The Perils of Introspection

Heard a fascinating interview of Malcolm Galdwell on NPR this weekend. He mentioned a couple of different psychological tests which question the foundations of our understanding about free will.

The first test was called the Poster Test, which Gladwell explains here:

[A]sking people to think about what they want causes them to change their opinion of what they want, in fact it screws up their ability to understand and recognize what they want. This problem in psychology is called the Perils of Introspection Problem, and a lot of research has been done by a guy named Tim Wilson at U.V.A. and he once did this very simple experiment called the Poster Test.

And the Poster Test is you got a bunch of posters in a room, you bring in some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who in the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn’t have to explain their poster. So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.

Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this—that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there where Impressionist prints and then there were these photos of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?

Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it’s a language problem. You’re someone, you know in your heart that you prefer the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice. Now you see this time and time again in for example, market research.

That the act of getting someone in a room and asking them to explain their preference causes them to move away from the more sophisticated, more daring, more radical ideas. The classic example is All in the Family. When the first pilot was made back in the 70s, it was taken to ABC and ABC had a big room full of people, as many people as this, and they showed them the test and they asked them to rate the pilot, asked them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 100. You need 70 to get on the air basically. This All in the Family pilot got 40. An unbelievably low score. And the comments were, ‘well, the real problem is Archie Bunker, he needs to be a little softer, more nurturing, more of a caring father.’ That was people’s response. So what did ABC do? They passed on it. Guys went to CBS, CBS tested it, did really poorly, but some guy at the top of CBS really liked it, and said, well why not, let’s just play it, they put it on the air and it was one of the most lucrative sitcom franchises in the history of television. So what does this mean?

Does this mean we can’t trust people at all? Maybe. What is really means, though, is that there is a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly and when we say that they’re ugly they really are ugly and we’re always gonna think their ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think, they challenge us, we don’t know how to describe them, and we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better was to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way to distinguish between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual.

And so often when we use the evidence of what people say, to determine what we ought to do, what we ought to go forward [with], we end up throwing out not just the things that ought to be thrown out, but the very things that are most meaningful, and have the potential to be most revolutionary.

There are, I think, two important lessons in that; the first is the one I dwell on in my book, which is simply that because of this fact people who come up with new ideas and new products or radical new things need to be very careful in how they interpret the evidence of consumers, the people that they ask about, random people whose opinions they seek. That we need to be very skeptical of ‘no’ and very skeptical of ‘ugly’ and very skeptical of ‘I don’t like that’. Particularly when we’re dealing with something that is radical and in some way challenging and difficult for someone to completely explain their feelings about. That’s one implication.

But the second implication, which is really one that’s more relevant to this discussion here, is that we’ve gotten really really good in recent years at describing all kinds of things about the way that human beings work and the way the mind operates. We understand genetics, we understand physiology, we have a whole vast array of knowledge now about why we do the things we do. But there is one area, perhaps the most important area of all, where we remain really really bad, and that is interpreting the contents of our own hearts, and as we go forward and learn more and more about human beings, I think we need to remember this fact, and to be humbled, because I’m not sure this is a mystery that we’re gonna solve.

The second experiment was simple. Take a person off the street and ask them to look at a picture of an average guy and ask them, "This is Joe. Do you like Joe or not?" They are also asked to hold a cup of coffee, although they are not let to believe that the coffee is part of the test. By outward appearances, everyone is given the same test, with no variation. However, there is one subtle variation: one group is given hot coffee and the other is given cold coffee. Few people believe the results, but time and again, people given the hot coffee say they like Joe and the people given cold coffee say they don't like Joe. (The inference here being that we subconsciously associate Joe the person with Joe, the nickname for coffee.)

Gladwell points out that we are vulnerable to racial bias when using the colors white and black to describe race. Though Gladwell is half-black, he was shocked to learn he himself has a negative bias against blacks. (Though Gladwell's book Blink deals with this in part, he added that Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will deals with the issue of racial bias more completely.)

The implications of these simple tests are staggering. How much of our decision making are we really in control of? How many of our choices are sculpted by mere circumstance? More concretely, how much of our entertainment is greenlit, or cancelled, based on poorly interpreted focus groups?

Finally, one has to wonder how John Stuart Mill and all the other 19th century philosophers who obsessed about the question of free will would respond when presented with these 21st century test results...

A hole in one from 300 million miles away

This is from the superb IMAX documentary Roving Mars, which shows NASA's probe actually landing on Mars about halfway in. For anyone who thinks NASA has become blasé about space travel, just study the looks on Mission Control's faces. Very, very tense!

Type 0.7

I'm shaking my head in bewilderment and handing you a book, open to page 307... trust me, you have to read this:

To understand the technology of civilizations thousands to millions of years ahead of ours, physicists sometimes classify civilizations depending on their consumption of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. When scanning the heavens for intelligent life, physicists do not look for little green men but for civilizations with the energy output of type I, II, and III civilizations. The ranking was introduced by Russian physicist Nikolai Kardashev in the 1960s for classifying the radio signals from possible civilizations in outer space. Each civilization type emits a characteristic form of radiation that can be measured and catalogued.

A type I civilization has harnessed planetary forms of energy. Their energy consumption can be precisely measured: by definition, hey are able to utilize the entire amount of solar energy striking their planet, or 10¹⁶ watts. With this planetary energy, they might control or modify the weather, change the course or hurricanes, or build cities on the ocean. Such civilizations are truly masters of their planet and have created a planetary civilization.

A type II civilization has exhausted the power of a single planet and has harnessed the power of an entire star, or approximately 10²⁶ watts. They are able to consume the entire energy output of their star and might conceivably control solar flares and ignite other stars.

A type III civilization has exhausted the power of a single solar system and has colonized large portions of its home galaxy. Such a civilization is able to utilize energy from 10 billion stars, or approximately 10³⁶ watts.

Each type of civilization differs from the next lower type by a factor of 10 billion. Hence a Type III civilization, harnessing the power of billions of star systems, can use 10 billion times the energy output of a type II civilization, which in turn harnesses 10 billion times the output of a type I civilization. Assuming a civilization grows at a modest rate of 2 to 3 percent in its energy output per year... we can estimate that our current civilization is approximately 100 to 200 years from attaining type I status. It will take roughly 1,000 to 5,000 years to achieve type II status and 100,000 to 1,000,000 years to achieve type III status....

To describe our present day civilization, astronomer Carl Sagan advocated creating finer gradations between civilization types. Type I, II, and III civilizations, we have seen, generate a total energy output of roughly 10¹⁶, 10²⁶, and 10²⁶ watts, respectively. Sagan introduced a type I.1 civilization, which generates 10¹⁷ watts of power, a type I.2 civilization, which generates 10¹⁸ watts of power, and so on. By dividing each type into ten smaller subtypes, we can begin to classify our own civilization. On this scale, our present civilization is more like a type 0.7—within striking distance of being truly planetary....

But the transition from type O to type I is also the most perilous, because we still demonstrate the savagery that typified our rise from the forest. In some sense, the advancement of our civilizations is a race against time. On one hand, the march toward a type I planetary civilization may promise us an era of unparalleled peace and prosperity. On the other hand, the forces of entropy (the greenhouse effect, pollution, nuclear war, fundamentalism, disease) may yet tear us apart. Sir Martin Rees sees these threats, as well as those due to terrorism, bioengineered germs, and other technological nightmares, as some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. It is sobering that he gives us only a fifty-fifty chance of successfully negotiating this challenge.

I could include the bit about type IV civilizations, but isn't your brain already hurting?

Far Out

The white speck in the sky? That's Earth. As seen from Mars.


(Click the image to enlarge it)

Our Inter-Galactic Escape Hatch

WARNING: READING THIS POST COULD GIVE YOU AN ANEURYSM.

Great scientists explain murky concepts very lucidly. I had the good luck of listening to Michio Kaku on NPR. Kaku is the author of Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos.

Kaku's specialty is String Theory, which is too difficult to explain here, but he did speak about "dark matter"—matter which has a weight like regular matter but which is invisible to us and is about ten times more plentiful than regular matter. What, then, is this "dark matter" made up of?

To answer that, think for a moment about a black hole—a star whose gravity is so strong that it has collapsed under its own weight and not even light can escape from its pull. Where does all the matter go that gets sucked into a black hole? Kaku suggests that the regular matter gets spit out into another universe, a parallel universe, where this matter gets converted into dark matter, presumably. Thus, the "inverted" black hole might look quite similar to a big bang. Could it be, then, that our own big bang was the result of another universe's black hole?

While mind-bending, Kaka turns it up a notch when he talks about the end of our own universe. "Eventually, billions of years from now, our universe will become too cold to be habitable... and we will choose to either die, adapt, or move on." Given that the first two options aren't viable, how could we leave our own universe?

Easy—we build an escape hatch to one of these parallel worlds. All we need are atom smashers 10 light years wide.

Did you get that? Can you even conceive how large that is? In layman's terms, it's about 60 trillion miles. From Wiki: "Earth's most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was 13 light hours away from Earth in September 2004. It took Voyager 27 years to cover that distance." Our nearest known star is Proxima Centauri and it's 4.22 light years away. So this atom smasher would have to be 1.56 light years larger than a round trip ticket to Centauri. Crikey.

Unfortunately, with machines that "small", we'd still only be able to slide mere molecules through this inter-universal portal. That means we'd have to use nanobots to "blip" into the other universe, get them to find a habitable place to thrive, recreate our DNA and personalities, and then repopulate.

To put it in the words of Alias' Marshall, "That sound—that "boom" you just heard—that's my mind, exploding."