Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

📖 Nonsense. The power of not knowing

8 min read

Why did I want to read it?

I deal with uncertainty poorly. My mechanism to deal with it is usually to be paranoid (🦜Only the paranoid survive). This is an attempt to learn about better ways to deal with uncertainty

What did I get out of it?

Prologue

…in an increasingly complex, unpredictable world, what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower or confidence in what we know. It’s how we deal with what we don’t understand (p. 15)

The mind state caused by ambiguity is called Uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable (p. 9)

Developed by a brilliant psychologist named Arie Kruglanski, a person’s need for closure measures a particular “desire for a definite answer on some topic, any answer as opposed to confusion and ambiguity” (p. 12).

Kruglanski believed that such need of closure is an adaptative mechanism to get things done.

See The art of contradiction. What diversity offers for its relation to prejudices.

A need for closure is a need to reduce cognitive dissonance. This reminds me a little to the need-for-cognition on 📖 Noise. A Flaw in Human Judgement.

The hidden A’s. The secrets of sense making

Mark Zanna and Joel Cooper discover in 1974 the effect of Misattribution of arousal: the physical discomfort we experience when we are in a situation of cognitive dissonance can be neutralized by any alternative explanation of that discomfort (e.g., changes in heat or ventilation in a room). (p. 55)

Travis Proulx and his colleagues proposed a general process for cognitive dissonance. (p. 58-59)

  1. When our assumptions about the world are violated, we experience a spike in brain activity, where the anterior cingulate cortex is the starring role. This happens even for good news. In a 2011 experiment, subjects with low self-eteem displayed lower changes in blood pressure when they received negative rather than positive feedback.
  2. Then, we move to anxious vigilance (“abstraction”) looking for patterns, via a neural network called behavioral inhibition system.
  3. Then another neural network takes over, behavioral approach system, forcing us to commit to either “assimilation” (explain away the incoherence) or “accommodate” (change a belief).
  4. Independently of the content of the violation, there is a process of “affirmation”: intensification of other beliefs and finding comfort in social groups, in response to the threat of incoherence.

Shocks and tremors. The problem with urgency

Men and women who in general didn’t like uncertainty found trusting their partners a moderate amount more unpleasant than trusting them a lot or a little (as both trust and distrust, perhaps counterintuitively, are comforting insofar as they provide certainty). As you’d guess, they also tended to shoehorn any conflicting or ambiguous information about their partners into preexisting views. They were more mentally locked in. Unfortunately, what’s called for during uncertain times is greater flexibility. (p. 77)

To improve the odds of making rational decisions, we need:

Fifty days in Texas. Why intentions are misread

A wide range of studies shows that negotiating a good deal requires someone who can handle confusing and contradictory messages without getting emotional, assuming too much, or fixating en one tidbit or another. At the same time, feeling pressured or threatened makes uncertainty feel more unpleasant. (p. 92)

…ambivalence is a far more common state of mind than most people assume (p. 108)

Overtested USA. When to resist momentum

Talks about Iatrogenics

The hemline hassle. A strategy of ignorance

How Zara decided to stop trying to forecast and instead, be reactive to consumer trends (the same just-in-time system than Taiichi Ohno in Toyota).

…we can’t always resolve ambiguity by seeking out more information (p. 153)

Michael Raynor (business writer and strategist) studied the strategies of companies, to discover that:

The most lucrative tactics were committed tactics, that is, irreversible financial wagers on the future (…) strategies with the greatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure. (p. 136)

Even in unpredicatble indsutries like high-end fashion, business tend to assume that they can predict more about the future than is actually possible. (p. 139)

One Swedish study in the late 1990s found that ambiguity tolerance was one of the most critical variables linked to higher financial performance (p. 151)

Building a better Ducati. The uses of uncertainty

The key point of the chapter is that:

The reasons for success can be just as ambiguous as the reasons for failure, but they are usually even harder to discover, since we’re even more unlikely to look for them (p. 174)

For example Pixar conducted postmortems after each success.

And another view on the leader dilemma in 📖 Superpronosticadores. El arte y la ciencia de la predicción:

On the surface, there may appear to be a paradox between the confidence of entrepreneurs like Jobs and companies like PIxar and the need to embrace uncertainty. Innovation requires boldness and self-assuredness, but it also depends on being able to dwell in uncertainty. How can we square these seemingly opposed traits? (…) One answer is that lasting knowledge earns its keep by allowing itself to be persistently questioned (p. 177)

The puzzle man. Where to find hidden answers

Tony McCaffrey, psychologist at the University of Massachusetts studies patterns in inventions. He said about Generalist vs specialist:

“Inventors”, he said, “think both broadly and deeply. Specialists tend to think deeply but not broadly. Dabblers tend to think broadly but no deeply. (p. 202)

The art of contradiction. What diversity offers

Dean Simonton psychologist at the University of California has made an historical study of Japan:

Openness to outside influences and the frequency of travel abroad, he found, was correlated with simultaneous gains in achievements in business and religion (p. 207)

Even though foreign-bron immigrants represent just 13 percent of the US population, they account for 30 percent of the nation’s patents and a quarter of its Nobel laureates. (p. 207)

Jerome Bruner (author of the reverse-colored playing card study):

Our shared, distorting preconceptions constitute what we call culture. (p. 208).

The cool history to detect Russian spies:

During the Cold War, the CIA reportedly employed a modified version of the Stroop test in order to detect Soviet spies. In their version, the words were in Russian. The idea was to uncover whether someone was secretly fluent in the language. If suspected spies didn’t speak Russian, identifying the color wouldn’t slow them down, because there would be no conflicting impulse to read the word. If the task slowed them down, they knew Russian. The test may have been particularly effective in uncovering spies because it’s difficult to suppress the automatic reaction to read the word. You’d have to practice. (p. 210)

Gordon Allport (also psychologist), studied prejudices and wrote:

Prejudiced people, Gordon Allport [psychologist] wrote in his landmark work, The Nature of Prejudice [1954], “seem afraid to say ‘I don’t know’“. They have an “urge for quick and definite answers”, “cling to past solutions”, and have a preference for “order, but especially social order”. (p. 220)

Then psychologists Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel linked this to the need of closure of Arie Kruglanski.

We need to consciously find the contradictions, as with 📖 Noise. A Flaw in Human Judgement, Actively open-minded thinking:

We are all stereotypes. Our rapid-fire assumptions are how we achieve the miracle of simplification. Culture determines the “style” with which we reduce complexity and ambiguity. Since we can’t have no style at all, we can’t avoid relying on preconceptions (…) we can sample from other cultures (…) Inevitably, there remains vast areas of knowledge (…) Yet we can be bighearted and acknowledge these gaps. We can struggle, persistently, to seek out the contradictions our minds naturally work to eliminate. (p. 221)

Epilogue

Staying in the uncertainty is also a moral imperative:

For Chekhov, morality lay not in our relationships with what we know, but in how admirably we deal with what we don’t (p. 230)

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