Books and literature – a sibilant intake of breath

Conformity versus competence

[I]n most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Ordinary incompetence, as we have seen, is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy, and thereby violates the first commandment of hierarchal life: the hierarchy must be preserved.

…

Employees in the two extreme classes—the super-competent and the super-incompetent—are alike subject to dismissal. They are usually fired soon after being hired, for the same reason: that they tend to disrupt the hierarchy.

Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. The Peter Principle. Buccaneer Books, 1969. p. 45-6

Combinatorial math and the impossibility of rationality

A perfectly rational entity maximizes the expected satisfaction of its preferences over all possible future lives it could choose to lead. I cannot begin to write down a number that describes the complexity of this decision problem, but I find the following thought experiment helpful. First, note that the number of motor control choices that a human makes in a lifetime is about twenty trillion… Next, let’s see how far brute force will get us with the aid of Seth Lloyd’s ultimate-physics laptop, which is one billion trillion trillion times faster than the world’s fastest computer. We’ll give it the task of enumerating all possible sequences of English words (perhaps as a warmup for Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel), and we’ll let it run for a year. How long are the sequences that it can enumerate in that time? A thousand pages of text? A million pages? No. Eleven words. This tells you something about the difficulty of designing the best possible life of twenty trillion actions. In short, we are much further from being rational than a slug is from overtaking the starship Enterprise traveling at warp nine. We have absolutely no idea what a rationally chosen life would be like.

Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. 2019. p. 232 (italics in original)

Game theory and the limits of reason

I myself suffer from a morbid sense of despair, and even now, decades after I worked with von Neumann, I still find myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann. Normal people are not like that at all. Yes, they lie, they cheat, deceive, connive, and conspire, but they also cooperate, they can sacrifice themselves for others, or simply make decisions on a whim. Men and women follow their guts. They heed hunches and make careless mistakes. Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced. And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off all the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason.

Labatut, Benjamin. The MANIAC. Penguin Random House, 2023. p. 144-5. (italics in original)

Reading Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow recently, at several points I was struck by what seemed like the unjustified assumption that people are competent at mental arithmetic. Specifically, that you can give a person a list of probabilities and payouts and then find it legitimately surprising that they can’t or don’t pick the best one. For people constantly immersed in calculation this may be puzzling, but I also have personal experience of highly intelligent and knowledgeable people struggling at (or being unwilling to even try) calculating what a certain percentage of a number is, like for a tip. Studies on the numerical literacy of the general public reveal a worrisome inability to properly gauge millions against billions.

When mathematicians, logicians, and game theorists forget that much of the population cannot or will not calculate, they miss the obvious cause of deviations from their predictions and theories.

Cleese for the record

But in other areas I was becoming less diffident—or, in St. Peter’s parlance, less “wet.” Indeed, on one occassion, I actually got into a fight with a boy who was teasing me. There I was, lying on the floor, grappling with him, like a proper schoolboy; I even banged his head on the floor, at which point I thought, “Oh my God! If I start losing, he’ll do this to me,” and then, of course, started losing. Fortunately my form master, Mr. Howdle, arrived and broke the fight up. Funnily enough, it was about then that the bullying stopped. This first fight also proved to be my last. I had thought so, anyway, until I read in the Sunday Times recently that I had a fight with Terry Gilliam in the ’80s. I think this is unlikely: owing to the relatively rare occurrence of fisticuffs in the Cleese life it must be statistically probable that I would remember such uncommon events; they would tend to stand out sharply from the rather less pugilistic tone of the rest of my life. And I definitely don’t recall having a fight with Terry Gilliam. May I also point out that if I had, I would almost certainly have killed him. I think the only possible explanation for the Sunday Times article—if it was true—was that Terry attacked me, but that I failed to notice he was doing so. Terry is very short, due to his bandy legs, so when he scuttles around, he stays so close to the floor that it can be difficult to see what he is up to down there.

Cleese, John. So, Anyway… Penguin Random House, 2014. p. 43 (italics in original)

Humans struggle with allocating losses

Canada seems to have a weird atmosphere of being in a recession, but without that term being used and without the definition (in terms of GDP growth or contraction) being met.

This starts to make more sense when you see that the GDP growth is largely the result of population growth and growth in the labour supply – not increased output per worker. GDP per capita was $58,304 in Q1 of 2020 and $58,111 in Q4 of 2023. Meanwhile, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, inflation has averaged 4% per year over the span, so C$100 in 2024 buys what C$85.48 would have bought in 2020. The average Canadian is getting poorer, even with all the stimulus that was given out over the pandemic and with all the new debt which has been accumulated. I personally think governments have been pulling out all stops to keep asset prices (especially stocks and houses) high since the 2008 financial crisis, with very little consideration of what those measures are doing to the non-affluent and those in future generations.

This is worrisome both in the immediate context and as a broader signifier. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow stresses how people experience gains differently from losses, and find a loss of any size more aversive than they find a gain of that size pleasurable. He comments on the social and political implications:

If you are set to look for it, the asymmetric intensity of the motives to avoid losses and to achieve gains show up almost everywhere. It is an ever-present feature of negotiations, especially of negotiations of an existing contract, the typical situation in labor negotiations and in international discussions of trade or arms limitations. The existing terms define reference points, and a proposed change in any aspect of the agreement is inevitably viewed as a concession that one side makes to the other. Loss aversion creates an asymmetry that makes agreements difficult to reach. The concessions you make to me are my gains, but they are your losses; they cause you more pain than they give me pleasure. Inevitably, you will place a higher value on them than I do. The same is true, of course, of the very painful concessions you demand from me, which you do not appear to value sufficiently! Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult, because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanded pie. (p. 304)

Globally, this pattern is alarming too. Humanity is choosing to persist in activities which we know will cause catastrophic climate change, loss of wealth, and unprecedented damage to the natural world which sustains us. We are also massively failing to invest enough in non-fossil energy sources to retain our current standard of life. This is setting us up for brutal inter- and intra-national fights over allocating losses.

Inequality, entitlement, and the breakdown of social cohesion

The nuclear razor’s edge

I listened to the audiobook of Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War. Having followed the subject and read a lot about it over the years, it nonetheless had a lot of new information inside of a compellingly presented, plausible, and chlling story.

Our whole world can end in a couple of hours; live life accordingly.

Peter Russell tributes

In January, my friend and mentor Peter Russell died. His son Alex invited me to give remarks at his funeral reception: Remarks at the funeral of Peter Russell

Yesterday, I spoke at Innis College’s memorial event: Remarks about Peter Russell at Innis College

Furthermore, intelligence, particularly beyond a certain level, may lead to behaviors that make acquiring or holding on to influence less likely. People who are exceptionally smart think they can do everything on their own and do it better than everyone else. Consequently, they may fail to bring others along with them, leaving their potential allies in the dark about their plans and thinking. Being recognized as exceptionally smart can cause overconfidence and even arrogance, which, as we will see in more detail later, can lead to the loss of power. And smart people may think that because of their great intelligence they can afford to be less sensitive to others’ needs and feelings. Many of the people who seem to me to have the most difficulty putting themselves in the other’s place are people who are so smart they can’t understand why others don’t get it. Lastly, intelligence can be intimidating. Although intimidation can work for a while, it is not a strategy that brings much enduring loyalty.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. Power: Why Some People Have It — and Others Don’t. HarperCollins, 2010. p. 56

Taleb on the domain dependence of knowledge

I used to attend a health club in the middle of the day and chat with an interesting Eastern European fellow with two Ph.D. degrees, one in physics (statistical no less), the other in finance. He worked for a trading house and was obsessed with the anecdotal aspects of the markets. He once asked me doggedly what I thought the stock market would do that day. Clearly I gave him a social answer of the kind “I don’t know, perhaps lower”-quite possibly the opposite answer to what I would have given him had he asked me an hour earlier. The next day he showed great alarm upon seeing me. He went on and on discussing my credibility and wondering how I could be so wrong in my “predictions,” since the market went up subsequently. Now, if I went to the phone and called him and disguised my voice and said, “Hello, this is Doktorr Talebski from the Academy of Lodz and I have an interrresting prrroblem,” then presented the issue as a statistical puzzle, he would laugh at me. “Doktorr Talevski, did you get your degree in a fortune cookie?” Why is it so?

Clearly there are two problems. First, the quant did not use his statistical brain when making the inference, but a different one. Second, he made the mistake of overstating the importance of small samples (in this case just one single observation, the worst possible inferential mistake a person can make). Mathematicians tend to make egregious mathematical mistakes outside of their theoretical habitat. When Tversky and Kahneman sampled mathematical psychologists, some of whom were authors of statistical textbooks, they were puzzled by their errors. “Respondents put too much confidence in the result of small samples and their statistical judgments showed little sensitivity to sample size.” The puzzling aspect is that not only should they have known better, “they did know better.” And yet…

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2007. p. 194-5 (italics in original)

Sagan on self-skepticism

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudoscience is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or “inerrant” revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error—even serious error, profound mistakes—will be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously.

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Ballantine Books, 1996. p. 21

Category: Books and literature