emotion

Expressivism

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 29 JDN 2460583

The theory of expressivism, often posited as an alternative to moral realism, is based on the observation by Hume that factual knowledge is not intrinsically motivating. I can believe that a food is nutritious and that I need nutrition to survive, but without some emotional experience to motivate me—hunger—I will nonetheless remain unmotivated to eat the nutritious food. Because morality is meant to be intrinsically motivating, says Hume, it must not involve statements of fact.

Yet really all Hume has shown is that if indeed facts are not intrinsically motivating, and moral statements are intrinsically motivating, then moral statements are not merely statements of fact. But even statements of fact are rarely merely statements of fact! If I were to walk down the street stating facts at random (lemurs have rings on their tails, the Sun is over one million kilometers in diameter, bicycles have two wheels, people sit on chairs, time dilates as you approach the speed of light, LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US, Coca-Cola in the United States contains high fructose corn syrup, humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA), I would be seen as a very odd sort of person indeed. Even when I state a fact, I do so out of some motivation, frequently an emotional motivation. I’m often trying to explain, or to convince. Sometimes I am angry, and I want to express my anger and frustration. Other times I am sad and seeking consolation. I have many emotions, and I often use words to express them. Nonetheless, in the process I will make many statements of fact that are either true or false: “Humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA” I might use to argue in favor of common descent; “Time dilates as you approach the speed of light” I have used in to explain relativity theory; “LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US” I might use to argue in favor of some sort of gay rights policy. When I say “genocide is wrong!” I probably have some sort of emotional motivation for this—likely my outrage at an ongoing genocide. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure it’s true that genocide is wrong.

Expressivism says that moral statements don’t express propositions at all, they express attitudes, relations to ideas that are not of the same kind as belief and disbelief, truth and falsehood. Much as “Hello!” or “Darn it!” don’t really state facts or inquire about facts, expressivists like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard would say that “Genocide is wrong” doesn’t say anything about the facts of genocide, it merely expresses my attitude of moral disapproval toward genocide.

Yet expressivists can’t abandon all normativity—otherwise even the claim “expressivism is true” has no moral force. Allan Gibbard, like most expressivists, supports epistemic normativity—the principle that we ought to believe what is true. But this seems to me already a moral principle, and one that is not merely an attitude that some people happen to have, but in fact a fundamental axiom that ought to apply to any rational beings in any possible universe. Even more, Gibbard agrees that some moral attitudes are more warranted than others, that “genocide is wrong” is more legitimate than “genocide is good”. But once we agree that there are objective normative truths and moral attitudes can be more or less justified, how is this any different from moral realism?

Indeed, in terms of cognitive science I’m not sure beliefs and emotions are so easily separable in the first place. In some sense I think statements of fact can be intrinsically motivating—or perhaps it is better to put it this way: If your brain is working properly, certain beliefs and emotions will necessarily coincide. If you believe that you are about to be attacked by a tiger, and you don’t experience the emotion of fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you are about to die of starvation, and you don’t experience the emotion of hunger, something is wrong. Conversely, if you believe that you are safe from all danger, and yet you experience fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you have eaten plenty of food, yet you still experience hunger, something is wrong. When your beliefs and emotions don’t align, either your beliefs or your emotions are defective. I would say that the same is true of moral beliefs. If you believe that genocide is wrong but you are not motivated to resist genocide, something is wrong; if you believe that feeding your children is obligatory but you are not motivated to feed your children, something is wrong.

It may well be that without emotion, facts would never motivate us; but emotions can warranted by facts. That is how we distinguish depression from sadness, mania from joy, phobia from fear. Indeed I am dubious of the entire philosophical project of noncognitivism, of which expressivism is the moral form. Noncognitivism is the idea that a given domain of mental processing is not cognitive—not based on thinking, reason, or belief. There is often a sense that noncognitive mental processing is “lower” than cognition, usually based on the idea that it is more phylogenetically conserved—that we think as men but feel as rats.

Yet in fact this is not how human emotions work at all. Poetry—mere words—often evokes the strongest of emotions. A text message of “I love you” or “I think we should see other people” can change the course of our lives. An ambulance in the driveway will pale the face of any parent. In 2001 the video footage of airplanes colliding with skyscrapers gave all of America nightmares for weeks. Yet stop and think about what text messages, ambulances, video footage, airplanes, and skyscrapers are—they are technologies so advanced, so irreducibly cognitive, that even the world’s technological superpower had none of them 200 years ago. (We didn’t have text messages forty years ago!) Even something as apparently dry as numbers can have profound emotional effects: In the statements “Your blood sugar is X mg/dL” to a diabetic, “You have Y years to live” to a cancer patient, or “Z people died” in a news report, the emotional effects are almost wholly dependent upon the value of the numbers X, Y, and Z—values of X = 100, Y = 50 and Z = 0 would be no cause for alarm (or perhaps even cause for celebration!), while values of X = 400, Y = 2, and Z = 10,000 would trigger immediate shock, terror and despair. The entire discipline of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy depends upon the fact that talking to people about their thoughts and beliefs can have profound effects upon their emotions and actions—and in empirical studies, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is verified to work in a variety of circumstances and is more effective than medication for virtually every mental disorder. We do not think as men but feel as rats; we thinkandfeel as human beings.

Because they are evolved instincts, we have limited control over them, and other animals have them, we are often inclined to suppose that emotions are simple, stupid, irrational—but on the contrary they are mind-bogglingly complex, brilliantly intelligent, and the essence of what it means to be a rational being. People who don’t have emotions aren’t rational—they are inert. In psychopathology a loss of capacity for emotion is known as flat affect, and it is often debilitating; it is often found in schizophrenia and autism, and in its most extreme forms it causes catatonia—that is, a total lack of body motion. From Plato to Star Trek, Western culture has taught us to think that a loss of emotion would improve our rationality; but on the contrary, a loss of all emotion would render us completely vegetative. Lieutenant Commander Data without his emotion chip should stand in one place and do nothing—for this is what people without emotion actually do.

Indeed, attractive and aversive experiences—that is, emotions—are the core of goal-seeking behavior, without which rationality is impossible. Apparently simple experiences like pleasure and pain (let alone obviously complicated ones like jealousy and patriotism) are so complex that the most advanced robots in the world cannot even get close to simulating them. Injure a rat, and it will withdraw and cry out in pain; damage a robot (at least any less than a state-of-the-art research robot), and it will not react at all, continuing ineffectually through the same motions it was attempting a moment ago. This shows that rats are smarter than robots—an organism that continues on its way regardless of the stimulus is more like a plant than an animal.

Our emotions do sometimes fail us. They hurt us, they put us at risk, they make us behave in ways that are harmful or irrational. Yet to declare on these grounds that emotions are the enemy of reason would be like declaring that we should all poke out our eyes because sometimes we are fooled by optical illusions. It would be like saying that a shirt with one loose thread is unwearable, that a mathematician who once omits a negative sign should never again be trusted. This is not rationality but perfectionism. Like human eyes, human emotions are rational the vast majority of the time, and when they aren’t, this is cause for concern. Truly irrational emotions include mania, depression, phobia, and paranoia—and it’s no accident that we respond to these emotions with psychotherapy and medication.

Expressivism is legitimate precisely because it is not a challenger to moral realism. Personally, I think that expressivism is wrong because moral claims express facts as much as they express attitudes; but given our present state of knowledge about cognitive science, that is the sort of question upon which reasonable people can disagree. Moreover, the close ties between emotion and reason may ultimately entail that we are wrong to make the distinction in the first place. It is entirely reasonable, at our present state of knowledge, to think that moral judgments are primarily emotional rather than propositional. What isnot reasonable, however, is the claim that moral statements cannot be objectively justified—the evidence against this claim is simply too compelling to ignore. If moral claims are emotions, they are emotions that can be objectively justified.

Compassion and the cosmos

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 24 JDN 2460304

When this post goes live, it will be Christmas Eve, one of the most important holidays around the world.

Ostensibly it celebrates the birth of Jesus, but it doesn’t really.

For one thing, Jesus almost certainly wasn’t born in December. The date of Christmas was largely set by the Council of Tours in AD 567; it was set to coincide with existing celebrations—not only other Christian celebrations such as the Feast of the Epiphany, but also many non-Christian celebrations such as Yuletide, Saturnalia, and others around the Winter Solstice. (People today often say “Yuletide” when they actually mean Christmas, because the syncretization was so absolute.)

For another, an awful lot of the people celebrating Christmas don’t particularly care about Jesus. Countries like Sweden, Belgium, the UK, Australia, Norway, and Denmark are majority atheist but still very serious about Christmas. Maybe we should try to secularize and ecumenize the celebration and call it Solstice or something, but that’s a tall order. For now, it’s Christmas.

Compassion, love, and generosity are central themes of Christmas—and, by all accounts, Jesus did exemplify those traits. Christianity has a very complicated history, much of it quite dark; but this part of it at least seems worth preserving and even cherishing.

It is truly remarkable that we have compassion at all.

Most of this universe has no compassion. Many would like to believe otherwise, and they invent gods and other “higher beings” or attribute some sort of benevolent “universal consciousness” to the cosmos. (Really, most people copy the prior inventions of others.)

This is all wrong.

The universe is mostly empty, and what is here is mostly pitilessly indifferent.

The vast majority of the universe is comprised of cold, dark, empty space—or perhaps of “dark energy“, a phenomenon we really don’t understand at all, which many physicists believe is actually a shockingly powerful form of energy contained within empty space.

Most of the rest is made up of “dark matter“, a substance we still don’t really understand either, but believe to be basically a dense sea of particles that have mass but not much else, which cluster around other mass by gravity but otherwise rarely interact with other matter or even with each other.

Most of the “ordinary matter”, or more properly baryonic matter, (which we think of as ordinary, but actually by far the minority) is contained within stars and nebulae. It is mostly hydrogen and helium. Some of the other lighter elements—like lithium, sodium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and all the way up to iron—can be made within ordinary stars, but still form a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe. Anything heavier than that—silver, gold, beryllium, uranium—can only be made in exotic, catastrophic cosmic events, mainly supernovae, and as a result these elements are even rarer still.

Most of the universe is mind-bendingly cold: about 3 Kelvin, just barely above absolute zero.

Most of the baryonic matter is mind-bendingly hot, contained within stars that burn with nuclear fires at thousands or even millions of Kelvin.

From a cosmic perspective, we are bizarre.

We live at a weird intermediate temperature and pressure, where matter can take on such exotic states as liquid and solid, rather than the far more common gas and plasma. We do contain a lot of hydrogen—that, at least, is normal by the standards of baryonic matter. But then we’re also made up of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and even little bits of all sorts of other elements that can only be made in supernovae? What kind of nonsense lifeform depends upon something as exotic as iodine to survive?

Most of the universe does not care at all about you.

Most of the universe does not care about anything.

Stars don’t burn because they want to. They burn because that’s what happens when hydrogen slams into other hydrogen hard enough.

Planets don’t orbit because they want to. They orbit because if they didn’t, they’d fly away or crash into their suns—and those that did are long gone now.

Even most living things, which are already nearly as bizarre as we are, don’t actually care much.

Maybe there is a sense in which a C. elegans or an oak tree or even a cyanobacterium wants to live. It certainly seems to try to live; it has behaviors that seem purposeful, which evolved to promote its ability to survive and pass on offspring. Rocks don’t behave. Stars don’t seek. But living things—even tiny, microscopic living things—do.

But we are something very special indeed.

We are animals. Lifeforms with complex, integrated nervous systems—in a word, brains—that allow us to not simply live, but to feel. To hunger. To fear. To think. To choose.

Animals—and to the best of our knowledge, only animals, though I’m having some doubts about AI lately—are capable of making choices and experiencing pleasure and pain, and thereby becoming something more than living beings: moral beings.

Because we alone can choose, we alone have the duty to choose rightly.

Because we alone can be hurt, we alone have the right to demand not to be.

Humans are even very special among animals. We are not just animals but chordates; not just chordates but mammals; not just mammals but primates. And even then, not just primates. We’re special even by those very high standards.

When you count up all the ways that we are strange compared to the rest of the universe, it seems incredibly unlikely that beings like us would come into existence at all.

Yet here we are. And however improbable it may have been for us to emerge as intelligent beings, we had to do so in order to wonder how improbable it was—and so in some sense we shouldn’t be too surprised.

It is a mistake to say that we are “more evolved” than any other lifeform; turtles and cockroaches had just as much time to evolve as we did, and if anything their relative stasis for hundreds of millions of years suggests a more perfected design: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But we are different than other lifeforms in a very profound way. And I dare say, we are better.

All animals feel pleasure, pain and hunger. (Some believe that even some plants and microscopic lifeforms may too.) Pain when something damages you; hunger when you need something; pleasure when you get what you needed.

But somewhere along the way, new emotions were added: Fear. Lust. Anger. Sadness. Disgust. Pride. To the best of our knowledge, these are largely chordate emotions, often believed to have emerged around the same time as reptiles. (Does this mean that cephalopods never get angry? Or did they evolve anger independently? Surely worms don’t get angry, right? Our common ancestor with cephalopods was probably something like a worm, perhaps a nematode. Does C. elegans get angry?)

And then, much later, still newer emotions evolved. These ones seem to be largely limited to mammals. They emerged from the need for mothers to care for their few and helpless young. (Consider how a bear or a cat fiercely protects her babies from harm—versus how a turtle leaves her many, many offspring to fend for themselves.)

One emotion formed the core of this constellation:

Love.

Caring, trust, affection, and compassion—and also rejection, betrayal, hatred, and bigotry—all came from this one fundamental capacity to love. To care about the well-being of others as well as our own. To see our purpose in the world as extending beyond the borders of our own bodies.

This is what makes humans different, most of all. We are the beings most capable of love.

We are of course by no means perfect at it. Some would say that we are not even very good at loving.

Certainly there are some humans, such as psychopaths, who seem virtually incapable of love. But they are rare.

We often wish that we were better at love. We wish that there were more compassion in the world, and fear that humanity will destroy itself because we cannot find enough compassion to compensate for our increasing destructive power.

Yet if we are bad at love, compared to what?

Compared to the unthinking emptiness of space, the hellish nuclear fires of stars, or even the pitiless selfishness of a worm or a turtle, we are absolute paragons of love.

We somehow find a way to love millions of others who we have never even met—maybe just a tiny bit, and maybe even in a way that becomes harmful, as solidarity fades into nationalism fades into bigotry—but we do find a way. Through institutions of culture and government, we find a way to trust and cooperate on a scale that would be utterly unfathomable even to the most wise and open-minded bonobo, let alone a nematode.

There are no other experts on compassion here. It’s just us.

Maybe that’s why so many people long for the existence of gods. They feel as ignorant as children, and crave the knowledge and support of a wise adult. But there aren’t any. We’re the adults. For all the vast expanses of what we do not know, we actually know more than anyone else. And most of the universe doesn’t know a thing.

If we are not as good at loving as we’d like, the answer is for us to learn to get better at it.

And we know that we can get better at it, because we have. Humanity is more peaceful and cooperative now than we have ever been in our history. The process is slow, and sometimes there is backsliding, but overall, life is getting better for most people in most of the world most of the time.

As a species, as a civilization, we are slowly learning how to love ourselves, one another, and the rest of the world around us.

No one else will learn to love for us. We must do it ourselves.

But we can.

And I believe we will.

What is anxiety for?

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 17 JDN 2460205

As someone who experiences a great deal of anxiety, I have often struggled to understand what it could possibly be useful for. We have this whole complex system of evolved emotions, and yet more often than not it seems to harm us rather than help us. What’s going on here? Why do we even have anxiety? What even is anxiety, really? And what is it for?

There’s actually an extensive body of research on this, though very few firm conclusions. (One of the best accounts I’ve read, sadly, is paywalled.)

For one thing, there seem to be a lot of positive feedback loops involved in anxiety: Panic attacks make you more anxious, triggering more panic attacks; being anxious disrupts your sleep, which makes you more anxious. Positive feedback loops can very easily spiral out of control, resulting in responses that are wildly disproportionate to the stimulus that triggered them.

A certain amount of stress response is useful, even when the stakes are not life-or-death. But beyond a certain point, more stress becomes harmful rather than helpful. This is the Yerkes-Dodson effect, for which I developed my stochastic overload model (which I still don’t know if I’ll ever publish, ironically enough, because of my own excessive anxiety). Realizing that anxiety can have benefits can also take some of the bite out of having chronic anxiety, and, ironically, reduce that anxiety a little. The trick is finding ways to break those positive feedback loops.

I think one of the most useful insights to come out of this research is the smoke-detector principle, which is a fundamentally economic concept. It sounds quite simple: When dealing with an uncertain danger, sound the alarm if the expected benefit of doing so exceeds the expected cost.

This has profound implications when risk is highly asymmetric—as it usually is. Running away from a shadow or a noise that probably isn’t a lion carries some cost; you wouldn’t want to do it all the time. But it is surely nowhere near as bad as failing to run away when there is an actual lion. Indeed, it might be fair to say that failing to run away from an actual lion counts as one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to you, and could easily be 100 times as bad as running away when there is nothing to fear.

With this in mind, if you have a system for detecting whether or not there is a lion, how sensitive should you make it? Extremely sensitive. You should in fact try to calibrate it so that 99% of the time you experience the fear and want to run away, there is not a lion. Because the 1% of the time when there is one, it’ll all be worth it.

Yet this is far from a complete explanation of anxiety as we experience it. For one thing, there has never been, in my entire life, even a 1% chance that I’m going to be attacked by a lion. Even standing in front of a lion enclosure at the zoo, my chances of being attacked are considerably less than that—for a zoo that allowed 1% of its customers to be attacked would not stay in business very long.

But for another thing, it isn’t really lions I’m afraid of. The things that make me anxious are generally not things that would be expected to do me bodily harm. Sure, I generally try to avoid walking down dark alleys at night, and I look both ways before crossing the street, and those are activities directly designed to protect me from bodily harm. But I actually don’t feel especially anxious about those things! Maybe I would if I actually had to walk through dark alleys a lot, but I don’t, and in the rare occasion I would, I think I’d feel afraid at the time but fine afterward, rather than experiencing persistent, pervasive, overwhelming anxiety. (Whereas, if I’m anxious about reading emails, and I do manage to read emails, I’m usually still anxious afterward.) When it comes to crossing the street, I feel very little fear at all, even though perhaps I should—indeed, it had been remarked that when it comes to the perils of motor vehicles, human beings suffer from a very dangerous lack of fear. We should be much more afraid than we are—and our failure to be afraid kills thousands of people.

No, the things that make me anxious are invariably social: Meetings, interviews, emails, applications, rejection letters. Also parties, networking events, and back when I needed them, dates. They involve interacting with other people—and in particular being evaluated by other people. I never felt particularly anxious about exams, except maybe a little before my PhD qualifying exam and my thesis defenses; but I can understand those who do, because it’s the same thing: People are evaluating you.

This suggests that anxiety, at least of the kind that most of us experience, isn’t really about danger; it’s about status. We aren’t worried that we will be murdered or tortured or even run over by a car. We’re worried that we will lose our friends, or get fired; we are worried that we won’t get a job, won’t get published, or won’t graduate.

And yet it is striking to me that it often feels just as bad as if we were afraid that we were going to die. In fact, in the most severe instances where anxiety feeds into depression, it can literally make people want to die. How can that be evolutionarily adaptive?

Here it may be helpful to remember that in our ancestral environment, status and survival were oft one and the same. Humans are the most social organisms on Earth; I even sometimes describe us as hypersocial, a whole new category of social that no other organism seems to have achieved. We cooperate with others of our species on a mind-bogglingly grand scale, and are utterly dependent upon vast interconnected social systems far too large and complex for us to truly understand, let alone control.

At this historical epoch, these social systems are especially vast and incomprehensible; but at least for most of us in First World countries, they are also forgiving in a way that is fundamentally alien to our ancestors’ experience. It was not so long ago that a failed hunt or a bad harvest would let your family starve unless you could beseech your community for aid successfully—which meant that your very survival could depend upon being in the good graces of that community. But now we have food stamps, so even if everyone in your town hates you, you still get to eat. Of course some societies are more forgiving (Sweden) than others (the United States); and virtually all societies could be even more forgiving than they are. But even the relatively cutthroat competition of the US today has far less genuine risk of truly catastrophic failure than what most human beings lived through for most of our existence as a species.

I have found this realization helpful—hardly a cure, but helpful, at least: What are you really afraid of? When you feel anxious, your body often tells you that the stakes are overwhelming, life-or-death; but if you stop and think about it, in the world we live in today, that’s almost never true. Failing at one important task at work probably won’t get you fired—and even getting fired won’t really make you starve.

In fact, we might be less anxious if it were! For our bodies’ fear system seems to be optimized for the following scenario: An immediate threat with high chance of success and life-or-death stakes. Spear that wild animal, or jump over that chasm. It will either work or it won’t, you’ll know immediately; it probably will work; and if it doesn’t, well, that may be it for you. So you’d better not fail. (I think it’s interesting how much of our fiction and media involves these kinds of events: The hero would surely and promptly die if he fails, but he won’t fail, for he’s the hero! We often seem more comfortable in that sort of world than we do in the one we actually live in.)

Whereas the life we live in now is one of delayed consequences with low chance of success and minimal stakes. Send out a dozen job applications. Hear back in a week from three that want to interview you. Do those interviews and maybe one will make you an offer—but honestly, probably not. Next week do another dozen. Keep going like this, week after week, until finally one says yes. Each failure actually costs you very little—but you will fail, over and over and over and over.

In other words, we have transitioned from an environment of immediate return to one of delayed return.

The result is that a system which was optimized to tell us never fail or you will die is being put through situations where failure is constantly repeated. I think deep down there is a part of us that wonders, “How are you still alive after failing this many times?” If you had fallen in as many ravines as I have received rejection letters, you would assuredly be dead many times over.

Yet perhaps our brains are not quite as miscalibrated as they seem. Again I come back to the fact that anxiety always seems to be about people and evaluation; it’s different from immediate life-or-death fear. I actually experience very little life-or-death fear, which makes sense; I live in a very safe environment. But I experience anxiety almost constantly—which also makes a certain amount of sense, seeing as I live in an environment where I am being almost constantly evaluated by other people.

One theory posits that anxiety and depression are a dual mechanism for dealing with social hierarchy: You are anxious when your position in the hierarchy is threatened, and depressed when you have lost it. Primates like us do seem to care an awful lot about hierarchies—and I’ve written before about how this explains some otherwise baffling things about our economy.

But I for one have never felt especially invested in hierarchy. At least, I have very little desire to be on top of the hiearchy. I don’t want to be on the bottom (for I know how such people are treated); and I strongly dislike most of the people who are actually on top (for they’re most responsible for treating the ones on the bottom that way). I also have ‘a problem with authority’; I don’t like other people having power over me. But if I were to somehow find myself ruling the world, one of the first things I’d do is try to figure out a way to transition to a more democratic system. So it’s less like I want power, and more like I want power to not exist. Which means that my anxiety can’t really be about fearing to lose my status in the hierarchy—in some sense, I want that, because I want the whole hierarchy to collapse.

If anxiety involved the fear of losing high status, we’d expect it to be common among those with high status. Quite the opposite is the case. Anxiety is more common among people who are more vulnerable: Women, racial minorities, poor people, people with chronic illness. LGBT people have especially high rates of anxiety. This suggests that it isn’t high status we’re afraid of losing—though it could still be that we’re a few rungs above the bottom and afraid of falling all the way down.

It also suggests that anxiety isn’t entirely pathological. Our brains are genuinely responding to circumstances. Maybe they are over-responding, or responding in a way that is not ultimately useful. But the anxiety is at least in part a product of real vulnerabilities. Some of what we’re worried about may actually be real. If you cannot carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre White man, it may be simply because his status is fundamentally secure in a way yours is not, and he has been afforded a great many advantages you never will be. He never had a Supreme Court ruling decide his rights.

I cannot offer you a cure for anxiety. I cannot even really offer you a complete explanation of where it comes from. But perhaps I can offer you this: It is not your fault. Your brain evolved for a very different world than this one, and it is doing its best to protect you from the very different risks this new world engenders. Hopefully one day we’ll figure out a way to get it calibrated better.

How to make political conversation possible

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 25 JDN 2460121

Every man has the right to an opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

~Bernard Baruch

We shouldn’t expect political conversation to be easy. Politics inherently involves confllict. There are various competing interests and different ethical views involved in any political decision. Budgets are inherently limited, and spending must be prioritized. Raising taxes supports public goods but hurts taxpayers. A policy that reduces inflation may increase unemployment. A policy that promotes growth may also increase inequality. Freedom must sometimes be weighed against security. Compromises must be made that won’t make everyone happy—often they aren’t anyone’s first choice.

But in order to have useful political conversations, we need to have common ground. It’s one thing to disagree about what should be done—it’s quite another to ‘disagree’ about the basic facts of the world. Reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes the best policy choice. But when you start insisting upon factual claims that are empirically false, you become inherently unreasonable.

What terrifies me about our current state of political discourse is that we do not seem to have this common ground. We can’t even agree about basic facts of the world. Unless we can fix this, political conversation will be impossible.

I am tempted to say “anymore”—it at least feels to me like politics used to be different. But maybe it’s always been this way, and the Internet simply made the unreasonable voices louder. Overall rates of belief in most conspiracy theories haven’t changed substantially over time. Many other times have declared themselves ‘the golden age of conspiracy theory’. Maybe this has always been a problem. Maybe the greatest reason humanity has never been able to achieve peace is that large swaths of humanity can’t even agree on the basic facts.

Donald Trump exemplified this fact-less approach to politics, and QAnon remains a disturbingly significant force in our politics today. It’s impossible to have a sensible conversation with people who are convinced that you’re supporting a secret cabal of Satanic child molesters—and all the more impossible because they were willing to become convinced of that on literally zero evidence. But Trump was not the first conspiracist candidate, and will not be the last.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now seems to be challenging Trump for the title of ‘most unreasonable Presidential candidate’, as he has now advocated for an astonishing variety of bizarre unfounded claims: that vaccines are deadly, that antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings, that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon. He even claims things that can be quickly refuted simply by looking up the figures: He says that Switzerland’s gun ownership rate is comparable to the US, when in fact it’s only about one-fourth as high. No other country even comes close to the extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership in the US; we are the only country in the world with more privately-owned guns than private citizens to own them—more guns than people. (We also have by far the most military weapons as well, but that’s a somewhat different issue.)

What should we be doing about this? I think at this point it’s clear that simply sitting back and hoping it goes away on its own is not working. There is a widespread fear that engaging with bizarre theories simply grants them attention, but I think we have no serious alternative. They aren’t going to disappear if we simply ignore them.

That still leaves the question of how to engage. Simply arguing with their claims directly and presenting mainstream scientific evidence appears to be remarkably ineffective. They will simply dismiss the credibility of the scientific evidence, often by exaggerating genuine flaws in scientific institutions. The journal system is broken? Big Pharma has far too much influence? Established ideas take too long to become unseated? All true. But that doesn’t mean that magic beans cure cancer.

A more effective—not easy, and certainly not infallible, but more effective—strategy seems to be to look deeper into why people say the things they do. I emphasize the word ‘say’ here, because it often seems to be the case that people don’t really believe in conspiracy theories the way they believe in ordinary facts. It’s more the mythology mindset.

Rather than address the claims directly, you need to address the person making the claims. Before getting into any substantive content, you must first build rapport and show empathy—a process some call pre-suasion. Then, rather than seeking out the evidence that support their claims—as there will be virtually none—try to find out what emotional need the conspiracy theory satisfies for them: How does it help them make sense of the terrifying chaos of the world? How does professing belief in something that initially seems absurd and horrific actually make the world seem more orderly and secure in their mind?


For instance, consider the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. At face value, this is horrifying: The US government is so evil it was prepared to launch an attack on our own soil, against our own citizens, in order to justify starting a war in another country? Against such a government, I think violent insurrection is the only viable response. But if you consider it from another perspective, it makes the world less terrifying: At least, there is someone in control. An attack like 9/11 means that the world is governed by chaos: Even we in the seemingly-impregnable fortress of American national security are in fact vulnerable to random attacks by small groups of dedicated fanatics. In the conspiracist vision of the world, the US government becomes a terrible villain; but at least the world is governed by powerful, orderly forces—not random chaos.

Or consider one of the most widespread (and, to be fair, one of the least implausible) conspiracy theories: That JFK was assassinated not by a single fanatic, but by an organized agency—the KGB, or the CIA, or the Vice President. In the real world, the President of the United States—the most powerful man on the entire planet—can occasionally be felled by a single individual who is dedicated enough and lucky enough. In the conspiracist world, such a powerful man can only be killed by someone similarly powerful. The world may be governed by an evil elite—but at least it is governed. The rules may be evil, but at least there are rules.

Understanding this can give you some sympathy for people who profess conspiracies: They are struggling to cope with the pain of living in a chaotic, unpredictable, disorderly world. They cannot deny that terrible events happen, but by attributing them to unseen, organized forces, they can at least believe that those terrible events are part of some kind of orderly plan.


At the same time, you must constantly guard against seeming arrogant or condescending. (This is where I usually fail; it’s so hard for me to take these ideas seriously.) You must present yourself as open-minded and interested in speaking in good faith. If they sense that you aren’t taking them seriously, people will simply shut down and refuse to talk any further.

It’s also important to recognize that most people with bizarre beliefs aren’t simply gullible. It isn’t that they believe whatever anyone tells them. On the contrary, they seem to suffer from misplaced skepticism: They doubt the credible sources and believe the unreliable ones. They are hyper-aware of the genuine problems with mainstream sources, and yet somehow totally oblivious to the far more glaring failures of the sources they themselves trust.

Moreover, you should never expect to change someone’s worldview in a single conversation. That simply isn’t how human beings work. The only times I have ever seen anyone completely change their opinion on something in a single sitting involved mathematical proofs—showing a proper proof really can flip someone’s opinion all by itself. Yet even scientists working in their own fields of expertise generally require multiple sources of evidence, combined over some period of time, before they will truly change their minds.

Your goal, then, should not be to convince someone that their bizarre belief is wrong. Rather, convince them that some of the sources they trust are just as unreliable as the ones they doubt. Or point out some gaps in the story they hadn’t considered. Or offer an alternative account of events that explains the outcome without requiring the existence of a secret evil cabal. Don’t try to tear down the entire wall all at once; chip away at it, one little piece at a time—and one day, it will crumble.

Hopefully if we do this enough, we can make useful political conversation possible.

Mindful of mindfulness

PNRJ cognitive science, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 25 JDN 2459848

I have always had trouble with mindfulness meditation.

On the one hand, I find it extremely difficult to do: if there is one thing my mind is good at, it’s wandering. (I think in addition to my autism spectrum disorder, I may also have a smidgen of ADHD. I meet some of the criteria at least.) And it feels a little too close to a lot of practices that are obviously mumbo-jumbo nonsense, like reiki, qigong, and reflexology.

On the other hand, mindfulness meditation has been empirically shown to have large beneficial effects in study after study after study. It helps with not only depression, but also chronic pain. It even seems to improve immune function. The empirical data is really quite clear at this point. The real question is how it does all this.

And I am, above all, an empiricist. I bow before the data. So, when my new therapist directed me to an app that’s supposed to train me to do mindfulness meditation, I resolved that I would in fact give it a try.

Honestly, as of writing this, I’ve been using it less than a week; it’s probably too soon to make a good evaluation. But I did have some prior experience with mindfulness, so this was more like getting back into it rather than starting from scratch. And, well, I think it might actually be working. I feel a bit better than I did when I started.

If it is working, it doesn’t seem to me that the mechanism is greater focus or mental control. I don’t think I’ve really had time to meaningfully improve those skills, and to be honest, I have a long way to go there. The pre-recorded voice samples keep telling me it’s okay if my mind wanders, but I doubt the app developers planned for how much my mind can wander. When they suggest I try to notice each wandering thought, I feel like saying, “Do you want the complete stack trace, or just the final output? Because if I wrote down each terminal branch alone, my list would say something like ‘fusion reactors, ice skating, Napoleon’.”

I think some of the benefit is simply parasympathetic activation, that is, being more relaxed. I am, and have always been, astonishingly bad at relaxing. It’s not that I lack positive emotions: I can enjoy, I can be excited. Nor am I incapable of low-arousal emotions: I can get bored, I can be lethargic. I can also experience emotions that are negative and high-arousal: I can be despondent or outraged. But I have great difficulty reaching emotional states which are simultaneously positive and low-arousal, i.e. states of calm and relaxation. (See here for more on the valence/arousal model of emotional states.) To some extent I think this is due to innate personality: I am high in both Conscientiousness and Neuroticism, which basically amounts to being “high-strung“. But mindfulness has taught me that it’s also trainable, to some extent; I can get better at relaxing, and I already have.

And even more than that, I think the most important effect has been reminding and encouraging me to practice self-compassion. I am an intensely compassionate person, toward other people; but toward myself, I am brutal, demanding, unforgiving, even cruel. My internal monologue says terrible things to me that I wouldnever say to anyone else. (Or at least, not to anyone else who wasn’t a mass murderer or something. I wouldn’t feel particularly bad about saying “You are a failure, you are broken, you are worthless, you are unworthy of love” to, say, Josef Stalin. And yes, these are in fact things my internal monologue has said to me.) Whenever I am unable to master a task I consider important, my automatic reaction is to denigrate myself for failing; I think the greatest benefit I am getting from practicing meditation is being encouraged to fight that impulse. That is, the most important value added by the meditation app has not been in telling me how to focus on my own breathing, but in reminding me to forgive myself when I do it poorly.

If this is right (as I said, it’s probably too soon to say), then we may at last be able to explain why meditation is simultaneously so weird and tied to obvious mumbo-jumbo on the one hand, and also so effective on the other. The actual function of meditation is to be a difficult cognitive task which doesn’t require outside support.

And then the benefit actually comes from doing this task, getting slowly better at it—feeling that sense of progress—and also from learning to forgive yourself when you do it badly. The task probably could have been anything: Find paths through mazes. Fill out Sudoku grids. Solve integrals. But these things are hard to do without outside resources: It’s basically impossible to draw a maze without solving it in the process. Generating a Sudoku grid with a unique solution is at least as hard as solving one (which is NP-complete). By the time you know a given function is even integrable over elementary functions, you’ve basically integrated it. But focusing on your breath? That you can do anywhere, anytime. And the difficulty of controlling all your wandering thoughts may be less a bug than a feature: It’s precisely because the task is so difficult that you will have reason to practice forgiving yourself for failure.

The arbitrariness of the task itself is how you can get a proliferation of different meditation techniques, and a wide variety of mythologies and superstitions surrounding them all, but still have them all be about equally effective in the end. Because it was never really about the task at all. It’s about getting better and failing gracefully.

It probably also helps that meditation is relaxing. Solving integrals might not actually work as well as focusing on your breath, even if you had a textbook handy full of integrals to solve. Breathing deeply is calming; integration by parts isn’t. But lots of things are calming, and some things may be calming to one person but not to another.

It is possible that there is yet some other benefit to be had directly via mindfulness itself. If there is, it will surely have more to do with anterior cingulate activation than realignment of qi. But such a particular benefit isn’t necessary to explain the effectiveness of meditation, and indeed would be hard-pressed to explain why so many different kinds of meditation all seem to work about as well.

Because it was never about what you’re doing—it was always about how.

I finally have a published paper.

PNRJ personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 12 JDN 2459773

Here it is, my first peer-reviewed publication: “Imperfect Tactic Collusion and Asymmetric Price Transmission”, in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Due to the convention in economics that authors are displayed alphabetically, I am listed third of four, and will be typically collapsed into “Bulutay et. al.”. I don’t actually think it should be “Julius et. al.”; I think Dave Hales did the most important work, and I wanted it to be “Hales et. al.”; but anything non-alphabetical is unusual in economics, and it would have taken a strong justification to convince the others to go along with it. This is a very stupid norm (and I attribute approximately 20% of Daron Acemoglu’s superstar status to it), but like any norm, it is difficult to dislodge.

I thought I would feel different when this day finally came. I thought I would feel joy, or at least satisfaction. I had been hoping that satisfaction would finally spur me forward in resubmitting my single-author paper, “Experimental Public Goods Games with Progressive Taxation”, so I could finally get a publication that actually does have “Julius (2022)” (or, at this rate, 2023, 2024…?). But that motivating satisfaction never came.

I did feel some vague sense of relief: Thank goodness, this ordeal is finally over and I can move on. But that doesn’t have the same motivating force; it doesn’t make me want to go back to the other papers I can now hardly bear to look at.

This reaction (or lack thereof?) could be attributed to circumstances: I have been through a lot lately. I was already overwhelmed by finishing my dissertation and going on the job market, and then there was the pandemic, and I had to postpone my wedding, and then when I finally got a job we had to suddenly move abroad, and then it was awful finding a place to live, and then we actually got married (which was lovely, but still stressful), and it took months to get my medications sorted with the NHS, and then I had a sudden resurgence of migraines which kept me from doing most of my work for weeks, and then I actually caught COVID and had to deal with that for a few weeks too. So it really isn’t too surprising that I’d be exhausted and depressed after all that.

Then again, it could be something deeper. I didn’t feel this way about my wedding. That genuinely gave me the joy and satisfaction that I had been expecting; I think it really was the best day of my life so far. So it isn’t as if I’m incapable of these feelings under my current state.

Rather, I fear that I am becoming more permanently disillusioned with academia. Now that I see how the sausage is made, I am no longer so sure I want to be one of the people making it. Publishing that paper didn’t feel like I had accomplished something, or even made some significant contribution to human knowledge. In fact, the actual work of publication was mostly done by my co-authors, because I was too overwhelmed by the job market at the time. But what I did have to do—and what I’ve tried to do with my own paper—felt like a miserable, exhausting ordeal.

More and more, I’m becoming convinced that a single experiment tells us very little, and we are being asked to present each one as if it were a major achievement when it’s more like a single brick in a wall.

But whatever new knowledge our experiments may have gleaned, that part was done years ago. We could have simply posted the draft as a working paper on the web and moved on, and the world would know just as much and our lives would have been a lot easier.

Oh, but then it would not have the imprimatur of peer review! And for our careers, that means absolutely everything. (Literally, when they’re deciding tenure, nothing else seems to matter.) But for human knowledge, does it really mean much? The more referee reports I’ve read, the more arbitrary they feel to me. This isn’t an objective assessment of scientific merit; it’s the half-baked opinion of a single randomly chosen researcher who may know next to nothing about the topic—or worse, have a vested interest in defending a contrary paradigm.

Yes, of course, what gets through peer review is of considerably higher quality than any randomly-selected content on the Internet. (The latter can be horrifically bad.) But is this not also true of what gets submitted for peer review? In fact, aren’t many blogs written by esteemed economists (say, Krugman? Romer? Nate Silver?) of considerably higher quality as well, despite having virtually none of the gatekeepers? I think Krugman’s blog is nominally edited by the New York Times, and Silver has a whole staff at FiveThirtyEight (they’re hiring, in fact!), but I’m fairly certain Romer just posts whatever he wants like I do. Of course, they had to establish their reputations (Krugman and Romer each won a Nobel). But still, it seems like maybe peer-review isn’t doing the most important work here.

Even blogs by far less famous economists (e.g. Miles Kimball, Brad DeLong) are also very good, and probably contribute more to advancing the knowledge of the average person than any given peer-reviewed paper, simply because they are more readable and more widely read. What we call “research” means going from zero people knowing a thing to maybe a dozen people knowing it; “publishing” means going from a dozen to at most a thousand; to go from a thousand to a billion, we call that “education”.

They all matter, of course; but I think we tend to overvalue research relative to education. A world where a few people know something is really not much better than a world where nobody does, while a world where almost everyone knows something can be radically superior. And the more I see just how far behind the cutting edge of research most economists are—let alone most average people—the more apparent it becomes to me that we are investing far too much in expanding that cutting edge (and far, far too much in gatekeeping who gets to do that!) and not nearly enough in disseminating that knowledge to humanity.

I think maybe that’s why finally publishing a paper felt so anticlimactic for me. I know that hardly anyone will ever actually read the damn thing. Just getting to this point took far more effort than it should have; dozens if not hundreds of hours of work, months of stress and frustration, all to satisfy whatever arbitrary criteria the particular reviewers happened to use so that we could all clear this stupid hurdle and finally get that line on our CVs. (And we wonder why academics are so depressed?) Far from being inspired to do the whole process again, I feel as if I have finally emerged from the torture chamber and may at last get some chance for my wounds to heal.

Even publishing fiction was not this miserable. Don’t get me wrong; it was miserable, especially for me, as I hate and fear rejection to the very core of my being in a way most people do not seem to understand. But there at least the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the process is almost universally acknowledged. Agents and editors don’t speak of your work being “flawed” or “wrong”; they don’t even say it’s “unimportant” or “uninteresting”. They say it’s “not a good fit” or “not what we’re looking for right now”. (Journal editors sometimes make noises like that too, but there’s always a subtext of “If this were better science, we’d have taken it.”) Unlike peer reviewers, they don’t come back with suggestions for “improvements” that are often pointless or utterly infeasible.

And unlike peer reviewers, fiction publishers acknowledge their own subjectivity and that of the market they serve. Nobody really thinks that Fifty Shades of Grey was good in any deep sense; but it was popular and successful, and that’s all the publisher really cares about. As a result, failing to be the next Fifty Shades of Grey ends up stinging a lot less than failing to be the next article in American Economic Review. Indeed, I’ve never had any illusions that my work would be popular among mainstream economists. But I once labored under the belief that it would be more important that it is true; and I guess I now consider that an illusion.

Moreover, fiction writers understand that rejection hurts; I’ve been shocked how few academics actually seem to. Nearly every writing conference I’ve ever been to has at least one seminar on dealing with rejection, often several; at academic conferences, I’ve literally never seen one. There seems to be a completely different mindset among academics—at least, the successful, tenured ones—about the process of peer review, what it means, even how it feels. When I try to talk with my mentors about the pain of getting rejected, they just… don’t get it. They offer me guidance on how to deal with anger at rejection, when that is not at all what I feel—what I feel is utter, hopeless, crushing despair.

There is a type of person who reacts to rejection with anger: Narcissists. (Look no further than the textbook example, Donald Trump.) I am coming to fear that I’m just not narcissistic enough to be a successful academic. I’m not even utterly lacking in narcissism: I am almost exactly average for a Millennial on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I score fairly high on Authority and Superiority (I consider myself a good leader and a highly competent individual) but very low on Exploitativeness and Self-Sufficiency (I don’t like hurting people and I know no man is an island). Then again, maybe I’m just narcissistic in the wrong way: I score quite low on “grandiose narcissism”, but relatively high on “vulnerable narcissism”. I hate to promote myself, but I find rejection devastating. This combination seems to be exactly what doesn’t work in academia. But it seems to be par for the course among writers and poets. Perhaps I have the mind of a scientist, but I have the soul of a poet. (Send me through the wormhole! Please? Please!?)

Commitment and sophistication

PNRJ cognitive science, heuristics and biases , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 13 JDN 2459652

One of the central insights of cognitive and behavioral economics is that understanding the limitations of our own rationality can help us devise mechanisms to overcome those limitations—that knowing we are not perfectly rational can make us more rational. The usual term for this is a somewhat vague one: behavioral economists generally call it simply sophistication.

For example, suppose that you are short-sighted and tend to underestimate the importance of the distant future. (This is true of most of us, to greater or lesser extent.)

It’s rational to consider the distant future less important than the present—things change in the meantime, and if we go far enough you may not even be around to see it. In fact, rationality alone doesn’t even say how much you should discount any given distance in the future. But most of us are inconsistent about our attitudes toward the future: We exhibit dynamic inconsistency.

For instance, suppose I ask you today whether you would like $100 today or $102 tomorrow. It is likely you’ll choose $100 today. But if I ask you whether you would like $100 365 days from now or $102 366 days from now, you’ll almost certainly choose the $102.


This means that if I asked you the second question first, then waited a year and asked you the first question, you’d change your mind—that’s inconsistent. Whichever choice is better shouldn’t systematically change over time. (It might happen to change, if your circumstances changed in some unexpected way. But on average it shouldn’t change.) Indeed, waiting a day for an extra $2 is typically going to be worth it; 2% daily interest is pretty hard to beat.

Now, suppose you have some option to make a commitment, something that will bind you to your earlier decision. It could be some sort of punishment for deviating from your earlier choice, some sort of reward for keeping to the path, or, in the most extreme example, a mechanism that simply won’t let you change your mind. (The literally classic example of this is Odysseus having his crew tie him to the mast so he can listen to the Sirens.)

If you didn’t know that your behavior was inconsistent, you’d never want to make such a commitment. You don’t expect to change your mind, and if you do change your mind, it would be because your circumstances changed in some unexpected way—in which case changing your mind would be the right thing to do. And if your behavior wasn’t inconsistent, this reasoning would be quite correct: No point in committing when you have less information.

But if you know that your behavior is inconsistent, you can sometimes improve the outcome for yourself by making a commitment. You can force your own behavior into consistency, even though you will later be tempted to deviate from your plan.

Yet there is a piece missing from this account, often not clearly enough stated: Why should we trust the version of you that has a year to plan over the version of you that is making the decision today? What’s the difference between those two versions of you that makes them inconsistent, and why is one more trustworthy than the other?

The biggest difference is emotional. You don’t really feel $100 a year from now, so you can do the math and see that 2% daily interest is pretty darn good. But $100 today makes you feel something—excitement over what you might buy, or relief over a bill you can now pay. (Actually that’s one of the few times when it would be rational to take $100 today: If otherwise you’re going to miss a deadline and pay a late fee.) And that feeling about $102 tomorrow just isn’t as strong.

We tend to think that our emotional selves and our rational selves are in conflict, and so we expect to be more rational when we are less emotional. There is some truth to this—strong emotions can cloud our judgments and make us behave rashly.

Yet this is only one side of the story. We also need emotions to be rational. There is a condition known as flat affect, often a symptom of various neurological disorders, in which emotional reactions are greatly blunted or even non-existent. People with flat affect aren’t more rational—they just do less. In the worst cases, they completely lose their ability to be motivated to do things and become outright inert, known as abulia.

Emotional judgments are often less accurate than thoughtfully reasoned arguments, but they are also much faster—and that’s why we have them. In many contexts, particularly when survival is at stake, doing something pretty well right away is often far better than waiting long enough to be sure you’ll get the right answer. Running away from a loud sound that turns out to be nothing is a lot better than waiting to carefully determine whether that sound was really a tiger—and finding that it was.

With this in mind, the cases where we should expected commitment to be effective are those that are unfamiliar, not only on an individual level, but in an evolutionary sense. I have no doubt that experienced stock traders can develop certain intuitions that make them better at understanding financial markets than randomly chosen people—but they still systematically underperform simple mathematical models, likely because finance is just so weird from an evolutionary perspective. So when deciding whether to accept some amount of money m1 at time t1 and some other amount of money m2 at time t2, your best bet is really to just do the math.

But this may not be the case for many other types of decisions. Sometimes how you feel in the moment really is the right signal to follow. Committing to work at your job every day may seem responsible, ethical, rational—but if you hate your job when you’re actually doing it, maybe it really isn’t how you should be spending your life. Buying a long-term gym membership to pressure yourself to exercise may seem like a good idea, but if you’re miserable every time you actually go to the gym, maybe you really need to be finding a better way to integrate exercise into your lifestyle.

There are no easy answers here. We can think of ourselves as really being made of two (if not more) individuals: A cold, calculating planner who looks far into the future, and a heated, emotional experiencer who lives in the moment. There’s a tendency to assume that the planner is our “true self”, the one we should always listen to, but this is wrong; we are both of those people, and a life well-lived requires finding the right balance between their conflicting desires.

Love is rational

PNRJ cognitive science , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457066 PST 15:29.

Since I am writing this the weekend of Valentine’s Day (actually by the time it is published it will be Valentine’s Day) and sitting across from my boyfriend, it seems particularly appropriate that today’s topic should be love. As I am writing it is in fact Darwin Day, so it is fitting that evolution will be a major topic as well.

Usually we cognitive economists are the ones reminding neoclassical economists that human beings are not always rational. Today however I must correct a misconception in the opposite direction: Love is rational, or at least it can be, should be, and typically is.

Lately I’ve been reading The Logic of Life which actually makes much the same point, about love and many other things. I had expected it to be a dogmatic defense of economic rationality—published in 2008 no less, which would make it the scream of a dying paradigm as it carries us all down with it—but I was in fact quite pleasantly surprised. The book takes a nuanced position on rationality very similar to my own, and actually incorporates many of the insights from neuroeconomics and cognitive economics. I think Harford would basically agree with me that human beings are 90% rational (but woe betide the other 10%).

We have this romantic (Romantic?) notion in our society that love is not rational, it is “beyond” rationality somehow. “Love is blind”, they say; and this is often used as a smug reply to the notion that rationality is the proper guide to live our lives.

The argument would seem to follow: “Love is not rational, love is good, therefore rationality is not always good.”

But then… the argument would follow? What do you mean, follow? Follow logically? Follow rationally? Something is clearly wrong if we’ve constructed a rational argument intended to show that we should not live our lives by rational arguments.

And the problem of course is the premise that love is not rational. Whatever made you say that?

It’s true that love is not directly volitional, not in the way that it is volitional to move your arm upward or close your eyes or type the sentence “Jackdaws ate my big sphinx of quartz.” You don’t exactly choose to love someone, weighing the pros and cons and making a decision the way you might choose which job offer to take or which university to attend.

But then, you don’t really choose which university you like either, now do you? You choose which to attend. But your enjoyment of that university is not a voluntary act. And similarly you do in fact choose whom to date, whom to marry. And you might well consider the pros and cons of such decisions. So the difference is not as large as it might at first seem.

More importantly, to say that our lives should be rational is not the same as saying they should be volitional. You simply can’t live your life as completely volitional, no matter how hard you try. You simply don’t have the cognitive resources to maintain constant awareness of every breath, every heartbeat. Yet there is nothing irrational about breathing or heartbeats—indeed they are necessary for survival and thus a precondition of anything rational you might ever do.

Indeed, in many ways it is our subconscious that is the most intelligent part of us. It is not as flexible as our conscious mind—that is why our conscious mind is there—but the human subconscious is unmatched in its efficiency and reliability among literally all known computational systems in the known universe. Walk across a room and it will solve reverse kinematics in real time. Throw a ball and it will solve three-dimensional nonlinear differential equations as well. Look at a familiar face and it will immediately identify it among a set of hundreds of faces with near-perfect accuracy regardless of the angle, lighting conditions, or even hairstyle. To see that I am not exaggerating the immense difficulty of these tasks, look at how difficult it is to make robots that can walk on two legs or throw balls. Face recognition is so difficult that it is still an unsolved problem with an extensive body of ongoing research.

And love, of course, is the subconscious system that has been most directly optimized by natural selection. Our very survival has depended upon it for millions of years. Indeed, it’s amazing how often it does seem to fail given those tight optimization constraints; I think this is for two reasons. First, natural selection optimizes for inclusive fitness, which is not the same thing as optimizing for happiness—what’s good for your genes may not be good for you per se. Many of the ways that love hurts us seem to be based around behaviors that probably did on average spread more genes on the African savannah. Second, the task of selecting an optimal partner is so mind-bogglingly complex that even the most powerful computational system in the known universe still can only do it so well. Imagine trying to construct a formal decision model that would tell you whom you should marry—all the variables you’d need to consider, the cost of sampling each of those variables sufficiently, the proper weightings on all the different terms in the utility function. Perhaps the wonder is that love is as rational as it is.

Indeed, love is evidence-based—and when it isn’t, this is cause for concern. The evidence is most often presented in small ways over long periods of time—a glance, a kiss, a gift, a meeting canceled to stay home and comfort you. Some ways are larger—a career move postponed to keep the family together, a beautiful wedding, a new house. We aren’t formally calculating the Bayesian probability at each new piece of evidence—though our subconscious brains might be, and whatever they’re doing the results aren’t far off from that mathematical optimum.

The notion that you will never “truly know” if others love you is no more epistemically valid or interesting than the notion that you will never “truly know” if your shirt is grue instead of green or if you are a brain in a vat. Perhaps we’ve been wrong about gravity all these years, and on April 27, 2016 it will suddenly reverse direction! No, it won’t, and I’m prepared to literally bet the whole world on that (frankly I’m not sure I have a choice). To be fair, the proposition that your spouse of twenty years or your mother loves you is perhaps not that certain—but it’s pretty darn certain. Perhaps the proper comparison is the level of certainty that climate change is caused by human beings, or even less, the level of certainty that your car will not suddenly veer off the road and kill you. The latter is something that actually happens—but we all drive every day assuming it won’t. By the time you marry someone, you can and should be that certain that they love you.

Love without evidence is bad love. The sort of unrequited love that builds in secret based upon fleeing glimpses, hours of obsessive fantasy, and little or no interaction with its subject isn’t romantic—it’s creepy and psychologically unhealthy. The extreme of that sort of love is what drove John Hinckley Jr. to shoot Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster.

I don’t mean to make you feel guilty if you have experienced such a love—most of us have at one point or another—but it disgusts me how much our society tries to elevate that sort of love as the “true love” to which we should all aspire. We encourage people—particularly teenagers—to conceal their feelings for a long time and then release them in one grand surprise gesture of affection, which is just about the opposite of what you should actually be doing. (Look at Love Actually, which is just about the opposite of what its title says.) I think a great deal of strife in our society would be eliminated if we taught our children how to build relationships gradually over time instead of constantly presenting them with absurd caricatures of love that no one can—or should—follow.

I am pleased to see that our cultural norms on that point seem to be changing. A corporation as absurdly powerful as Disney is both an influence upon and a barometer of our social norms, and the trope in the most recent Disney films (like Frozen and Maleficent) is that true love is not the fiery passion of love at first sight, but the deep bond between family members that builds over time. This is a much healthier concept of love, though I wouldn’t exclude romantic love entirely. Romantic love can be true love, but only by building over time through a similar process.

Perhaps there is another reason people are uncomfortable with the idea that love is rational; by definition, rational behaviors respond to incentives. And since we tend to conceive of incentives as a purely selfish endeavor, this would seem to imply that love is selfish, which seems somewhere between painfully cynical and outright oxymoronic.

But while love certainly does carry many benefits for its users—being in love will literally make you live longer, by quite a lot, an effect size comparable to quitting smoking or exercising twice a week—it also carries many benefits for its recipients as well. Love is in fact the primary means by which evolution has shaped us toward altruism; it is the love for our family and our tribe that makes us willing to sacrifice so much for them. Not all incentives are selfish; indeed, an incentive is really just something that motivates you to action. If you could truly convince me that a given action I took would have even a reasonable chance of ending world hunger, I would do almost anything to achieve it; I can scarcely imagine a greater incentive, even though I would be harmed and the benefits would incur to people I have never met.

Love evolved because it advanced the fitness of our genes, of course. And this bothers many people; it seems to make our altruism ultimately just a different form of selfishness I guess, selfishness for our genes instead of ourselves. But this is a genetic fallacy, isn’t it? Yes, evolution by natural selection is a violent process, full of death and cruelty and suffering (as Darwin said, red in tooth and claw); but that doesn’t mean that its outcome—namely ourselves—is so irredeemable. We are, in fact, altruistic, regardless of where that altruism came from. The fact that it advanced our genes can actually be comforting in a way, because it reminds us that the universe is nonzero-sum and benefiting others does not have to mean harming ourselves.

One question I like to ask when people suggest that some scientific fact undermines our moral status in this way is: “Well, what would you prefer?” If the causal determinism of neural synapses undermines our free will, then what should we have been made of? Magical fairy dust? If we were, fairy dust would be a real phenomenon, and it would obey laws of nature, and you’d just say that the causal determinism of magical fairy dust undermines free will all over again. If the fact that our altruistic emotions evolved by natural selection to advance our inclusive fitness makes us not truly altruistic, then where should have altruism come from? A divine creator who made us to love one another? But then we’re just following our programming! You can always make this sort of argument, which either means that live is necessarily empty of meaning, that no possible universe could ever assuage our ennui—or, what I believe, that life’s meaning does not come from such ultimate causes. It is not what you are made of or where you come from that defines what you are. We are best defined by what we do.

It seems to depend how you look at it: Romantics are made of stardust and the fabric of the cosmos, while cynics are made of the nuclear waste expelled in the planet-destroying explosions of dying balls of fire. Romantics are the cousins of all living things in one grand family, while cynics are apex predators evolved from millions of years of rape and murder. Both of these views are in some sense correct—but I think the real mistake is in thinking that they are incompatible. Human beings are both those things, and more; we are capable of both great compassion and great cruelty—and also great indifference. It is a mistake to think that only the dark sides—or for that matter only the light sides—of us are truly real.

Love is rational; love responds to incentives; love is an evolutionary adaptation. Love binds us together; love makes us better; love leads us to sacrifice for one another.

Love is, above all, what makes us not infinite identical psychopaths.