Biased for Life?

Pre-programmed machines are dedicated to do certain tasks in a way humans would do. My automatic washing machine doesn’t have to discuss with me while washing clothes. It has decided the cycle even before I press start. Do humans come hardwired with instructions? (where’s the instruction manual?) When we say that we might inherit certain traits from our parents or from our family, which include behavioural traits as well, do we mean that they have been pre-programmed into our systems?

There is a book by Nassim Taleb called “Fooled by Randomness”, which deals with the human fallibility when it comes to uncertainty. One of the most important things I realized while reading it, was that we aren’t as smart as we think we are. We are prone to make errors in judgement even if the risks are calculated.

Imagine that I have an imaginary HOT girlfriend. We are in an imaginary stable relationship. One fine evening she spots me with a HOTTER chick at a coffee shop. Even though my girlfriend knows that we are in a stable relationship she can’t resist believing that I am seeing someone else. Jealousy seeps in, but she lets me go for that moment (since she might have most certainly read Taleb’s book as well). The next time, she spots me with some other HOTTER chick at some different coffee shop. These are completely random events, she just happens to be in the neighbourhood, not that she is stalking me. But then she has observed & decided to let go, yet again, I love my imaginary girlfriend for that. The third time on yet another random occasion she spots me with some other HOT chick. What should be the most rational reaction of my imaginary girlfriend?

Options include;

Believe firmly that I am seeing someone else

Believe that it was just a coincidence that she saw me with three different girls

Believe that I am a polygamous asshole dating 4 chicks at the same time

Now this is how we run into the problem of induction. Even though she is sensible, tolerant, understanding, caring, did I mention HOT? She is still prone to react emotionally. She has to think a posteriori of the whole incident. She has seen the final outcome; she has to reach to the cause through inductive reasoning. Taleb says that the human brain isn’t capable, sometimes, of handling this problem. We jump to conclusions without considering all the available data.

He cites the example of people in the old world who had almost concluded that all swans are white, strictly based on empirical evidence. After a few years, one fine day, someone spotted a black swan in Australia which shattered their results. This must have hit some ornithologists by the balls to have come across a so called anomaly in their knowledge. This is just a peek into our learning process through observations or experience & shows (in Taleb’s Words) the fragility of our knowledge.

Data, or to be precise, a theory, is subject to falsification. We can’t always certainly say that the given data is absolutely correct. Take for instance, theoretical physics. There are so many base theories in it & over the years so many ideas have accumulated over these base theories, that each new offshoot has become a specialisation subject per se. On the basis of few known facts, many theories have spawned which make us believe that we get closer to understanding our own existence in the universe. I am not saying all these theories can be falsified, but certainly some of them can be, in the same way Einstein’s did to Newton’s. We hit the wall when we start assuming that the theory is a proven fact & start using it as a foundation to build new theories on. When we do that & suddenly the base theory is falsified, what happens to all the new ideas built on it? Poof. Proof, is yet another problem, not all things can be physically proven to exist, some things can be mathematically or theoretically proven to exist. How are we to assume that these proofs are absolute? Or so to speak, should we or should we not assume in the first place?

In defence to the argument of the problem of induction, many scientists have said that when a person who asks for proof of scientific understanding while sitting on a plane, is a hypocrite, since he is using the same product of scientific belief that is helping him stay afloat in a mega tonne mass transport unit.

The problem Taleb highlights, is marriage to our ideas & our convictions. We tend to believe that our convictions are absolute & indisputable. This is a cultural flaw of the human society & can be observed across the globe. People who are non conformists also fall for it sometimes. But amidst all this, there are a few people who allow the inclusion of luck, randomness & uncertainty into their thinking.

Are some people actually prone to take more risks than others? Are some people actually risk averse? To cite examples, there are successful investors, adrenalin junkies, stunt professionals, people employed in public services who have to constantly deal with natural calamities & so on. These people have chosen professions which account for a considerable amount of risk. How they play the risk is another story. But if we try & peek into the lives of these people, we might find that they lead perfectly normal lives yet play with risks which might potentially wipe them off the planet, metaphorically speaking. Are these people genetically programmed to indulge in risk seeking behaviour? Do they deliberately make such professional choices when there can be other ways to do the same job? Safer ways?

Yes, if we peek into the life of humans some 10,000 years ago, the period to which we can attribute the beginning of actual human life, we would see that the clans of people were hunter gatherer types. Surviving in the wild along with other animals, or to be precise, predators; must have been a real task. Right from hunting for food, to hunting for protection, the humans must have used their above average intelligence to gain the ability to survive. This might have included, formulating ways to defend & attack, especially without having any lethal physical characteristics. So they had to rely on their instincts, depend fully on their senses & on their intelligent brain to devise weapons. To survive in those conditions must have involved a lot of risk. The people who were incapable to risk their lives would usually die of hunger or would be killed by a predator.

This potential to deal with risk in order to survive must have driven mankind since a really long time. Also altruistic behaviour towards fellow humans allowed the risk-averse types to thrive along with risk seekers. That’s we find both risk seekers & risk averse people living side by side in today’s world, diversifying the gene pool.

What possible advantage can risk seeking bring? For starters it would help us grasp opportunities which might pop out of the blue. Reaching a point where we are uncertain about the outcome, we might look out for escape routes & might find a profitable one. We ideally wouldn’t have found this route if we hadn’t taken the risk to venture to the unknown. This is what drives adrenalin junkies to sheer excitement & insurance companies to sheer panic & high premiums.

Incorporating risk into everyday life creates lot of room for luck. Interpreting luck as luck & not attributing every win to sheer skill is what we can learn from our natural instincts.

The Chamber of Thought

I have witnessed a few profound thoughts coming out of me from nowhere. Most of them were a direct result of spending more than average time on the pot. Somehow the pot works like a positive feedback loop. Not that anything loops back, but results into clarity like no other.

A few salient features of the pot thought would be, the dead silence. I am blessed with a potty area which somehow shields all the ambient noise. Even if there is a loud band marching past the street adjacent to my building, I still have no clue about it if I am on the pot. I haven’t seen many architectural wonders in my life, but this surely is one of them. Who needs a sound proof studio?

The potty allows many activities, other than the obvious ones. One of them is, reading the sports pages in the newspaper. There is nothing like reading about a speedy forehand at Wimbledon coupled with your invincible outward thrust. My potty comes with a cute little exhaust fan, which fortunately drives away all the smell. So it manages to provide me with no olfactory guilt whatsoever.

Amongst the other uses, ‘thinking’ is my all time favourite. Nassim Taleb writes in “fooled by randomness” about the ideas, thoughts or even urges that we encounter, people happen to remember the exact place, the exact time & their exact activity at the time they have a profound thought. When I look back, many of my ‘good’ thoughts come from my loo. Sometimes when I sit on the pot, I look like Rodin’s Thinker. Usually accompanied by a newspaper or mostly with an above average sense of serenity. The flush sounds like the river’s water flowing off a cliff to turn into a massive waterfall. The trademark dim light leaves a feeling of a dark evening by the beach. The silent drone of the exhaust fan, rapidly takes me to a state of trance, wherein my potty travels through worm holes of thought.

The thought generation is mainly because of the confidence I feel on the pot. Enclosed in my own world, no one to disturb, elegantly plugging me off from the world to be in my bastion. It’s amazing to realize the range of thoughts that can occur while on a pot. Sometimes I suddenly remember a scene from a movie, n try to think how it might look from a certain angle other than what was used in the movie. That’s a serious time killer. I can spend a grand amount of time in visualizing that frame. Amongst the most cherished thoughts are lines from books I have read. To ruminate on those words feels like rewriting the thought itself. Trying to grasp what the author wanted to say, trying to relate to the things that I might have witnessed, trying to realize how I would have written it, focusing on the philosophical aspect of the thought. All this leads to huge chain reaction, one thought igniting the next & so on. Like I said about the positive feedback mechanism of the pot, we can generalize the thinking process with this simple relation. The output of thought is directly proportional to the input of the pot. This correlation strictly works on the basis of time spent on the pot. It‘s like having two diametrically opposite bodily processes trigger each other.

A pot can very well be termed as a final resting place in the fast world. The moment you step out of the loo, its like leaving that pressurized chamber of thought & coming back to your own time. You leave the space-time continuum in that cabin; you realize that a few moments ago there was physics right under your ass.

Any amount of praise for the chamber of thought is incomplete, without the superb monologue from a hit English comedy series called “Coupling”. The character Steve in the series, dives into this monologue trying to explain why it is so important to have a lock on the toilet door (which his girlfriend forgets to put after redecorating the toilet).

“We are men. Throughout history, we have always needed in times of difficulty, to retreat to our caves. It so happens in this modern age, that our caves are fully plumbed. The toilet for us is the last bastion, the final refuge, the last few square feet of man space left to us. Somewhere to sit, somewhere to read, something to do & who gives a damn about the smell! Because that for us, is happiness. Because we are men. We are different. We have only one word for soap, we do not own candles. We have never seen anything of any value in a craft shop. We don’t possess magazines with photographs of celebrities, with all their clothes ON. When we have conversations, we actually take it in turns to talk. We have not yet reached that level of earth shattering boredom & inhuman despair where we would have a haircut, recreationally. We don’t know how to get excited about REALLY, REALLY boring things like ornaments, bath oil, the country side, vases, small churches, we do not even know, WHAT, WHAT in the name of god’s arse, is the purpose of pot pourri. Looks like breakfast smells like your aunty.

So please, in this strange & frightening world, allow us one last place to call our own, this toilet, this blessed pot, this fortress of solitude. You girls, you only go to the bathroom in groups of two or more. We do not pass comment; we do not make judgement, that is your choice. But we men, will always walk the toilet mile, ALONE (with his palm on his chest, like taking a pledge).”