Fundamental Attribution Error

A few days ago, I went to the university's 'Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation' to ask for a video of my teaching and a classroom observation. The director did the observation yesterday and we talked about it this morning.

She seemed very impressed overall with my teaching. During our conversation, she said something like "You are born to be a public speaker."

My parents can attest that this is simply not true. I am, by nature, quite introverted. I have no natural instinct for many basic social skills, like 'reading a crowd'. It has taken a lot of work over a lot of time to get me to the point where I can do a good job of teaching and interacting with a group of students.

I will admit that teaching a class is much easier than most social interactions, because I am unquestionably in control of the situation. I can act rather than react. If I know my stuff and plan well, then I do not have to worry that any uncertainties will develop. The only unknown factor is the attention and understanding of the students, and I have the ability to demand information and responses of them, rather than play the social guessing games that still confuse me.

I guess it is good that I have trained enough for people to think that I am 'a natural'. But it is a bit annoying that people credit innate ability for that. This is the 'Fundamental Attribution Error' of the title. People assume that what they see in others is the result of innate characteristics, rather than planning or training or the situation.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago in a conversation with my martial arts teacher. I told him that I am naturally clumsy and he had a hard time believing it. He sees me doing martial arts moves I have trained for years, and the parkour moves that are closely related, and thinks that I have a natural dexterity. I don't. I am naturally clumsy, and it has taken a lot of training to fight that clumsiness.

Gunsmoke

Yesterday I watched a random 1961 episode* of the TV western Gunsmoke. It was the best thing I have watched in a long time.**

In almost everything I watch, I either know exactly what is going to happen or I do not care what happens. But this show was able to create a rare sense of tension in me. At several points, I had no clue what was going to happen next, and against all logic, I found myself caring.

This may be because I am unfamiliar with the show. After seeing more episodes, I will probably be able to predict things better and it will lose its ability to generate dramatic tension. But even then, the show would still be a better thing to watch than most others, assuming most episodes are of this quality. The writing, acting, and technical quality of the show were all of high quality.

The plot seemed quite sophisticated for 1961. It was about a woman who had been captured by one tribe of Indians and sold to another. The main character, the town marshal, accompanies some cavalry on a mission to buy her back. The leader of the cavalry is a racist 'Indian hater' and his violent nature threatens the mission. The marshal soon discovers that the woman is reluctant to leave; she had been treated well and enjoys her new life. She and the brave who bought her have fallen in love with each other.

Maybe this plot line is a tired old trope that shows up in many Western stories, but it was new to me and it was executed well. I usually enjoy any story where there are no real bad guys and the conflict comes from a clash of values or circumstances, with everyone honestly trying to do what is right but having different beliefs about what that is. The show did this well; even the racist cavalry officer, who was clearly portrayed as the 'bad guy', was a sympathetic character who cared about his men and his  mission.

Much of the tension came from the implied threat of violence in the genre; I found myself thinking that the negotiations might fail, and some incident would lead to a big firefight between the cavalry and the Indian tribe. I did not want that to happen, and so I was hoping that the marshal could manage a peaceful solution. If that feeling was what the filmmakers intended, as I believe it was, it shows a maturity that is often lacking in TV shows.

Sure, there were all kinds of minor flaws. They pushed the 'noble savage' theme a bit too far, many of the 'Indians' were clearly Anglo actors, and their costumes had a few too many seashells for a Kansas tribe.  The woman looked way too good for spending a year in a hunting camp: she had the typical suite of 'hollywood blonde' superpowers, including the ability to skin a buffalo without getting her fingernails dirty, and the ability to make the wind cause her dress to flutter just the right way. 

But these flaws, or worse ones, are still present in most things. The woman still seemed more real than a lot of characters in modern shows.

This episode of Gunsmoke compares favorably to the good episodes of the original Star Trek, the ones based on scripts written by good science fiction writers. I am guessing that Gunsmoke also benefited from good writing. The Western novel was a highly refined at that time, which meant that everyone had high standards to live up to, and a deep pool of plots and characters and situations to draw from.

My enjoyment of the show could be party due to me expecting it to be bad. I have seen various Western movies, including classics, and was generally not impressed. I expected this to be worse.  I watched it on Netflix because I was curious. I mainly saw it as a historical document, a glimpse into the dominant American culture of my parents' childhood. I knew that Westerns used to be the dominant thing, and I chose Gunsmoke because it was the best and longest-lasting show.

I am glad that I took the time to watch it as an experiment. There is a lot to be said for sampling lots of things that are widely agreed to be high-quality, rather than just sticking with more copies of things you have liked in the past.

* Season 7, episode 10, "Indian Ford"

**Note that I normally watch about four or five hours of moving pictures a month, so this is not really saying that much.

Choices

I dislike making choices when I do not have good information. 

I think this is one of the reasons I do not like going to non-buffet restaurants. All restaurant food is worse and more expensive than what I or the people in my life can cook, but on rare occasions the convenience is worth the price. At those times, I always prefer to go to a buffet. At a buffet, I can make an informed choice. I see the food, I see the ingredients and how it is cooked, and I can choose as much or as little as I like. I can grab a small sample to taste, and then go back for more if it turns out to be good. But with a menu, there is no way I can make a good choice. All I see is a partial list of ingredients.  I have to choose only one thing from a list of dozens of items, I can only choose one thing and the choice is permanent, and I do not have enough information to make the choice well.

I also tend to dislike it when people ask me to make choices about things like what to eat. I know that this makes me unusual. Most people have their own special preferences and want those to be satisfied. I am different. I want the highest quality thing that can be provided, and I do not much care what it is.

There are others like me. In fact, the fanciest restaurants in the world typically give the consumer no choice. They cook things the best way they can, and expect you to enjoy it. This is actually quite logical. A good chef knows far more about food than I ever will, and knows the exact combination of ingredients required to make a world-class meal. It would ruin the meal for the ignorant consumer to start taking part in the production process.

Here is a foodie's comment:

When I go into a (good) restaurant, I like to simply tell the waiter that I don't want to look much at the menu, and he should simply bring me what is best. If he asks what that means by "best," I (sometimes) respond by telling him I am an aesthetic Platonist and that best is best. Or I will ask the waiter to imagine it is his last meal on earth and to bring me the relevant dishes he would order

Maybe I should start doing that.

Robots and Personality

My sense of humor is bizarre. I just laughed out loud for several minutes after reading this:

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
This test, he charged, was inhumane.

I think I found this story so funny because I can see the conflict between two personality types: the engineer who happily watches his machine perform its intended function, and the leader who identifies emotionally with the people and tools under his command. I was laughing at the confusion of the engineer who made a flawless machine but failed to consider the human factors in the design.

The article is interesting throughout, as is the one that pointed me to it:

They're designed to do a job, and they're designed to be able to interact with people to the extent that it facilitates their ability to do that job, but service robots are really not programmed to be your pet, your best friend, or a member of your family.
Whether it's in their programming or not is, to some extent, beside the point, since it happens anyway. And when it happens, it dramatically changes the way that people interact with what on a primary level is intended to be little more than a tool. Realizing this, a team from Delft University of Technology and Philips Research in the Netherlands decided to take a look at how people actually want their robot vacuums to behave, and what kinds of personalities they'd like them to display.

 

Psychiatric Drugs Continued

More scary stuff:

What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects.

I believe that people should have the right to take drugs that the FDA has not approved. However, they should only do so with full knowledge of the risks, and knowledge of the fact that the government does not think it is safe. The existence of regulatory agencies often gives people a false sense of security. They assume that things are safe, instead of asking the questions they should.

But then, maybe they are making a rational calculation:

As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, "This has become the new welfare." Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.
Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs. According to a New York Times story, a Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.

That first sentence is nonsense. People could survive without this government program, and the assertion that they cannot is incredibly insulting and misleading. But it is true that without these kinds of programs, people would have to reduce or alter their consumption and/or learn new skills and work harder. Nobody wants to do that, so they do what it takes to get the diagnosis. 

One of the mantras of public choice economics is "If you subsidize something, you get more of it." That is what we are seeing here. The government gives you money if your kids are on psychoactive drugs, so more people put their kids on psychoactive drugs.

Read the whole thing

Misc

One of my favourite lines – and I haven't been able to find out who came up with it – is that "There's an age when boys read one of two books. Either they read Ayn Rand or they read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. One of these books leaves you with no grasp on reality and a deeply warped sense of fantasy in place of real life. The other one is about hobbits and orcs."

Source

I read Lord of the Rings, thankfully.

 

Then I read Hume's Enquiry, this wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. What we know is what we have evidence for. We do the best we can, but anybody who claims to be able to deduce or have revelation about The Truth – with both Ts capitalised – is wrong. It doesn't work that way. The only reasonable way to approach life is with an attitude of humane scepticism. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read that book. 

I have never gotten around to reading Hume, but I know the general idea of his works and I definitely approve. I rarely have the patience for reading the full text of philosophers write. They are far too verbose. It is much more efficient to read summaries.

Residents of the Austrian mountain town of Hallstatt, population 800, are scandalized. A Chinese firm has plans to replicate the village — including its famous lake — in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Austrian media reported this week.

Source

The Chinese possess a fascinating combination of initiative and shamelessness. They decide that they want something, and then they do it. Their entrepreneurs will gladly make copies of anything and everything, and their consumers will gladly buy it. The concept of 'authenticity' seems completely foreign to them.

Ayn Rand would be proud of them.

Depressing Health Facts

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.

emphasis mine

Source (You may not be able to read the paper without access from a university library.)

So basically, this study says that being locked in a cage with people selected for their violent and antisocial tendencies is a healthier environment than black men normally live in, and that remains true even if you ignore deaths from cars and guns. I have skimmed the paper and it looks like they used decent methodology.

There are a lot of ways you could spin this. It could be due to a better diet and increased access to health care, or it could be due to controlling dangerous actions and habits, or maybe a combination of both. Nobody is going to claim that quality of life is higher in prison, but it is kind of disheartening to see data showing that, for a segment of the population, having the government lock you in a cage and manage your life (badly) results in less mortality than living on your own in our society. No matter if you blame society or the individuals involved, something is seriously wrong here.

The second link is a newspaper article about life expectancy: 

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health
...
In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.
...
Communities with large immigrant populations — Southern California, for example — fared considerably better than average despite relatively high poverty rates. The worst-performing counties were clustered primarily in Appalachia, the Deep South and the lower Midwest. In those places, women died as much as a year younger in 2007 than women did a decade earlier. Life expectancy for women slipped 2 1/2 years in Madison County, Miss., which recorded the biggest regression.

Again, you have the same debate over social causes versus individual responsibility, but it is clear that something is very wrong. There are pockets of people in our country that are regressing in the most basic measures of well-being.

Just like with prison, there is a lot more to your overall quality of life than your mortality rate. Most people would probably think that living in the modern world and dying at 70 is better than living a hundred years ago and dying at 75, just like they would prefer to not be in prison. But mortality is related to health, and your health has a huge impact on your quality of life.

This is a big problem. Something is missing. When analyzing problems like this, the key is to try to find the relevant scarcity, to figure out what is lacking so you can provide it.  

Living a healthy life requires both knowledge and willpower. The two are substitutes. For example, the more you know about cooking, the less willpower you need to eat healthy, because you know how to cook healthy food that tastes really good. Giving people more knowledge is something most people agree on, but the problem is that it is often hard and expensive to do so.

One thing that might help is to provide people with 'artificial willpower' by making systems that allow you to make and enforce commitments. People should be able to tell their credit card companies and grocery stores to refuse to process any transaction involving junk food. I have talked about this before. 

Hopefully in the future we will all have robot butlers to do our shopping for us. They can be our commitment mechanisms; we can tell them to get healthy food and not buy bad things, and we will not go in stores and be confronted with impulse purchases.