Wisdom is not automatic

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, thinking, psychology

In his late 90's, Art Linkletter was asked the secret of his success interviewing children, most famously on his long-running TV program Art Linkletter's House Party. He said, "It's simple, but you probably can't do it: they must know that you are on the same intellectual level." With this gentle dig at himself he revealed that connecting with anyone is to reflect them. He knew he was just a big kid, and the kids could tell.

On a similar note, if someone could ask Joseph Bell, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, or even the author Arthur Conan Doyle, what was the secret of his deductive abilities, I imagine him replying, "It's simple, but you probably can't do it: you must exclude no possibility without a reason to do so."

We are, by habit, quick to close doors and slow to open them. Our everyday language is full of door-closing phrases:

"I can't do that."
"This must be so."
"Why would you think that?"
"That is impossible."
"It won't work."

In the film The Help I found it extremely touching when the nanny holds a small girl and repeats to her, "You is good, You is Kind…" and so forth, and the girl trustingly repeats with her, "I am good, I am kind…" How can this fail to establish a helpful basis for the girl's character?

At this moment, I am less concerned with the things we tell our children than with what we tell ourselves. "What you think is what you get" could be a mantra for Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Having grown up hearing the Holmes stories read aloud by her father (and a great many other good books, she hints here and there), Ms Konnikova in eight chapters, jam-packed with examples and exhortations, shows us how to re-form our ways of thinking, and problem-solving in particular.

You and I may never need to solve a crime or find a kidnapped prince. We may never cross wits with a purblind and misguided police inspector. But our lives are full of conundrums big and small that a bit of Holmes-style thinking can help us resolve. It is more than just "thinking outside the box," though that is helpful; first we must know what the box is!

Throughout the book the author uses the analogy of an attic. In what state is our memory? Certainly, it contains thousands of things, but how are they stored? We're not talking psychobiology here but mental discipline. Continuing the analogy of an attic, or even better, a vast warehouse, how are its contents arranged? Is everything in piles like in the house of a hoarder, such that you can barely squeeze your way hither and yon to find things? Perhaps things are in boxes, but are things grouped with similar things or just jumbled together, box by box by myriads of boxes? Is anything labeled?

I think of interior views of the shelves in M5 on Mythbusters, such as this image. Jamie and Adam didn't rise to the top of the special-effects field by being sloppy curators of their "stuff". The boxes, bins and jars may exhibit a wondrous diversity of their own, but they are sorted alphabetically. I reckon that beats trying to sort them functionally; Jamie would need a taxonomy of function, and there would inevitably be an "Other" category that would soon grow out of control. Better this way. (But note in the bottom row that "Small Pumps" is misplaced. Would you sort that with S or P? Who knows how it got between T and U!)

Anyway, key #1 to Sherlock Holmes's method is having a mental attic with much of the "stuff" labeled and sorted. He is able to quickly retrieve what he needs.

This doesn't happen by accident. I suppose it will always be true that most of what we take in and retain (and we retain a very small percentage) is quickly strewn helter-skelter, and there is little we can do about that. It is probably one function of sleep to sort through recent new memories and nudge them this way and that into some sort of order. You and I may not consciously be good curators of our memories, but some amount of curation is carried out anyway. We must be thankful for that. But we are all different, and if that curation is too sloppy, we are called "scatterbrained" at best, and probably other, less flattering terms behind our backs.

But we read in Mastermind of observing with intention, of taking in what is most likely to be useful, then curating that properly. Like many others, I collect a number of things. My stamp collection is, for the most part, labeled and sorted. My minerals, not so much. I have a rather small number of minerals on display, a somewhat larger amount stored in boxes, but it is more of an accumulation than a collection. Then the books! There are a few thousand, and I have certain subsets well arranged in special places. The rest simply line the shelves of three rooms. One friend has at least this system: all his books are arranged by the color of the spine, so his main library is a rainbow. Another, now deceased, had a true library, with a Dewey Decimal notation in white ink on every book, and a card catalog in the corner. Now that is a collection!

A second key is the extent to which we allow our emotions free reign. In the Holmes stories, Dr. Watson is a kind of Everyman. He represents nearly all of us, jumping to a premature conclusion and then falling in love with it, which makes it quite impossible to proceed in any useful way. Let us remember the maxim that I foisted on Dr. Bell in my imagination: "Exclude no possibility without a reason to do so." Holmes is a master of the creative back-step. When formulating hypotheses he quite automatically pulls back to take in a wider view and be sure he is excluding nothing that might be useful. He (usually) did not allow his fondness for a neat explanation to deter him from discerning other explanations. Thus, when the first "neat" explanation is found wanting, he would have further avenues to explore. Watson-style thinking far too often confronts us with a blank wall and empty pockets.

Some people are openers, some are closers. Both are needed. More rare are those who can both open and close with equal ability. I am referring to opening up more and more possibilities in the early stages of a project or puzzle, followed by closing off one possibility after another as each is proved impossible or unfeasible, to drive to an appropriate conclusion. Holmes's most familiar dictum is, "When you have excluded everything that is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." And suppose you have excluded everything you could think of? Time for more opening exercises. Conan Doyle has Holmes make a few mistakes, and they tend to be in this category: closing off possibilities too early or not thinking of them in the first place. If every avenue is blocked, back off and look for others. Oh, how loath we are to retrace our steps! Yet sometimes that is most necessary.

Later in the book Ms Konnikova dwells on the value of getting away. Holmes will sometimes simply go elsewhere for a day, or he might spend an hour playing violin (Einstein did so also, to world-changing effect!). Conscious mental effort is not always, or even usually, the most effective. I built a nearly 40-year career writing scientific software on the following practice: At the end of a period working, I'd focus on the most troubling puzzle (usually some algorithm that was hard to code) and deliberately arrange all the pertinent facts and parameters in my mind (closing my eyes lets me "write" on a mental "screen"), then sort of say, "Away with you, now" as I push it to "somewhere else" in my mind and go do something else. I might get something to eat, or talk to someone or, if it is late in the day, go home and sleep. I frequently awoke at 3 AM or so with a neat package on my mental doorstep, so I would write it all down, in earlier days, or log in and code it all out on the spot in later years.

Here and there in the book we find suggestions for exercising the mind, and it is easy to get overwhelmed and think, "Oh, it is all too much for me." Everything is too much for us if taken all at once. Remember how to eat an elephant: one forkful at a time…and it helps to have a large room full of chest freezers! We can do any number of things to improve the arrangement of our mental attic, to distance ourselves from over-fondness for first ideas, and to improve our skepticism for overly simple solutions. One thing at a time. Pick one, any one, and have a go at it. It is like learning to juggle, which nearly everyone can do with about 3 months of daily practice. It doesn't come in a single day. And once learned, it has to be continued by juggling at least once or twice a week, or the skill diminishes. No matter at what stage we are, we can improve. And that is what this author is telling us. In place of the door-closing statements above, let us tell ourselves,

"I can do that."
"There must be a solution somewhere."
"Why should this not be so?"
"It had to happen somehow."
"If a question is never asked, the answer is always NO. Ask!"

The illusion of thinking clearly

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, thinking, logical fallacies

A few years ago I met someone at a reception. He told me he was a philosopher, and that his specialty was the fallacies of formal logic. I happen to know that there are 16 formal fallacies, which are errors in the logic of an argument. I also know, and had recently read a treatise upon, the informal fallacies, which are unknown in number, but there are more than 100 (the Wikipedia article "list of fallacies" notes 59). For some reason, this quite incensed my new acquaintance, to the point that I was concerned he may become violent (a common informal fallacy on his part!).

Winston Churchill said, "Even a fool is right once in a while." This caution alerts us to avoid the most common informal fallacy, the ad hominem attack, which we could describe as, "You must be wrong because you are a bad person", or, "…because I don't like you", or, "…because you are a [substitute your stereotype of choice]". Interestingly, this fallacy is not discussed in The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. I suppose he felt is has been sufficiently treated elsewhere, a great many elsewheres. But he does discuss 99 common errors that are so common, so very common it is a surprise any of us can decide anything at all!

Dobelli is Swiss and writes in German; the book was translated to English by Nicky Griffin. Kudos to the translator. Many translations from German produce nearly unreadable English. Clearly, Dobelli has a smooth, conversational writing style which Griffin has captured masterfully. It is great fun to read.

I can't hope to comment on more than a few of the items discussed. I picked a few favorites:

• Reciprocity, in the chapter "Don't Accept Free Drinks" – Dobelli calls appeals for donations that come in the mail with a "free gift" inside a "kind of gentle blackmail" (I'd call them extortion rather than blackmail). An allied principle is TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Depending on how much spending authority you have, the "free lunch" could range from sports tickets to a "free" vacation. Then there is all the "free" stuff offered if you'll spend 90 minutes listening to a timeshare presentation. It is good to learn to say, "I don't think I can afford your 'free gift'."
• Confirmation Bias, in two chapters, the second being "Murder Your Darlings" – This has two sides. One is the increasing tendency for search engines, led by Google, to keep track of your preferences and to use them to rank the list of returns from a search you make. As time goes by, you'll only get "hits" that confirm your prejudices. That's why it is a good idea not to search when you are logged in to a Google service such as Blogger, Drive or GMail (or one such as Yahoo Mail if you search using Yahoo). Search as anonymously as possible if you want less biased results. The second side is the tendency of writers to dwell on themes that they love and to give short shrift to others, even if they are trying to discuss "all sides" of an issue. Arthur Quiller-Couch devised the motto, "Murder your darlings", meaning to eliminate the redundant text that inevitably fills your writing about those most-loved themes; pare those sections down to match the less-favored sections.
• Induction, in the chapter "How to Relieve People of Their Millions" – This is a favorite of mine, based on an ancient scam. Someone who is lucky several times in a row may be considered extra favored or blessed, and if you get tricked by your own good luck, it can lead to a feeling of immortality. It also leads to unneeded depression when your luck turns. But it also explains why "financial advisers" invest each client's funds in a different collection of investments (Those who invest all funds equally are called mutual fund managers, and are more likely to have a modicum of honesty!). Here is a key datum: multiply 2 by itself 10 times, and the result is 1,024. Pick a yes/no question, such as "will the market go up or go down?" Send about 1,000 people an e-mail in which you explain why you think the market will go up in the coming week, and send another 1,000 an e-mail in which you explain why you think it will go down. After a week, it has done one or the other. Suppose it went down. Now send an e-mail to just the second group making a new prediction, again of the yes/no variety. The third week, e-mail just the 500 for whom you've been right twice, with a further prediction, and so forth. After five weeks, assuming you actually started with two groups of 1,024, you now have 64 people who have received five accurate predictions. At this point, ask to be paid for further predictions. Let's say they all agree (keep the cost low at first). Now things get complicated. After your next prediction, send an apologetic e-mail to the 32 who saw you "flub", and offer to refund their payment; send a self-congratulatory e-mail to the others, but don't lay it on too thick. You are likely to keep some of the ones who got the apology. Anyway, after a total of 10 predictions, you now have at least 2 people who think you are infallible! You can ask for stratospheric prices for your answers. Investment advisers are not so blatant about it, but by spreading around their clients' funds, they can avoid being wrong too frequently.
• The Black Swan, in the chapter "How to Profit From the Implausible" – The actual fallacy is to think that unlikely events are less likely than they really are. For example, how likely is it that someone could throw a basketball over their house, and have it go through the hoop in the back yard? One in a million, or a billion? Yet there are at least two videos out there showing just this happening. One is shown a couple times a year on America's Funniest Home Videos on ABC. Professional statisticians tend to analyze every distribution as a "normal" distribution, even though very few natural phenomena follow a bell curve. For example, women's height is found to be normally distributed, but household income is not. Also, the daily change in a stock's price is typically analyzed as a normal distribution, but large changes are much, much more likely than such a model predicts. Dobelli claims that unlikely events are getting even more likely, and even more consequential, because our civilization is more strongly affected by events outside "the usual range", like a 100-year flood. Before we began building lots of fragile houses some 10,000 years ago, a 100-year flood simply meant moving camp to higher ground for a week. Now it means high insurance premiums (if you have flood insurance in the first place). Also, those who make big incomes don't work for others. Dobelli's advice is to work in an area where a big break can bring big returns, but to save and invest as though such a big break may never come. If it comes, you can profit from it, and if it doesn't, you will have provided for your future.
• Feature-Positive Effect, in the chapter "Why Checklists Deceive You" – We notice things that are there (but not even all of those!), but it is very hard to notice what isn't there. This is the crux of the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze", where the important clue was that a watchdog didn't bark. Only Holmes would notice such a fact. Everyone else was busy about evidence they were able to collect, because it existed. Double-talk "explanations" about why something went wrong are solidly based on carefully omitting key facts in the midst of a blizzard of less relevant, but attractive, facts (a related fallacy). Dobelli tells of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. During its premier many wept. He asks, "Would we be less happy without [it]? Probably not." Had "the Ninth" never been written, we'd never know what we were missing anyway. In the same way, we notice nothing in particular when we are totally well. We really notice any disease or injury.

In a reference section at the end we find 50 pages of bibliographic information, which the author says could easily have become several hundred pages. There is a lot of "thinking about thinking" being written up in the literature. This book is the most accessible of them all in my experience.

The middle memory

kw: musings, memory, thinking

I love it when a book gets me thinking. I reviewed How to Think Like a Neandertal, by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, yesterday. A portion of their discussion of Neandertal cognition was memory.

Usually, memory is considered to have two varieties, long term and short term. Short term memory can hold a phone number, or someone's name, or a short list of items, for a few seconds, up to a minute or so. Repetition of a short-term memory, or a sudden shock, can fix it in long term memory, which lasts decades. But another term came up in the discussion of tool making and expertise: working memory. It wasn't really quantified.

Is working memory some combination of short- and long term memory, or something distinct? It seems to work this way. When you are engaged in a task, particularly one which is not wholly familiar, you may have to hold several things in memory for periods of minutes to hours. Yet, once you are done, all the memories fade.

I took advantage of this whenever I wrote a computer program or subroutine. In the very early days, I did what beginning programmers usually do, and built stand-alone applications (today folks just call them apps). They consisted of a stack of FORTRAN code that just did what I wanted it to do, usually. Whether extract certain numbers from a list or calculate a Fourier series, I just set it all up to do what I wanted. While I was writing, particularly in the days of the card punch (no terminal screen to help), I kept the entire program in mind as I spun out the code, line by line.

As time went on, I learned to break up a process into chunks, and write the chunks one at a time. I began to rely on callable routines. Eventually, I could write a program with a general outline:

Program dostuff
Call Askfordata
Call Crankonthedata
Call Printresults
Stop
End

But this just deferred the situation. The core of the work was in routine Crankonthedata, and it could be quite involved, with hundreds of lines of code. Sometimes I could break it up further, but there is a limit to "chunking" a problem. Sooner or later, you have to make it all go.

There was another technique I learned to rely on. As problems I needed to program got harder, it would take several days to write a routine. By such a time, I was pre-writing not the program code, but a flow chart of its operation, and spinning out the code for each block of the flow chart as I came to it. Inevitably, something would not work right, or I'd come to a section and find out I hadn't thought it through sufficiently; there were some dangling threads in the logic that I had to tie up. So at the end of the day, I learned to "grok" the whole routine I was working on, sort of hang the whole thing on a mental blackboard, and go to sleep on it. In the morning, I'd have a batch of stuff ready to write, and it could take half the morning to catch up.

By the way, I always wrote lots of comments in my code, something not all programmers do. Do you know why? I found out that if I looked at the routine just a couple of weeks later, I had no idea what was going on, unless I had good comments to help me decipher what I had written! All trace of the memory was gone. Somehow, a detailed memory, with thousands of parts, that I could hold onto for a few days, would still not make it into long term memory.

Perhaps that's a blessing. I wonder whether my brain would be full now, if I could remember every line of code I wrote over a forty year career. As I've written elsewhere, I used to produce 500-1000 lines a week of FORTRAN. With an average usable "year" of forty weeks (nobody works a 52-week year), that comes to a million lines of code or more.

I once met a pianist who claimed to be nothing special in the memory department, but he typically prepares for a concert by learning 100-150 pages of music. He performs strictly from memory. When he is getting ready for the next concert, any pieces he is not repeating have to be learned. The rest he mostly forgets, though he has a core repertory of a few hundred pages of music that he performs more often.

So what is working memory? It seems to be a forgettable memory store with a medium period, up to a few days or a couple of weeks. If things like FORTRAN code were stored as compactly in the brain as they are on a hard disk, my million lines of FORTRAN might total no more than fifty megabytes. These days, that's about a third of a square millimeter on the surface of a hard disk (the disk in my current computer stores 100 Gby per square inch, or 155 Mby per square mm). Somehow, we may store much more than this about many things, but not everything. I am awed.

Decisions, decisions

kw: observations, thinking, mental health

My father has received some help with his balance and other problems from a hypnotist. He repeated a statement made by the hypnotist that we make about a thousand conscious decisions daily, while our unconscious makes a million decisions a day. That got me thinking.

Firstly, what is a decision? Upon reflection, I concluded that it is a sequence of brain activity that leads to an action or to refraining from an action. By "action", however, I don't mean just a bodily motion, but I include a mental state that differs from before, such as a realization, a word choice for a sentence one may soon speak or write, or a "mental note" to do something in the future. Do we count the sub-decisions that lead to something more major? Sure, why not?

A thousand decisions amounts to about one per waking minute. Let's consider this as a starting point. While I am writing, I can type 50-60 words per minute, but I don't always think this fast. Nonetheless, I am capable of sustained burst of "word choice" and "sentence-concept choice" in the range of one per second. When I play a computer card game such as Freecell or Spider Solitaire, I may think about a move for a minute or several minutes, and at other times make several moves per second. My hand speed limits me to about three per second. Nobody can do that all day, however.

Speaking with someone, we make one or two decisions per second, and some of us spend a lot of time conversing. Of course, half of the conversation a person spends listening, but they will be thinking, often planning what to say next, the while. So sustained decision making can approach one per second. In 16-18 hours of waking time, the number of seconds is 54,600-64,800. Thus I conclude that most of us make fewer than 50,000 conscious decisions daily, and that nobody exceeds 100,000.

What counts as an unconscious decision? When some part of the brain builds a dream image in your sleep, how many decisions are involved, and how long did it take? The visual cortex operates in parallel, and I recall dream images, just from last night, that were rather complex, containing dozens to hundreds of objects. For an image sequence to seem continuous, they must occur at about twenty per second. That is one kind of decision-making we need to consider. It parallels the recognition process that makes us aware of dozens to hundreds of items in our visual field, also at a rate of about twenty per second. In either case, a minute of visual activity is sustained by as many as several hundred thousand recognition or recall decisions. Watching an hour-long movie, which I've noticed is often visually less rich than a "real" experience, let's just guess that each minute requires 100,000 decisions (hundreds are made in parallel at every instant), so that movie prompts six million decisions by our visual processing system.

There is a lot more going on in our body; regulation of heart, liver, stomach and other organ rhythms, for example. I don't know how to analyze the number of decisions this takes, but I think it is safe to say that it does not require the sustained level found in visual processing. Then let us consider that the visual cortex is one-third of the total cortex, and the cortex is a fifth of the total brain. The cortex may then be capable of twenty million decisions per hour. The rest of the brain runs at different rates. The largest portion of the limbic system involves emotional responses, another kind of decision entirely. There may be some parallelism in this as well, but it is more mysterious overall. Then there is the memory system. Again, it is hard to decide how to count activity, and harder still to figure out what is a "decision".

Instead, let us back off and consider. The cortex alone is capable of twenty million unconscious decisions per hour, which is probably a few thousand per hour (one or two per second) in each of thousands of regions. Conscious decision making requires getting more of the brain into gear, and seems not to run in parallel.

It seems the hypnotist had his ratios about right, but the figures were wildly conservative. I suspect it is more accurate to say that we make 10,000-50,000 conscious decisions daily, while unconsciously the whole cortex makes around a third of a billion decisions…during waking hours. During sleep, the rate of activity is hardly changed, so that another hundred million or so decisions get made.

In all the above, I have considered only the cerebrum, not the cerebellum and brain stem, which regulate bodily states and mediate our decisions to perform bodily actions. I don't think I need to. The hypnotist was using the thousand-to-one figure to make the point that if we can influence how the unconscious functions operate, even a little, we can make big changes in bodily and mental states, and perhaps even rates of healing. Now that takes more consideration.