) males carry higher amounts of epinephrine (adrenalin) and glucocorticoids than dominant alpha males. (No reports in this documentary on fat-shaming or that ugly females have higher stress.)
So that may be a basis for thinking that social inequality—where a rank and a distance exist—really does mean a lower quality of life for the bottom-rungers, even if they have an absolutely high standard of living. (Sapolsky remarks that in the park he visits, food is so plentiful for the babboons that they only need to work 3 hours a day to survive. So they could be said to have an absolutely high wealth.)
Of course the “right” use of Pareto optimality always took into account the possibility that giving more money to Bill Gates could make me more miserable—but utility is so hard to pin down that a social-optimality conversation can easily be turned by “Well, it’s wrong of you to envy the rich” — casting aside the normative/descriptive distinction.
My first thoughts leap to envy-free solutions of pie-splitting problems (S J Bram, P C Fischburn)
but maybe there are some free-lunch alternatives as well. Such as, is there something I’m doing that makes other people feel ashamed or stressed? Some subtle pitches to my voice or subtle movements of my eyes when I’m internally judging someone but trying to not say anything out loud? Why do I care anyway if some hippie wants to be an organic farmer and not get a job? I don’t think I even have a good reason to care; “ideological opposition”. Maybe you can make some arguments sometimes that I should be stressed about the possibility that my government gets overrun by a bunch of irresponsible ideologues and it’s worth the time to debate about it. Fine, but still maybe there are some free lunches in just not socially shaming other people. Just because I have more money doesn’t mean I need to look down on you as less a person. There certainly are narratives that tell that story—“Contribution to society” type narratives or “Hard work” narratives and sometimes even “Smart” narratives. But I don’t need to embrace those, especially if it’s suboptimal.
Minute 28 they show pictures of monkey brains lighting up in the pleasure centre or stress zones.
Making me think again of taking an integral of the chemical flows over someone’s life (how to deal with time I don’t know) as some kind of selfish evaluation of the pain/pleasure experienced over the lifetime. The naïvest thing would be to measure dopamine and integrate it up over time, perhaps convolved with a risk preference function, anti-variance or pro-variance preference, and some time preference (either NPV/Ramsey or work hard in youth for a delightful old age). Something more realistic would have to take into account that a full life should experience a variety of emotions and corresponding chemical combinations. When your father dies you don’t want to go on smiling and partying, for example.
Minute 48 we get Sapolsky’s interpretation: rank isn’t necessarily it, but rather what rank means in your culture. And our own psychological freedom to decide which hierarchy we think is important. Maybe, RS. Just because I have free will doesn’t make me Herculean, it depends how hard it is to override the bad thoughts with self-affirming thoughts.
Giving rather than receiving. Ask a middle-class parent if s/he is looking forward more to giving something to their child or receiving a present from a friend, partner, or coworker this Christmas? Yet the economics 101 just takes consumption and leisure as life’s desiderata.
So put this together with Daniel Kahneman’s supposed finding of an “enough” level (around $45k for Americans I think) above which extra income doesn’t add very much to one’s sense of well-being.
That is, above $45k suponemos que income sea more of a ranking tool or a “You did right” reward. People’s happiness se determine más por the way coworkers and people around them act toward them [do I have to deal with this stressful person today? Does Mr Z laugh at my jokes? Do people look and speak to me as if I’m respectable, smart, admirable, good-looking, sexy, competent, fun, nice—what kind of person am I? Am I good?
] y menos por consumption por sí. Their home is comfortable enough, their food is good enough, life is easy enough. Money removes discomfort rather than providing happiness, kind of idea.
Hat tip @ArcAldebaran.
In game theory the word “strategy” means a fully specified contingency plan. Whatever happens—be it a sequence of things, a conditional branching of their responses and my responses—∃ a contingency.
I can’t prove this, but I do feel that sometimes people talk about others as constants rather than response functions.
(A function is a ≥1-to-1 association from elements of a source domain to elements of a target codomain. I’ll owe ya a post on how this is not the most intuitive way to think about functions. Because it depends which domains you’re mapping from and to. Think for example about automorphisms—turning something over in your hand—versus measures—assigning a size to something.)
For example, extraversion vs introversion. This is one of the less disputatious dimensions of human variation from the MBTI. We can observe that some people (like me) gain more energy by being around people and feel like sh*te when they spend too much time alone, whereas others (like my best friend) replenish their reserves by being alone and drain them when they go out in public.
So we observe one datum about you—but sometimes a discussion (eg, an economics debate) wants to veer over counterfactual terrain—in which case we need a theory about how things might else have been.
I can think of other aspects of myself that are obviously responses to situational stimuli rather than innate constants.
Besides being motivation for me to learn more maths to see what comes out of this way of thinking about people when you layer abstract algebra over it, this view of people is a reminder to
Someone who piss me off may not be “a jerk”, it may not be about me whatever, s/he may be lag-responding to something from before I was there. Or s/he may not have adapted to a “nice guy” equilibrium of interacting with me. Who knows. I’m not seeing all of that person’s possibility, just a particular response to a particular situation.
On the other hand, if they really are acting wrong, it’s up to me to address the issue reasonably right away, rather than let my frustration passive-aggressively fester. Wait ten years for revenge and they’ll be a different person by then.
The final suggestion of people-as-functions is that there’s always something buried, something untapped—like part of a wavefunction that will never be measured, or a button on a machine that never gets pressed. You may see one version of yourself or someone else, but there’s more latent in you and in them—if you’re thrown into a war, a divorce, the Jazz Age, the Everglades, a hospice, a black-tie dinner, poverty, wealth, a band, a reality show about life under cruel premodern conditions—that may bring out another part of them.
UPDATE: peacemaker points out the similarity between people-as-response functions and the nature/nurture debate. I think this viewpoint subsumes both the nature and the nurture side, as well as free will.
UPDATE 2: As I think through this again, I feel quantum measurement really is a great metaphor for interacting with people. You only evoke one particular response-complex from a person on that particular time. And the way you evoke it perturbs the “objective” underlying thing. For example if yo’re introduced to someone in a flirtatious way versus in a business setting.
