The Yellow Clarinet

The illusion of control is a very important thing.

How many superstitions about bad luck are there?  The number 13, walking under a ladder, breaking mirrors, real flowers on stage - there are numerous (probably too many to count) variations on what should or shouldn't be done to influence the luck on has.  Some of them seem kind of obvious - walking under a ladder doesn't seem terribly brilliant to start with, as something or someone might fall off, but I'm not sure how many people need to be advised not to randomly break mirrors (it seems, at best, a fractured hobby).  Some of them likely arise from random collusion of incidents or from historic prejudice.

Most people think most superstitions are silly - except their own.  I know hardened atheists and skeptics who knock on wood.  Of course, the "mote in my eye/twig in your own" phenomenon is fairly common among various belief systems, and they are, after all, a kind of extension of the same phenomenon: the need to exert or at least pretend to exert some control over the random events in one's life.

But there is a more practical, more sinister side to this illusory sense of control.

How many times have you heard, "It's his own fault he got mugged - he was in that part of town after dark!" or, "Tsk, she would have been fine if she hadn't been wearing a dress like that" or similar statements?

It's the same thing: this notion that the person (in this case the victim) had control over how the situation played out.  While this may be true to an extent, in situations where the person is the victim of a crime, there is only one person who had 100% control over how the events played out:

The criminal.

The concept is known in psychology as Defensive Attribution Hypothesis - the notion on the part of the bystander that "if only she/he/they had done (something) different, this wouldn't have happened."  The "goal", if one can call it that, is to determine causal mechanisms for the event that the bystander has control over and, therefore, that the bystander can use to prevent the event from happening.  It's a psychological defense mechanism: "this can't happen to me because I'm in control."

The primary problem, though is that if the bystander is in control, then so was the victim (at least theoretically), which means that, according to the bystander, the victim is at fault for being robbed/attacked/(insert crime here).

On the surface level, this is ridiculous.  I hear, in the virtual echo chamber of the internet, the audience saying, "Well, of course not, but..."

No "but".  No qualification.  The only person who has control over - and thus responsibility for - committing a crime is the criminal.  One can speak of ways to reduce risk - after one has plainly and unambiguously acknowledged this fact.  One can talk of how to defend one's self - after one has admitted that the need for defense is entirely because of the attackers, not the attacked.

The illusion of control is a very important thing.  It helps people to maintain at least a fleeting sense of security in a world where very few things are guaranteed.  However, it is an illusion.  Try to remember that the next time you wish someone "break a leg" or hear about a woman being raped.

This is how science works

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2012/09/25/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/

The basic premise is that a bunch of scientists put a dead salmon in an fMRI and demonstrated brain activity.

Yes, in a dead, frozen salmon.

So in the final results, the authors compared the normal multiple comparisons, with the multiple CORRECTED comparisons. When they used the multiple corrected comparisons, the dead salmon showed nothing. When they did the multiple comparisons without the correction, the salmon showed significant increases in “activation”, coincidentally, in the brain and spinal cord. This shows the importance of correcting for multiple comparisons and avoiding false positives

The original poster almost didn’t make it to a conference, but when it did, it made a major splash, and reactions were very positive. Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn’t the case, it’s actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.

And the poster, and the paper that was eventually published, may have had an effect on the field. The authors note that at the time the poster was presented, between 25-40% of studies on fMRI being published were NOT using the corrected comparisons. But by the time this group won the Ignobel last week, that number had dropped to 10%. And who knows, it might, in part, be due to a dead fish.

Yes, that's right, a frozen fish - and the analysis of it - may have improved medical science.

The takeaway point, though is that you can do your data collection correctly but screw up your  analysis and still end up with a bad result.

Or, sometimes, you're looking in

Curiosity (inside its sky crane) as it parachutes down to the surface of Mars, as seen from the Odyssey orbiter

Off the planet, past the moon, across space, through the atmosphere, under the parachute, released from a sky crane...

... nothin' but net.

Standing

So, you're some unimportant, average person in your city. You know there's some kind of protest or sit-in going on nearby - you walk through the park regularly, and it's been on the news - but you're not participating. You may agree, you may disagree, doesn't really matter.

You've been out buying groceries, and on your way back, you decide to cut across the square like you always do. As you cross the street, you see a line of tanks - of your own government's military - heading away where the protestors (mostly students, but almost all citizens) were. Where they'd just killed hundreds if not thousands.

What do you do?

What kind of a person does it take to go from a casual walk home to standing in front of a moving line of tanks? What went through his mind? We don't know his name, his history, his motivations, or anything - all we know is what was caught on film: a man standing alone on a road.

If it happened in your city - if you were walking along and saw a line of tanks heading towards a protest nearby - what would you do? Would it matter who the protestors were? If they were democratic students or religious fundamentalists or just a bunch of people having a bad day? Would you hesitate? Would you keep walking? Or would you stand them down?

What kind of person are you?

(As a note, I'm explicitly not using certain words and phrases here. The events of that day twenty-three years ago are still heavily censored in that country. It has been written out of history books, is banned from all forms of media, and was the cause of books and such being burned. The people who most need to know about the events that happened - that nation's youth of today - are officially forbidden from learning about it. Think about that a while.)

Fighting Back

How many times have you found yourself arguing for a position you didn't really support merely because someone had tried to impose upon you the opposite position?

Classically, this is the behavior of teenagers - in extreme cases classified as "oppositional defiance disorder" - but even adults experience this kind of inherent oppositional reaction when we feel our independence is being challenged.

In psychology, this is known as "psychological reactance theory". From Psycholopedia:

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy (Brehm, 1966, 1972, Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Wicklund, 1974). This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior.

Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy (Brehm, 1966, 1972, Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Wicklund, 1974). Reactance, for example, often encourages individuals to espouse an opinion that opposes the belief or attitude they were encouraged, or even coerced, to adopt. As a consequence, reactance often augments resistance to persuasion (Brehm & Brehm, 1981). Reactance was proposed to explain many common examples of resistance in society, such as the adverse effects of prohibition.

Yes, this is a real, traceable, verified concept: an individual is more likely to be confrontational when s/he perceives that his or her freedoms are being impinged. It doesn't matter why or whether or not they agree with the underlying principles: merely the act of feeling confined, physically or mentally, induces a basic "fight or flight" syndrome that comes out as oppositional defiance.

Keep this in mind both as you watch your own behavior and as you watch how others respond to you. If you know you are predisposed to a negative response in certain situations, you can have mitigate that response to some degree and prevent yourself from getting into confrontations you don't necessarily want to have. You can also strive to prevent others from feeling the same kind of confinement and, thus, hopefully reduce their tendency to be confrontational in return.

(Sorry for the long lag between posts; I'll try to get at least one a month up.)

Once Upon a Time

A raven, flitting around somewhere, notices a silver spot. Being curious, it pecks at it, and a seed falls out of a nearby hole. It pecks again, and another seed falls out. Now, whenever it pecks that silver spot, it expects a seed; whenever it wants a seed, it will peck the silver spot.

This is learning. Learning is entirely based on predictive pattern analysis: the ability to say, "in the past, every time X has occurred, Y has resulted," and use that information for future prediction. Advanced learning is being able to extrapolate that cause/effect into areas not identical but similar to the original situation: maybe the spot is gold, and maybe it's a piece of candy instead of a seed.

In simpler terms, the act of learning is an act of building stories - even ones far less interesting than "Jack and the Beanstalk." We build, in our heads, a narrative course of actions that we can use to inform ourselves as well as others in the future. Our brains are very good at building these stories: being good at stories - being good at learning - provided a heritable survival advantage, so our ancestors who were better building stories tended to survive more.

It's important, however, to recognize when our story-building goes awry: when we don't have enough data or experience to build a realistic cause/effect model, or when we highlight the wrong thing as being the cause or effect. This is also something we tend to be good at, unfortunately, because it's a side effect of constantly looking for stories.

The most critical part of any story we build is that we be open to modifying, expanding, or removing it based on experience in order to keep it useful: remember, if the story can't predict anything, it's not useful and may even be counter-productive as we waste energy in support of a pattern that doesn't exist. If the raven finds that it's not just silver spots, but square silver spots, that result in seeds, continually pecking a round silver spot and expecting a seed is a waste of energy; if it goes on long enough, the raven may starve.

Stories are extremely powerful, and while they can be useful, we need to constantly check and validate them to prevent them from becoming detrimental, both to ourselves and to society.

Privilege

privi: private
lege: law

Privilege means, literally, "private law". Operating from a position of privilege means that the rules are applied differently - or are just not applied at all - for you.

There are many kinds of privilege. Some are earned, at least partially. Many are gained through luck or circumstance. Some are assumed even when not held.

The key, though, is that in all cases of privilege, the privileged person is acting from a position of strength or advantage over others who aren't privileged. The person with privilege doesn't have to be doing this deliberately or maliciously, or even be aware that s/he is doing it at all; often, one advantage of privilege is being unaware that a state of privilege even exists: those who have privilege may not be aware of it, while those who do not have it generally don't have a choice but to be aware of it. Furthermore, exercising a privilege generally (though not always) involves detriment to someone not privileged.

There are many privileges that are granted through general culture, so something that provides privilege in one culture may not (or may deny it) in another.

An example of a privilege that most people wouldn't think about: my parents are both great at finances, and have taught me from a young age about them. That's a privilege - it's an advantage most kids don't have. I didn't "earn" it in any way, and in this case my having it doesn't necessarily detract from others. But the knowledge I have gained because of my parents' fiscal ability is something that most of the people I know don't have.

An example of a privilege that is easy to spot is that I'm male. Being a male, even (or especially) in modern US culture, provides a plethora of advantages that most men aren't really aware of. We all know about things like wage differences, but even things like "not having to be vigilant about rape prevention" are privileges that men have and women don't.

An example of a privilege I lack is that I'm not straight. This goes far beyond issues like same-sex marriage and discrimination at work: the assumption of heterosexuality is so prevalent in culture that there is quite often a feeling that I have to hide my sexuality in everyday conversation or make other people angry/upset/flustered. Straight people don't have that stress: a straight man talking about his wife/lover/girlfriend does not cause any kind of disruption, but a gay man talking about his boyfriend/husband or a lesbian talking about her girlfriend/wife does. Thus, straight individuals are operating from a position of privilege.

We often can't avoid privilege - I can't stop being a guy, or at least not in ways that anyone would find reasonable, and I can't change who my parents are - but we can do our best to make sure that, in the exercising of privilege, we do not hurt or disadvantage others who are not privileged. This is often easier done that it seems, but first we have to be aware of the advantages we have that others lack. Also, we have to realize that, sometimes, levelling the field again isn't enough: to counteract privilege we, the privileged, must sometimes go out of our way to actively disadvantage ourselves in order to help someone who is unprivileged - especially if that privilege is indemic to culture and widespread.