"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

"When I see a surprising finding, my default is not to believe it. Twelve years ago, my default was to believe anything that was surprising."

Said Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in behavioral economics, and who now says the effects of "social priming" "cannot be as large and as robust" as he had assumed.

Quoted in "The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers/When Francesca Gino, a rising academic star, was accused of falsifying data — about how to stop dishonesty — it didn’t just torch her career. It inflamed a crisis in behavioral science" (NYT).

The bloggers are the Data Colada bloggers, who have been checking the evidence and finding problems.

Why was Kahneman so credulous in the first place? He seems to be admitting that he wanted to believe cool stuff, so he just did. 

How screwy was this field?

"[S]ince around 1980, English speakers have been more given to writing about feelings than writing from a more scientific perspective."

"From around 1850 on, [researchers] found, the frequency of words such as 'technology,' 'result,' 'assuming,' 'pressure,' 'math,' 'medicine,' 'percent,' 'unit' and 'fact' has gone down while the frequency of words such as 'spirit,' 'imagine,' 'hunch,' 'smell,' 'soul,' 'believe,' 'feel,' 'fear' and 'sense' has gone up. The authors associate their observations with what Daniel Kahneman has labeled the intuition-reliant 'thinking fast' as opposed to the more deliberative 'thinking slow.' In a parallel development, the authors show that the use of plural pronouns such as 'we' and 'they' has dropped somewhat since 1980 while the use of singular pronouns has gone up. They see this as evidence that more of us are about ourselves and how we feel as individuals — the subjective — than having the more collective orientation that earlier English seemed to reflect."

Writes John McWhorter, in "Don’t, Like, Overanalyze Language" (NYT), discussing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purported to detect a "surge of post-truth political argumentation" and a "historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and — inextricably linked — between the rational and the emotional.” 

"The speech of rationalists is heavy on the vernacular, often derived from programming language: 'updating your priors' (keeping an open mind), 'steel-manning' (arguing with the strongest version of whatever point your opponent is making)..."

"... double-cruxing' (trying to get to the root of a disagreement).... In her book, Galef argues for what she calls 'scout mindset,' which she contrasts with 'soldier mindset.' The idea is that evolution has wired our minds to be soldiers (focused on winning) instead of scouts (focused on ensuring our mental maps accurately reflect the territory of reality). To adopt a scout mindset is to resist falling prey to 'motivated reasoning,' in which we distort our thoughts to achieve a desired outcome."

From "The Tech Elite’s Favorite Pop Intellectual Julia Galef on bringing the rationalist movement to the mainstream" (NY Magazine).

The book is "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't Hardcover." My link goes to Amazon, where there's this graphic (click to enlarge and clarify_:

I'd love to see  more "scouts," but I'm afraid this clear picture may make some rational people chose to be "soldiers"! I believe I've always been on the scout side, but if I'd understood this division early on, I would have asked the "Is it true?" question about whether it's better in life to be a "scout," and I might have said no, taken a side, and fought. I have no idea if Galef discusses that problem!

FROM THE EMAIL: Tim writes:

Engineers are trained to have a scout mindset. Never mind what we want to be true, what IS true. Seek out the correct answer and then revise your assumptions. Which is why 2/5ths are conservative, 2/5ths are independent, and only 1/5 is leftist. Because there is a right (sometimes best, but always accurate) and wrong answer. And once you figure out the right answer, you stop believing in the false answers. It is why we have not built any more Tacoma Narrows bridges. There was a right answer, and it was found. It is how the Brooklyn Bridge was built starting 150 years ago. I may not be the engineer that Washington Roebling was, but if I get hit with a clue bat often enough, I figure out the correct answer.

Yes, if the scout mentality naturally appeals to you, there are some careers that will fit most comfortably. 

AND: Geoff emails:

If everyone were a scout, tens of thousands of people in Silicon Valley would stop getting up every morning to work 10 hour days to implement the visions of "thought leaders" like Steve Jobs and would do their own thing instead. This is why Silicon Valley likes H1Bs from countries where obedience to the hierarchy is a social value. It takes a special kind of self-regard to think of how lost your army would be without your scouting while blinding yourself to the fact that without your army's soldiering you would be dead. This is, of course, just another manifestation of the elite's self-separation from the world they presume to rule.

ALSO: I received email from 4 different readers who converged on the point that Galef is mischaracterizing soldiers:

1. A reader named Tytus writes: "There is a, quite famous, fight methodology developed by the military called OODA loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act).It is an approach of constantly updating your priors based on incoming information, resulting in increased agility, and, in effect, gaining advantage over even greater opposing forces. Such an approach seems very much scout-mindset-like. Sooo, I'm not sure about starting with the premise 'soldier' vs 'scout' and running with it, when the military was able to create such gems as OODA loop. 

2. A reader named John writes: "I was in the armed forces for seven years (four years navy, three in the army national guard). The military, as an institution, gave me more freedom to think for myself (and required it- they are big on individual initiative) than I ever have had since. It's the opposite of the closed-minded archetype depicted by Julia Galef. Soldiers, in my experience, are far more adaptable and flexible than your average office worker. They have to be because war requires it. If you can't adapt, the enemy will kill you. After every engagement or task, army units hold an after-action review, where soldiers and leaders describe in front of everyone what happened and what could have been done better. Everyone is included. It's not about criticism or blame. It's about learning from mistakes. I've never had another job where they did anything like that. There's a stereotype that soldiers are rigid and mindlessly follow orders. It's very far from the truth. I don't know what other word the author could have used. It's unfortunate she used soldiers as a foil for her pop psychology message. It's the opposite of what she is saying, which is to look at reality instead of a preconceived notion."

3. A reader named Eric wrote: "As a former soldier and S2 (intelligence staff officer) I am disturbed about the use of the words 'soldiers mindset.' Military intelligence is always aware of the possibility that any or all information may be false. The opposing forces are always trying to deceive you. Your own channels have misinformation due to stress or wishful, fearful, thinking from the provider. Every bit of information is evaluated as to the probablity of being true. And the are numerous decision points at which decisions must be made based on that best information available, knowing that it may be wrong. Soldiers use the Scouter mindset. I had trouble understanding those who felt that 'Bush lied.' Any politician should have known that the data on WMD may be wrong. And had the decency and courage to say that they made a mistake in believing the data, not 'Bush lied.' The congressional authorization for that war listed the 23 reasons-23 paragraphs in Part 1 beginning with 'Whereas.......' Vote based on the likelihood that the sum total of those 23 reasons are likely True.  "

4. A reader named Clyde wrote: "It's obvious that Ms. Galef has never been a soldier. Soldiers must be able to read the map correctly, and the sorts of things that she lists under the 'soldier mindset' (rationalizing, denial, self-deception, wishful thinking) are that exact sort of mistakes that will get people killed on a battlefield. I think that perhaps 'Politician Mindset' might be more accurate, since politicians are far more likely to ask themselves 'Can I believe this?' or 'Must I believe this?' They're also more likely to engage in the aforementioned rationalizing, denial, self deception and wishful thinking."

MORE: The commenter God of the Sea People writes: 

"It seems to me that soldier v. scout is a false dichotomy, and values are what differentiate the two. Some things are demonstrably, objectively true. It makes sense to have a scout mindset about quantifiable things. Values and opinions are not quantifiable, and are not necessarily less valid because of that. I'm willing to change my mind about something when there is sufficient evidence to warrant it, but I don't think evidence is typically sufficient to change what someone values, aside from direct life experience. Especially so, if the evidence comes in the form of a bunch of studies or articles written by people with obviously different values, and who are themselves in the soldier-posture of trying to 'win' over their adversaries. I can see how thinking of yourself as having a rational, scout mindset is appealing to people. However, after witnessing the way people weaponize scientific pronouncements (with little understanding or curiosity) solely to browbeat their friends and family in social media wrangling, I would be skeptical of anyone who uses this kind of framing in an attempt to convince me of anything." 

And Daniel wrote:

I have been a fan of Julia Galef for years. I love her careful demeanor and her extensive discussion on Bayesian reasoning. Her main idea is that the normal rational mindset only works in "one direction" in a series of unique choices. Her approach, and one I endorse, is that we actually make choices through a series of events. The Bayes Theorem essentially states that with each iteration, we add to our knowledge of the choice set and can use that information to revise (and resubmit) how we understand the choices before us. This means that the next set of choices will be informed by what we have learned a posteriori. 

As the research on decision making has shown, most of us are what Kahneman and Twerski called "naive statisticians," meaning that we actually do not make the necessary calculations to compute the best choice. We choose on our gut. The Bayes process is a bit more complicated and requires some basic computation; yet, the results reveal a topography of probability that is not apparent from a simple presentation of the initial choice set. 

For example, in the Wikipedia article on Bayes theorem, there is the classic case of Drug Testing. The Bayes process shows that the probability a person who tested positive for cannabis is actually a user is not very high (the solution given there is only 19-21 percent). Regardless of how Ms. Galef chooses to label it, the Bayes/Scout approach is a better model for rational process since it combines inductive and deductive models. Washington Blogger: I would guess that most people would consider themselves more scout than soldier. But I think, through my own anecdotals experiences most people are scouts about what they assume they don't know and soldiers about what they do, and the sad thing is, most people assume they know a whole lot more than they do. In this I am soldier. I have come to the conclusion that people are soldiers in action because they think they were scouts about the topic. 

In reality, we have a favored notion of what the terrain looks like and act under the assumption that we came by that knowledge through careful scouting. However, I have another thought on this. What if we are all looking at different maps? I wonder this because of the seemingly obvious problem with the idea that math is racist. (BTW, rationalism is racist under the current race paradigm.) One person is looking at a map of the streets and bus routes saying how could math be anything close to racist while another is looking at a map of the terrain and saying how could you totally miss the inherent racism of math? Is either map wrong? 

And Stuart wrote: 

Being a scout all sounds well and good, so why aren’t we all scouts? I have composed a short hymn to explain: 

Onward, Christian soldiers, transformed into scouts, 

With the loss of Jesus now beset by doubts! 

Christ, the royal Master, all but overthrown; 

Into ev’ry battle, each will go alone! 

Like a mighty army in a cul-de-sac; 

Brothers, we are trapped here helpless to attack; 

We are quite divided; frequently at odds, 

Arguing the doctrines, of out private gods. [Refrain]

"A study published in PLOS One suggests that the type of fiction a person reads affects their social cognition in different ways."

"Specifically, literary fiction was associated with increased attributional complexity and accuracy in predicting social attitudes, while popular fiction was linked to increased egocentric bias.... 'We distinguished between literary (e.g. Don Delillo, Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munroe) and popular fiction (e.g. Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Jackie Collins), and showed that it is by reading literary fiction that you enhance your mindreading abilities — you are better at inferring and representing what other people think, feel, their intentions, etc.'... [E]ngaging with literary fiction is thought to be active; it asks readers to search for meaning and produce their own perspectives and involves complex characters. Popular fiction, on the other hand, is passive; it provides meaning for the readers and is more concerned with plot than characters.... 'The literary type pushes us to assess others as unique individuals, to withhold judgment, to think deeply. It is important, but it can paralyze us in our attempt to navigate the social world. The popular type reinforces our socially-learned and culturally-shared schemas; a mode of thinking that roughly corresponds to what Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls System 1: fast, automatic, well-practiced... I submit that for a well functioning society a continuous tension between these two types of thinking styles – and thus both types of cultural products that, among other factors, promote them. Too much literary, and we disintegrate as a society. Too much popular, and we ossify. Neither scenario is auspicable.'"

 From "Reading literary versus popular fiction promotes different socio-cognitive processes, study suggests" (PsyPost).

I'm totally distracted by the question whether "auspicable" is a word. I can see that "auspicabile" is an Italian word, and the quote is from the author of the study, Emanuele Castano of the University of Trento and the National Research Council in Italy. There must be a word for a word that is newly slipping from one language into another. I accept it. I understand it. He could have said "auspicious," but it's charming that he didn't. These are the kind of thoughts I have, and they demonstrate that I'm the sort of person who, when reading fiction, pretty much only reads literary fiction. 

Before you gear up to call me a snob — I say, with my enhanced mindreading ability — I assure you that I just don't like popular fiction. I bought a novel the other day because I wanted to quote a particular passage — here — and I decided to try to read it. Here's how it began:

After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau. Rydell was a big quiet Tennessean with a sad shy grin, cheap sunglasses, and a walkie-talkie screwed permanently into one ear. 

“Paragon-Asia Dataflow,” Rydell said, around four in the morning, the two of them seated in a pair of huge old armchairs. Concrete beams overhead had been hand-painted to vaguely resemble blond oak. The chairs, like the rest of the furniture in the Chateau’s lobby, were oversized to the extent that whoever sat in them seemed built to a smaller scale.

Ugh! I hate writing like that. I instinctively loathe it. I could analyze why, but I didn't analyze it before shutting the book down and shuddering in horror. 

What exactly is my problem? It's not that it's too easy. It's what it's demanding that I do: 1. Remember the names of 2 guys I have no reason to care about and to remember numerous external details about them, 2. Remember some dull technological sounding name that has no meaning or promise of meaning, 3. Picture a shitload of interior decoration, 4. Expect insights on the level of large chairs make people look smaller than they otherwise would, 5. Steel myself for an onslaught of adjectives, especially in boring pairs like "big quiet," "sad shy," and "huge old." I get weary!

I am rereading a work of literary fiction that is, in fact, much easier to begin to read: 

Kumiko never came back that night. I stayed up until midnight, reading, listening to music, and waiting for her, but finally I gave up and went to bed. I fell asleep with the light on. It was six in the morning when I woke. The full light of day shone outside the window. Beyond the thin curtain, birds were chirping. There was no sign of my wife beside me in bed. The white pillow lay there, high and fluffy. As far as I could see, no head had rested on it during the night. Her freshly washed, neatly folded summer pajamas lay atop the night table. I had washed them. I had folded them. I turned off the lamp beside my pillow and took a deep breath, as if to regulate the flow of time.

Only one name to remember, and I'm eased into reasons to care about her and the unnamed narrator, her husband. My sensitivity is cared for. This author isn't yelling at me to get to work. 

"How Change Happens, Sunstein tells us, 'reflects decades of thinking.' This is another way of saying that it repeats decades of writing."

"To call it his 'new book' you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title. Broaching a new Sunstein these days, you already know what you’re going to get: a section on the joys and uses of cost-benefit analysis, some dashed-off thoughts about utilitarianism and negative freedoms, three or four chapters on nudges and their importance to the design of seatbelt policy, the primacy of Daniel Kahneman–style 'slow thinking' over intuition and moral heuristics, some tut-tutting about social media, a Learned Hand quote or two, and a few weak anecdotes about Sunstein’s time as President Obama’s regulator-in-chief, all delivered through a prose that combines the dreariest elements of Anglo-American analytical style with the proto-numerate giddiness of a libertarian undergrad who’s just made first contact with the production possibility frontier.... How Change Happens conforms so comically to type that it repurposes several passages of text from Sunstein’s previous books, even his most recent ones. Hence he tells us that people typically think that more words, on any given page, will end with -ing than have n as the second-to-last letter—an anecdote you would have already encountered had you made it as far as page 30 of The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He explains the Asian disease problem and provides a number of choice-framing analogies also found in The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He retells the David Foster Wallace water parable spotted on page eleven of On Freedom, published in February of this year...."

From "The Sameness of Cass Sunstein/His books keep pushing the same technocratic fixes. But today’s most pressing questions cannot be depoliticized" by Aaron Timms (The New Republic), which as you can tell from the subtitle, goes on to find more substantive problems than chatty repetition.

What does "Like an unstuck Mallarmé" mean? I had to look it up. Here (from "Blocked/Why do writers stop writing?" (The New Yorker, 2004)):

After the English Romantics, the next group of writers known for not writing were the French Symbolists. Mallarmé, “the Hamlet of writing,” as Roland Barthes called him, published some sixty poems in thirty-six years. Rimbaud, notoriously, gave up poetry at the age of nineteen. In the next generation, Paul Valéry wrote some poetry and prose in his early twenties and then took twenty years off, to study his mental processes. Under prodding from friends, he finally returned to publishing verse and in six years produced the three thin volumes that secured his fame. Then he gave up again. These fastidious Frenchmen, when they described the difficulties of writing, did not talk, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, about a metaphysical problem, or even a psychological problem. To them, the problem was with language: how to get past its vague, cliché-crammed character and arrive at the actual nature of experience. They needed a scalpel, they felt, and they were given a mallet.

So you get what Timms is saying about Sunstein.

System One and System Two — the brain's " two independent sytems for organizing knowledge."

Writes Freeman Dyson, explaining Daniel Kahneman's new book "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

System One is amazingly fast, allowing us to recognize faces and understand speech in a fraction of a second. It must have evolved from the ancient little brains that allowed our agile mammalian ancestors to survive in a world of big reptilian predators. Survival in the jungle requires a brain that makes quick decisions based on limited information. Intuition is the name we give to judgments based on the quick action of System One. It makes judgments and takes action without waiting for our conscious awareness to catch up with it. The most remarkable fact about System One is that it has immediate access to a vast store of memories that it uses as a basis for judgment. The memories that are most accessible are those associated with strong emotions, with fear and pain and hatred. The resulting judgments are often wrong, but in the world of the jungle it is safer to be wrong and quick than to be right and slow.

System Two is the slow process of forming judgments based on conscious thinking and critical examination of evidence. It appraises the actions of System One. It gives us a chance to correct mistakes and revise opinions. It probably evolved more recently than System One, after our primate ancestors became arboreal and had the leisure to think things over. An ape in a tree is not so much concerned with predators as with the acquisition and defense of territory. System Two enables a family group to make plans and coordinate activities. After we became human, System Two enabled us to create art and culture.

The question then arises: Why do we not abandon the error-prone System One and let the more reliable System Two rule our lives? Kahneman gives a simple answer to this question: System Two is lazy. To activate System Two requires mental effort. Mental effort is costly in time and also in calories. Precise measurements of blood chemistry show that consumption of glucose increases when System Two is active.

This is a fabulous article with lots of great stuff worth reading, but I just want to lock onto the point about consuming calories. Yes, we're lazy, but we do all manner of ridiculous things to consume calories and they tend to require overcoming laziness. If activating System Two is a substitute for trudging on a Stairmaster or whatever, maybe even lazy people will do it. Can we lose weight by thinking hard? I'll leave it to others to collect and analyze the evidence. That's just my instant, intuitive take on the matter.