On Friday I had the opportunity to hear author Dan Ariely speak. Dan is an MIT professor on tour to promote his new book, Predictably Irrational. He made a strong case that people are, as his book's title implies, not just irrational but irrational in predictable ways. Some interesting tidbits:
- The herd instinct extends even to one's current self being inclined to copy actions one previously made (in this case, you can think of all of the prior "yous" as the herd). People often remember what they did before in similar situations without necessarily remembering the rationale or the outcome, and this can contribute to behavioral inertia.
- People are more likely to cheat when the benefit is abstracted, even if only superficially. The example Dan gave was an experiment in which people had the ability to cheat and claim they deserved more money than they actually did. When the payoff was in cash, people only cheated a little, but when the payoff was in tokens which could be immediately redeemed for cash, people cheated a lot more. (As a side note, I also took this as evidence that the pervasiveness of cash has made people forget that it is just as abstracted as tokens are.)
- In another experiment, people were given arbitrary numbers from 1 to 100 and each was first asked if he/she would want to buy a given item at that number of dollars, and then later was given the opportunity to bid whatever he/she wanted to on the same item. There was about a 0.5 correlation between the initial arbitrary amount and the bid amount, whereas for rational agents there should've been no correlation. Provided that the methodology was sound, such a high correlation implies that people's perceptions of value are extremely easy to manipulate.
- In another experiment, Dan let students specify their own deadlines for a series of projects during the semester, but with substantial penalties for missing their self-imposed deadlines. A strictly rational student seemingly should choose the latest date allowed for all projects, but students who spread their deadlines evenly throughout the semester turned performed better. (There are obviously potential confounding factors here, which I'm assuming Dan dealt with.) This is an interesting example of a person wanting to do what's best for his/her future selves while not trusting those future selves to behave rationally and therefore imposing restrictions on his/her own future behavior.
If you like this kind of thing, you might want to check out Dan's book. You might also like overcomingbias.com, a great site run by ultra-smart guys Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky which covers similar ideas.

Here are my favorite quotes from David Seaman's "The Real Meaning of Life":

"If you spend your time on things you feel are meaningless, life will seem meaningless to you, and you will probably be pretty miserable and discontented. If you spend your time on things you feel are meaningful, then your life will be full of meaning, and you will be pretty happy, no matter what happens to you." - Michaela Stephens

"It is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but it is equally true that the overexamined life is also not worth living."
"There is always a blue sky above the clouds."
"The sunrise and sunsets in life are sublime, and every night we see that it is darkest just before the dawn, but on a deeper level we know that the sun never actually goes down - it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning around. Nature is nudging us, offering fresh evidence for hope and faith, love, and persistence against all appearances." - John P. Avlon

"Choose the meaning of life from one of the four listed below:
1. Life has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we attribute to it. Our task is to infuse our lives with whatever meaning will ensure we stay with it to the end.
2. The meaning of life is way beyond our grasp. Naturally, we do the best to grasp it, but it essentially ungraspable. Our life is a continual process of seeking that meaning, and living in the heart of that seeking. When we stop seeking we have either given up on it or decided that we have it figured out. In either case we are wrong, and life begins to die from there.
3. Life means love. Our lives are treasure hunts for love. When you find the treasure, you find yourself; you are love, you are life, you live.
4. Life is an experiment. Can we bear to live without meaning? If we can live without meaning, we will be destroyed. If we cannot live without meaning, we will destroy ourselves. If we find meaning, we will fight to live. If enough people find enough meaning, humankind will live. If a critical mass does not find meaning soon enough, the experiment will be complete, and humankind will be gone." - Wend Stewart

"We spend entirely too much time looking outside ourselves for meaning, for happiness, for gratification, for validation, or for anything we seek. The trick is to find all these things within first. Once we do that we find affirmation of all those things in the world around us." - Sjan Evardsson

"No one ever finds the meaning of life - they simply become suitably satisfied by love, children, or career, and these become the outcomes of the quest and human fulfillment of purpose... If you are ever consistently hounded by longings to uncover the meaning of life, it's you telling yourself that something is missing in your existence. Stop reading books about the subject - that's the equivalent of reading romance books when you're lonely. Get out and open yourself up to new experiences. You're being set up for an internal battle with your own desire for security." - Peter Davison

"For me, what it means to live are these things in this order: love, family, friends, fun, health, creativity, achievement, stability, purpose, variety, challenges, excitement." - Autumn Nazarian

"Give more than you take. Do your best to leave every situation better than you found it. Seek beauty in all its forms. Chase dreams. Watch sunsets. Endeavor to use more than 10 percent of your brain. Don't stifle your deep-from-the-gut, cleansing laughter. Take a moment to ponder the enormity of the universe, then admit to yourself that you can't possibly be the center. Breathe deeply. Swim into the dark water. Let yourself cry when your body tells you to. Love more. Delight in silliness. Don't be bitter. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive." - Katy Rhodes

"I have been alive 10,983 days. I can't help but think I've wasted around 10,900 of them.
By wasted, I mean I've spent the days hidden behind a desk at the office or slept until noon or wallowed in a bad mood. I've been ill, watched too much TV, or surfed the Internet for entirely too long. There are 10,900 days I don't remember.
But I could probably recall vividly around eighty-three different days of my life. These are the days I graduated from college, adopted my dog, Lucy, got married, played my first song on the guitar, or published my first poem. They also include the day my grandfather died and the day my first boyfriend broke my heart.
The days I remember aren't all happy or pleasant; they didn't always teach me a lesson or make me a better person. But they always, always made me feel something: excitement, pride, sadness, love, exhilaration. There is an overwhelming emotion tied to each of these days that makes them impossible to disregard.
It is so easy to pass a day without having felt anything. To me, my life has meaning only when I've felt something I can't forget." - Vicki L. Wilson

"Enjoy your life to the fullest, do what you truly love to do, and be with those you love as much as possible." - David Seaman

On this date in 1600, scientific martyr Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy. I have a profound respect for him... I love truth, but I'm not prepared to give my life for it. Here's my favorite quote from Bruno, from his De l’Infinito Universo e Mondi: "There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth... Destroy the theories that the Earth is the center of the Universe!" Read more about him here.

I decided to take off work tomorrow to go snowboarding. I prefer to go on a weekday to avoid the lift lines. It does tend to be harder to persuade friends to go with me during the week, but that's understandable. Or is it? When someone says "I can't", is that really true? No, they were physically capable of going. So why would they say they couldn't go? Maybe they didn't want to go. Maybe abdicating decision-making power is their way of short-circuiting any attempt by me to persuade them. Maybe "I can't" is linguistic shorthand for "I have evaluated my options and determined that it's not the best one". (If that's the case, the English language probably needs a new word that lacks the moral implications of "shouldn't"... maybe "optn't"?) But more likely, it was an automatic reflex rather than a carefully deliberated decision.
Why would people choose to avoid making such decisions? Because they think that if they don't make a choice that they can't make a mistake? Because continually rethinking every possible option at every instant would result in mental fatigue? Because it's unpleasant to think about the sacrifices that the current you makes to benefit future yous?
Commitments, obligations, responsibilities... on the surface these all feel like either yes or no, you have it or you don't, and if you have it then it trumps everything else, and is not something to be weighed in the balance with other considerations. Granted, sometimes people really have no choice, and a certain course of action is absolutely necessary. And if you make a promise to do something, you should honor that commitment, even if it limits your decision-making power (which means that you should not make such commitments lightly). But in other circumstances, when you feel that you have only one choice, you should double-check to make sure that you really only have one option, because you might have other options that you automatically assumed weren't viable but which might be.
As a small business owner, it is both easier and harder for me to take a day off. Easier because no one can tell me I can't go. Harder because it's more expensive for me to take a day off. Even if I'm not a wage slave, I'm still a slave to the business model. But above moderate affluence the marginal value of each additional dollar declines in its ability to positively impact one's happiness, and realizing this has given me a degree of freedom I wouldn't have had otherwise. I sometimes take off a day of work just to exercise my autonomy, and to remind myself that it's within my power to do so, even when the temptation is to think that it isn't.
I hope to see you on the slopes, if not tomorrow, then some other weekday.

From author, entrepreneur, and all-around cool guy Paul Graham: "People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good."

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin! His complete works are now freely available online here. My favorite quote from him is his concluding sentence from Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

A reader named Chris recently sent me an email that I'm publishing here (with his permission) because it's too good not to post. I like the way he thinks, because it forces me to question what I believe. Below his email I have included my replies as referenced footnotes. My intent in posting this is to clarify my opinions for him and other readers and to subject these opinions to criticism.
Chris wrote:
In what is apparently your current state of mind, all things are possible and interesting. This is not a virtue of logic or rationality; it is a virtue of imagination. [1] Hold onto it dearly because if you persist in your stated purpose, your imagination is the baby you'll need to salvage from the bathwater. I applaud your efforts and hope that you will have a fruitful journey. Toward that end I offer a few thoughts on the subject.
1. Whether or not there is anything beyond our universe (in the grand sense of our ability to perceive or measure) is utterly irrelevant, and most likely uninteresting except for flights of fancy. Why? Because, by definition, it cannot affect us. [2] The very instant that it affects us or becomes tangent in any way to our universe, it ceases to be THAT and becomes THIS. And THIS is the province of science. Anything that is defined as supernatural or metaphysical cannot be studied or understood by science, but who cares? No theist is interested in God's hobbies. It is the interface BETWEEN the natural and the supernatural (i.e. so-called miracles, etc.) that people are concerned with. In short, if there is a God who exists beyond the physical laws of our universe, it does not matter UNTIL He acts on our universe at which point He or His act is by definition part of our Universe and even if not constrained by our universe's physical laws, He or His act is certainly subject to our scientists' scrutiny. Read more at naturalism.org.
2. Your conscious or subconscious endorsement of the legitimacy of the evolution/ID "debate" if not your tacit endorsement of ID itself, is clear through your repeated use of the term, "design" throughout your site. I would predict that, if you are not being disingenuous, you probably believe that some kind of god or other-worldly force does exist and has either allowed or controlled the process of evolution. If I am correct in that prediction, please re-read #1 above after reading this. [3]
If your position is that "God"(or whatever) must exist because of the overabundance of order and apparent design in the universe generally and in biological systems specifically [4], think about this:
a. this is what is known as the argument from personal incredulity. "I, personally, find (it) difficult to imagine therefore (it) must be false." or conversely, "I find (it) easier to believe than something else so (it) must be true." Obviously, this can have no explanatory value to anyone, including the person making the argument. [5]
b. If your argument is that the universe and the biology found in it are too complex to have occurred via any means other than through the design of some vastly superior being you have explained precisely NOTHING. You are in the grips of an infinite regress. If the universe is so complex as to require a designer, then by the same very argument, THE DESIGNER ITSELF REQUIRES A DESIGNER (presumably the designer is at least AS complex as that which was designed). [6]
3. You may also have bought into the statistical hat trick suggesting that the universe is too statistically unlikely to have occurred via natural means (trick #1 is the use of the code term "by chance"). Ponder this: The odds of something happening that DID HAPPEN, no matter how unlikely, are precisely 1 in 1. [7]
4. Another recurrent theme in your repertoire seems to be a reliance upon the concept of free will (and I like the Rush song, too). I would caution you against overestimating it's value. The most that can be said of free will is that it is very a convenient illusion for our legal system to exploit in order to maintain it's own legitimacy, the status quo and prosecute those who are statistically unpopular. [8]
a. Several hundred years ago the study of philosophy determined that free will was another infinite regress since no one is their own "First Cause."
b. More recently Physics dropped the deterministic universe bomb. Briefly, at any single moment, there exists exactly one possible future. [9]
c. Neurobiology is currently dismantling the heart of the free will myth in ways that defy sound-biting. Suffice it to say, we are the product of two programs, one genetic and one environmental/cultural. Nature AND nurture AND...nothing else. There is no "you" passing judgment on you; no "you" beyond you deciding what to do, no matter how counter-intuitive this seems. [10]
That's right. I am saying there is no supernatural anything. No soul, no god, no consciousness guiding evolution or anything else in any sense that any religion has thus far suggested. This is not to say that we have figured it all out. I'm quite certain that there are forces at work in the universe with which we are not yet familiar (and may never be). I am equally certain that those forces, if they exist, exist in THIS universe, or they simply don't matter.
And now my replies:
[1] I don't think that all things are interesting; I do have broad interests but find many things uninteresting. I do think it is an open question whether all things are possible, and my view is based at least partially on logic and not just imagination. Countless things have been demonstrated to be possible, but I don't think anything has ever been demonstrated to be impossible (perhaps proving that something is impossible is the only thing which is impossible to do?), and many things which had been previously thought to be impossible were eventually accomplished. Our universe does seem to have some limits on what can be known (e.g. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, etc), but these don't necessarily imply that there are states that our universe can't reach. I can't confidently say that everything is possible, but it's hubris to think we're smart enough to confidently say we know what will never be possible.
[2] Part of our apparent difference of opinion might be merely semantic, specifically in our usage of the word "universe". I typically use the phrase "our universe" to mean "the stuff that came out of our big bang", as distinct from "all that exists". It's possible that our universe is all that exists, or it's possible that our universe is an unimaginably small part of all that exists. I think the latter is more likely. I do think that what might exist outside our universe, and questions such as what happened "before" the big bang or what (if anything) caused it, are suitable topics for scientific research (once we're sufficiently intelligent to use clues within our universe about what's outside our universe), and therefore not supernatural.
I do have a minor objection to your claim that anything outside of our universe is irrelevant for how we should live. If one thinks a god created our universe for some purpose, and one believes that some clues as to this purpose can be discovered, then this should certainly be factored in to one's decision about how to live. You apparently do not accept these two premises (which is fine), but I think you'd admit that one who did should accept the conclusion.
Having said all that, I do occasionally think that speculating about what might lie beyond our universe is a waste of time, and that I do it not because it's important or because it will change how I live, but because I enjoy thinking about these things. But those feelings are based on the low probability that I'll figure out anything meaningful and not on the fact that such discoveries wouldn't be useful.
[3] My use of the word "design" might be confusing. I mean it in the same sense that some evolutionary theorists use it as a shorthand for "appears to be designed". Some writers include that explanatory caveat every time they use the word, but I find that cumbersome. I know that such confusion can be manipulated by intelligent design proponents for their political ends (just as they tried to claim that disagreements between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould about punctuated equilibrium implied that evolutionary theory wasn't on solid footing), but I care more about discovering the truth than about how such meme wars play out. Just to be clear, I have very little patience for religious fundamentalists who rally behind the intelligent design movement as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court ban on teaching creationism.
I consider myself an agnostic. But the distinction I made above between a creator of all that exists and a creator of our universe is important here. If I had to guess, I'd estimate the likelihood of a creator of all that exists (i.e. a first mover) to be 30%, and a creator of our universe to be 80%. Of course, these are just guesses based on limited and difficult-to-interpret data.
[4] My position is not that apparent design necessarily implies a creator, but that it ought to somewhat increase one's estimation of the likelihood that a creator exists.
[5] When deciding what to believe, I weigh empirical evidence much more heavily than my intuition; e.g. I accept quantum physics and relativity as true even though they seem profoundly absurd to me. But for anything that currently lies outside the empirical realm, what can I possibly factor in to my beliefs other than intuition (after examining ways in which my intuition tends to be flawed and making adjustments to the extent that I can)? And couldn't I argue that atheists are falling into the same trap, believing that there's no god because they can't imagine how there could be one? (e.g. "If there was a god, then what created that god? I can't wrap my head around that, so there must not be a god.")
[6] I do accept that my view (that there is at least a chance that there are "levels" above ours) doesn't remove the mystery. However, that alone doesn't mean it's not true. If we start to find evidence that there are indeed levels above ours, it would be silly to simply ignore that information on the grounds that it doesn't provide a full explanation and merely pushes the mysteries further up.
[7] That is true. However, if I flipped a coin and it came up heads, even afterwards I would still be able to say that the a priori chance of it coming up heads was 50%. Granted, the matter of our existence is different due to the Anthropic Bias. You might be right that existence isn't a mystery in need of explanation, but I just can't get past the firing squad analogy: If you woke up to find that you had just faced a firing squad and all the shooters had somehow missed you, you would not simply say "it's not remarkable that I'm still alive, because if I wasn't then I wouldn't be here to ponder the situation".
[8] I talk a lot about free will not because I understand it and want to educate others, but because I don't understand it and hope others can educate me. I'm not confident that I'll ever understand free will (people much smarter than me have spent years thinking about it without success), so this might fall in the category of things that are fun to think about but are unlikely to really affect how we should live. I do grant that some people believe in free will because they want to believe in it; but obviously this alone doesn't make it false. I also admit that it's possible to overstate the importance of free will, but I think it's also possible to understate its importance. Consider the following list: life, intelligence, consciousness, morality, free will. Several things strike me about this list: They're interrelated; They feel valuable and fundamental; They make a universe interesting; They are among the few things that humans don't understand; They might somehow open the door to an unexpected outcome; etc. I might be biased by the fact that I'm a living, intelligent, conscious, moral, partially free entity. But if I were creating a universe, I'd probably bake stuff like this into the system. I don't know how important free will is. But given that philosophers can't even agree on a definition (e.g. "ability to do otherwise"... ok, so what does that mean?), I don't see how we can confidently say that free will is not important.
[9] Even if I accept the claim that in our universe the causal path we're on cannot be changed, I don't think that implies that the same must be true outside our universe. And in any case, compatibilists argue that there could be some form of free will in a deterministic system. I haven't found compatibilist arguments persuasive, but we shouldn't simply dismiss them as non-existent.
[10] I definitely agree that most people live like robots, doing whatever their genes and memes "want" them to do. But I do think that it's possible (at least in theory, if not by current humans) to break free from our default programming and have some degree of free will. One possible route to such freedom may be found in the concept of higher-order desires and preferences described by Harry Frankfurt and others.

I recently saw the excellent movie The Shawshank Redemption for the first time since its original release. One scene got me thinking. In it, Morgan Freeman's character is talking about another inmate who has spent almost his whole life in jail, but who is up for parole and is scared of starting a new life in the "real" world. Freeman says: "These prison walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on 'em. That's institutionalized." My question is, is your life institutionalized? Invisible walls are no less real than visible ones, and are harder to break through because they have to be discovered before they can be destroyed. How much of what you think and do in a typical day are influenced, or even determined, by others? Have you gradually become reliant upon things that you would be better off without? Comfort is seductive, but is detrimental to the development of the autonomous spirit. Are you truly free? Or are you sleepwalking through life?

TGIF and Happy New Month, dear reader. I'm registering pretty high on the happyometer today, for a lot of reasons: 1. It's friday. 2. Spring is just around the corner. 3. I sold one of my web sites this week. The negotiations took longer than I had expected but I'm glad we were able to work out a deal. With this out of the way I hope to have more time now to post. 4. Yesterday I found out that I wasn't going to have to move out of my townhouse. My aunt owns it and had planned to move back to town this spring, but her plans have been postponed and so I'm not getting evicted yet. 5. I'll be spending most of this weekend with my favorite person (other than myself, of course).