Overcoming Bias

Have I mentioned how much I like the blog Overcoming Bias? The aim of its authors is to use results from experimental psychology (among other things) to explore the mechanisms of non-optimal (i.e. biased) decision making, and discuss ways of making better decisions.

The most recent entry mentions something that's been very much on my mind these days:

In our culture we are supposed to oppose ordinary bloody war, preferring peace when possible there. But we do not generalize this lesson much to other sorts of conflicts. We celebrate those who take sides and win far more than we do peacemakers and compromisers.

I've long been bothered by how political discourse in the US is dominated by pointless "Coke vs Pepsi" battles that are little more than ideological cage fights. What a waste of time. And this is held up as some sort of virtue? Yes, it is. I'm tempted to spend a lot of time dissecting the anti-republican screeds I read here on LJ from that perspective, but I think that it would be pointless; people who are ready to turn away from the distraction of artificially generated conflict and towards self-understanding will find it on their own.

Most discussion about cognitive bias is, in itself, frittered away on these counterproductive conflicts. The understanding of the sources of bias is limited to its deployment as a rhetorical bludgeon against the "other side". This blog does exactly the opposite, gently turning that critical eye inwards and asking how one can improve one's own judgment instead. Somehow its writing style makes this egodystonic exercise interesting and non-threatening.

Update: Another equally interesting blog, which I just discovered, is Less Wrong, which has some great articles on procrastination. I love the phrase in their byline, "the art of human rationality", because rationality is too often seen as a deterministic, one-right-way process when, in fact, it is an incredibly subtle thing that's full of traps and blind alleys.

Raise the Red Lantern

I often wonder how films get onto my Netflix queue. There's so much time between choosing and watching that it's hard to know.

Anyway: Raise the Red Lantern. Part of me says "oh joy another dreary depressing foreign film". But it was interesting for several reasons:

1) Old-style Chinese architecture. It's stunning to see it in actual use by elegantly dressed people. So beautiful. And silent - Chinese cities were incredibly calm places before the automobile. You can see it on the map - countless little alleys have names reflecting their (once) otherworldly quiet. I'd become a concubine just to live there.

The Chinese have been terrible about its preservation, by the way - for the past twenty years beautiful homes have been destroyed en masse by bulldozers in neighborhoods all over Beijing, and almost certainly everywhere else in the country, in order to build high-rise apartments. The Cultural Revolution really did wipe the slate clean when it comes to anything involving beauty and good taste. The destruction of pre 20th-century Chinese buildings is one of the world's great architectural wastes.

2) Interesting questions about what constitutes "poverty" and "deprivation". Beautifully dressed pampered women that have almost all their needs met, behaving like trailer trash because they're so desperately unhappy. This is surely influenced by Marxism (must show that the lives of the rich suck, too) but it is also a deep and tragic truth about the nature of wealth and privilege.

3) Incredible drama unfolding in complete silence. It's like a cross between John Waters and haiku. So little happens on the surface, and so much in the inner lives of the characters. Behind their skulls run endless film-loops of conflict, chess-like in their complexity and fatal in their consequences, while their outer lives are completely serene and poised. The viewers, too, are drawn into it, wondering how to read the countless little feints in their war, and perhaps making morally compromising speculations themselves.

Worth watching, if only for the pretty pictures and squeaky opera singing. Also recommended for Mandarin learners, as the dialog is very clear and articulate, and meshes suspiciously well with typical language course vocabularies.

Visualizing a trillion

This is kind of alarming:

The Econ4u folks are dedicated to education Americans about all matters financial. To dramatize the importance of their mission, they put a poll into the field asking people how many millions are in a trillion. The results:

Q: How many times larger is a trillion than a million? Would you say…

One Thousand Times- 18%
Ten Thousand Times- 12%
One Hundred Thousand Times- 21%
One Million Times- 21%
Ten Million Times- 17%
Don’t Know- 12%


The correct answer is a million millions are in a trillion. But 79 percent of Americans got that wrong. And almost everyone got it wrong downward.

LOL. I was just thinking lately about ways to visualize a trillion.

Imagine a very small pebble, or alternately a large grain of sand, one millimeter on a side. (That's about 1/25th of an inch.)

If you place them side by side along the edge of a typical office desk, you have about a thousand pebbles.

If you completely cover the surface of the desk, you have about a million pebbles.

If you completely fill the volume of the desk, you have about a billion pebbles.

If you completely fill a 3,000 square foot home up to the very peak of the roof, you have about a trillion pebbles.

It's a big number, but not so big that you can't relate it to familiar objects.

Incidentally, it's also (very) roughly the total number of pixels in an uncompressed, high-resolution, feature length film.