Kindle Notes & Highlights
Don Brown's Human Universals16 is
This applies to computational “shapes” as much as physical ones—as a computational mechanism becomes better at solving an information-processing problem, it becomes worse at solving any number of other ones, which is why the guts of a chess-playing program look really different from the guts of a word processor (and why you could beat Word at chess but wouldn't want to write a book using Deep Blue).
This argument confuses specialization for particular things for specialization of function. The immune system, independent of the fact that it can do its job for many, many pathogens, can still be nicely and accurately described as specialized: defending the body against harmful pathogens. Surely
Many subroutines are constructed in such a way that the details of their operation are made unavailable to other parts of the program through the use of locally defined variables, private subroutines, and so on. Other parts of a large program have access to only the output, not the underlying operations. This is not an accident. Encapsulating a subroutine's procedures—putting them behind what is called an “abstraction barrier”—carries important advantages, including the ability to modify the code without having to worry what other parts of the program will be affected.
Dennett introduced the term “Cartesian Theater” in his book Consciousness Explained,
The Happiness Hypothesis,
Barry Schwartz has done some very interesting work in this area, showing that some of us often don't stop gathering information even when it's not worth our time.5 If you have ever been in a supermarket stuck
The researchers conclude that “self-serving attributions are not merely misrepresentations in their public descriptions of causality used by subjects in the service of self-presentation. Instead, this attributional asymmetry seems to reflect actual bias in private perceptions of objective causality.”27 (Note that the words “actual bias” suggest the authors believe that there's a “real, true” belief in there, rather than some representation in a propaganda module.†)
Tooby and Cosmides argue that one solution to this problem is to cultivate skills that make you uniquely valuable—irreplaceable as a friend. So, what kind of modules might your mind have to guide you toward being valuable in the social world? One thing you can do is be better at something than everyone else around. If you are the best at something, then you are irreplaceable insofar as there's no one else who can do whatever it is you do as well or better. Taking
Subjects gave either a friend or a stranger clues to help them solve a problem. When the task was described as important, they gave the stranger better clues than they gave their own friend. When the task was described as merely a game, they gave their friend better clues. Interestingly, when asked how helpful they had been to friends and strangers, people indicated they had given equally difficult clues to both.
He reported that people throw the dice harder if they want high numbers and “easier” (softer) if they want low numbers.
Some subjects were taunted with this instruction: “Now, if you are worried that you might choke under pressure or if you don't think you have what it takes to beat the target, then you might want to play it safe and just go for the two dollars.” Subjects with high self-esteem were more likely to choose the more difficult option, choice (b),45 and averaged lower earnings—25 cents—than the low self-esteem subjects, who averaged $2.80. In a second, similar experiment, experimenters found that those with high self-esteem “showed the greatest tendency to make high bets on themselves and then
...more
This measure was then compared to an independently generated index of how good a trader each of them was. Traders who showed a higher illusion of control earned less money and were rated as less effective at their jobs. The higher the illusion of control, the worse they were at their job, just like the gamblers in the thought experiment above.
The third and final category of positive illusions is unjustifiable optimism. People think that good things (like success in their career) will happen to them, and bad things (like car accidents) will not, in comparison to the average. Statistically, this can't be right.
Optimism is, from the point of view of being an appealing social partner, a pretty good thing. If positive things are likely to happen to me—or, really, if I can persuade you I think that good things will happen to me—then I'm a good bet as a friend, ally, or mate. Not only that, but the nice thing about predictions about the future is that, being about the future, they aren't wrong, at least not yet. Being strategically optimistic seems like an eminently reasonable strategy.
As we've seen, the claim that being overly optimistic is necessary to motivate doing risky, high-payoff things doesn't make any sense—being correctly optimistic will do this as well and, in fact, even better.58
The trick is that novelty is in the mind of the beholder. One's old ideas can seem very new to anyone who isn't deeply enmeshed in the field. To make a splash, you have to persuade others that that the idea is new, even if it isn't.* To do this, the press secretary in one's head can be strategically wrong, “believing” the idea is new and portraying it in this light. Then, consumers of the idea—editors, other scientists, and the public—can thereby be made to think so as well. I'm not saying that these people are lying—I'm saying that, by design, the press secretary modules are getting it wrong.
Being strategically wrong is a good—by which I mean “effective,” certainly not “moral”—strategy when the costs of being wrong are low and the strategic advantages—when persuading others of whatever it is that you're wrong about—are high. Because digging up the truth is often more trouble than it's worth, being strategically wrong is, sadly, often an excellent strategy.
designed to avoid pain and systems for thinking about
Fill in the following sentence in a way that makes it true. I really like to____but afterwards I wish I hadn't In contrast, you can tell that you're doing something that your long-term modules prefer if the sentence goes like this: I don't like to____, but afterwards I'm glad I did.
This is as true for adults as it is for children. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues developed a scale to assess self-control in adults, and found that people with greater self-control as measured by this scale engaged in less binge drinking and eating and also had better relationships and higher GPAs.
A similar effect was obtained when subjects were asked to suppress their emotions watching film clips (Robin Williams, or Terms of Endearment). Subjects were asked to solve some anagrams (this time, ones that could actually be completed), and those who suppressed their emotions solved an average of about five, while those who could laugh or cry solved seven.
