Why Being Wrong Makes Humans So Smart 311
Hugh Pickens sends in an excerpt in last week's Boston Globe from Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. "The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to make mistakes is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent. Rather than treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect — an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence — we need to recognize that human fallibility is part and parcel of human brilliance. Neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Humans use inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly. However, Schulz writes, 'The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren't necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false.' Schulz recommends that we respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity and demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them. 'Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right. We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy.'"
Be Careful (Score:3, Interesting)
I think people focus their criticism more on those that make errors that seem glaringly obvious to everyone else. We tend to call those "stupid" errors. It's true however people tend to become far too critical of others who seem to be unable to reach the same conclusions at a high speed that we have already come to.
On the other hand, there are obvious mistakes that should not be conflated with probabilistic errors due to inductive reasoning. When the heads of BP cut corners that result in a giant explosion, a several month long oil leak, and billions of dollars in damage to the environment and people's lives, we can attribute that to gross negligence.
When a politician decides to engage in 2 costly wars while lowering taxes for the rich, or when a majority of society elects politicians who repeatedly punish the poor and middle class while rewarding the rich, and then complain about not having enough money to support their expensive lifestyles, you can attribute that to stupidity.
In Western culture, maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Up to a point (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at what happens in Japan when a major mistake is make and in the west. Has anyone from BP taken accountability? Has anyone from Boeing ever laid down their jobs because they killed a couple of hundred people with their bad decision? Has any airline director every left? No.
But in Japan the higher ups DO feel that they are at fault for mistakes.
Your explenation of western attitude often becomes: A fault is nobodies fault.
Evolutionary Bloom Filter? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter [wikipedia.org]
Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
the ability to reach a conclusion that could be incorrect... but is still probably correct.
That sounds a lot like fuzzy logic [wikipedia.org] to me..
Re:Up to a point (Score:3, Interesting)
The "fault is nobody's fault" is exactly what we're talking about! Don't resign in disgrace or commit suicide, just go on like nothing has happened. What BP is doing is crass modern Western shamelessness. Why is that that BP is the first thing that pops into mind? Can we have a higher discussion without interjecting the crisis of the month?
Besides, responsibility has been taken already, so if there are any screwups, we already know who to blame: "I ultimately take responsibility for solving this crisis. I am the president and the buck stops with me." - Obama, May 28 2010.
Re:Look at yourselves in the mirror. You do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Man. That totally reminds me of how much I hate this one dude at work. He gets this stupid-ass grin on his face whenever he thinks he's telling you something you don't know, and it makes me want to knock the smug bastard's teeth out of his head.
At least he's a socially inept moron with a stupid-sounding voice, so the cosmic joke is on him.
Re:Rogue_rat (Score:0, Interesting)
To be fair, I think most foreign companies have learnt a lot from it, something along the lines of:
"If you're a foreign company operating in US territory, under US regulations, at the behest of the US, employing US citizens, and using US contractors, then if something goes wrong, expect every US element to shrug off it's own blame and responsibilities and shift them all onto you."
I know there'll be a lot less companies wanting to invest in the US and a lot less companies outside the US wanting to work with US entities having seen how BP immediately from the outset offered to pay over and above it's obligations in compensation, whilst every US company and entity has ducked and dived even their basic responsibilities in offering to pay what they owe.
Still, I guess US companies are used to not accepting blame seeing as they've been getting away with the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Nigeria ever year for about the last 50 years, and completely dodged their responsibilities with the Bhopal leak.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the potential benefit isn't for those who are confidently intelligent. They see mistakes as a means of learning. The real benefit is for people who are tremendously insecure. They see mistakes and try to explain them away, or blame them on something else, negating the possible positive benefit of seeing why the mistake happened. For instance, they may have overlooked something. Instead of noticing that and learning to look for it the next time, they shy away from looking at the fault in detail.
I see this kind of thing all the time with my students. They misread something, and if I comment on it, no matter how nicely, the shut down because they don't like to be wrong because they think it makes them seem stupid. When in reality, they are trying to use inductive reasoning, which is a huge part of my goal. But...they miss the learning opportunity when they close down.
This article will make its way into my introductory lessons now. It will supplement the big sign on my door that says, "There is nothing wrong with being wrong."
False claims - The key to knowledge. (Score:3, Interesting)
Heuristics (Score:3, Interesting)
Shulz is precise, just not quite accurate in her descriptions, assertions and conclusions.
It's not (just) inductive reasoning that produces the humans' results, it's heuristics. We create the fastest good enough result rather than the best possible result more slowly. The former proved conclusions that are correct enough but very fast, which evolution favors over slower but more accurate decision making. You can be right as god, but if you get ate you're just very right poop.
Heuristics works in all directions, top-down, bottom-up and side-to-side. Inductive, deductive and all the rest is labels we developed much later to try to describe what we could figure out about what's really going on in our heads. We can do those things because they're all part of how we work, but on the fly we never work in only one direction. Heuristics develops chains of thought according to associations, and so can fill in the chain (more often, the tree)
There are some things that defy logical reasoning, such as language. We can use reasoning to figure out how to talk about the arrangement in memory of the items we can recall and so talk about, but learning to communicate happens far faster than learning can account for. Hence "generative grammar" and the utterly arbitrary nature of language production. Such things are predetermined in the way of species specific behaviors. We are genetically predisposed for these, and no logic could possibly keep up. This could be hardwired heuristics, though nobody can prove that as yet, but it certainly acts like it.
So, heuristics, not induction, plus hardwired exceptions. Thus, we're never right, but we're right enough (to varying degrees) fast enough to survive.
Top Shulz's cake with that frosting, and her precision becomes accurate also when it comes to our (neuroscientists) present best picture of how we think.
It's not in the article above, but thinking that's always completely right has the major failing of being unable to produce novel responses. Heuristics allow the adaptability which novel situations require (another ability favored by evolution as well as Dr. Chandra), and which allows for creativity.
Sounds like a very good book. Adequately correct too. Must have been written heuristically.
Re:This is why I use this name (Score:4, Interesting)
What annoys me is that managers expect perfection from imperfect being. I remember in my second year as an engineer I was testing an FPGA using a self-designed testbox. By a simply drawing a line in the wrong place I had connected 28 volts to 4 of the pins, which then blew-out the FPGA.
Rather than say "Ooops. Fix it and try again," the managers totally over-reacted and stopped work on the project. We wasted two weeks on this simple error. Thousands of dollars in man-hours because of a damaged $200 part. Rdiculous. I identified the problem within just a few hours and had it fixed by the next day, but the managers went into panic mode and forbade me from entering the lab until a 2 week review was finished.
They would not allow for error.
VERY old news (Score:5, Interesting)
David Hume [wikipedia.org] pointed all of this out hundreds of years ago. And he backed up all his claims with plenty of evidence that was readily available at the time.
I wonder if Kathryn Schulz's is aware of this?
Re:Be Careful (Score:5, Interesting)
90% of income taxes are paid by the 1% richest earners. 99% are paid by the 10% richest. Yes I know - an inconvenient fact but also happens to be true (came direct from the IRS).
The simple truth [lcurve.org] is that they should pay much more. If you want to hold all the wealth, why shouldn't you pay all the taxes? The idea that a few can make almost all the money and yet accept less than their share of the stewardship (through various tax dodges including ye olde capital gains) is ridiculous no matter how you examine it. The top 10 taxpayers in the year 2000 paid taxes on only 50% of their income, another fact straight from the IRS. Typical wageearners who work for some corporation have to pay taxes on nearly 100% of their income. Now what's fair?
Machine Learning? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think that anyone who has dabbled in machine learning would not be too shocked (weather by Hume's version or this post). It's the error term in machine learning, adaptive filtering, etc. that really drives the learning. As a stupid but simple example: Least Mean Squares in adaptive filtering (essentially gradient descent over the error surface).
Humans Prefer Abduction to Induction, Deduction (Score:3, Interesting)
DEDUCTION: Rule + Case -> Conclusion
Induction and Abduction use the elements in a different way:
INDUCTION: Case + Conclusion -> Rule
ABDUCTION: Conclusion + Rule -> Case
Only deduction provides a valid inference. But humans default to using abduction and learn induction and deduction only slowly through formal training.
Re:I'm never wrong... (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus Experience and Comon Sense (Score:1, Interesting)
My personal sum of 50+ years of inductive reasoning, refined by experience and considerable reflection thereof, formal and informal - over decades, leads me to infer that :
- self-interest varies according to immediacy and extent considered - both social and material - and is composed of the totality of these principles.
- avoiding necesssary action or improvement is laziness.
- refusing to acknowledge the necessity of action, and reincurring in detrimental action and avoiding corrective or beneficial action is stupidity.
- willfully supporting detrimental action is evil.
Corporate serfdom is - from the point of view of the general ndividual, and humanity - immediately and ultimately evil, stupid, and lazy - through greed. Greed is irrational. Detrimental. Limited. Stupid. And evil.
Inference does not exist in a vacuum.
It is refined and improved by experience and reflection.
The immediate product of this process is your basic common-sense.
In some cultures being wrong is ok (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm from Scandinavia, one of the biggest cultural differences that I notice in my day-to-day work with people from other cultures is that people from other cultures tend to have a lot harder time admitting that they were wrong. They see this as some kind of defeat, and the really stupid ones keep pushing their idea even though they know it's bad. Here, people won't look down on people admitting that they were wrong, instead you will get "respect" for acknowledging that you were wrong and taking corrective action. This kind of open attitude is a necessity if you want to see innovation instead of fear...
Re:Rogue_rat enjoys cock frequently (Score:3, Interesting)
Given everything I'm hearing about BP's higher than average safety violation problems, I know they may talk the talk, but apparently they do not walk the walk.
Companies SAY things all the time that they really do not mean.
For example at my company we have three status rankings for projects.
GREEN
YELLOW
RED
In three years, for projects which were cancelled, which were late, which were horrible failures, guess which status rankings were NEVER USED.
I foolishly used yellow once and the reaction was strong. I said it was yellow because it was going to miss its date and needed more resources.
Not a good idea.
Re:Rogue_rat enjoys cock frequently (Score:5, Interesting)
You told me, but you didn't convince me.
Actually, had they told anybody, the job would stop. Every employee has the authority to stop a job - any job. There aren't some jobs that some people can stop and some jobs that other people can stop, anybody can stop a job for safety on a BP rig (or any BP facility). That gets pounded into your head day from day 1 - if you see something that you think is unsafe, you stop it, and everybody gets together and double-checks the plan and makes sure they haven't missed anything that would make it unsafe.
There are practical limits, of course. For example, if I'm not involved in a job and I have no idea if it's safe or not because I'm not qualified enough to know the difference, then I have no business stopping a job. I still have the authority to stop it, but I won't stop a job because I have no idea what's involved. However if I'm involved in a job and I feel unsafe, I will absolutely stop the job.
By the same token, management may be pushing to get a job done a certain way (they always want to use the low cost option), but if they aren't qualified to know what is safe and what isn't they obviously aren't going to stop the job for safety. However, if you are qualified to know if it's safe, and you think it is not safe, you MUST stop the job. If you're working on a job and you feel unsafe, you MUST stop the job.
All it took was for one person to say "This doesn't seem safe, we need to stop the job" and the job would have stopped right then and there. The fact that it didn't means either nobody said to stop the job, or there was a serious breach of BP policy.
In other words, all of this "If they had just listened to the engineers" stuff is either complete bullshit (as in, never happened), or criminal mis-management at the rig level. This is not the kind of decision that happens further up the chain. There is a very real possibility that there was a local culture to ignore safety concerns in spite of BP policy, in which case the ones responsible actually are the people on the rig. Not Tony Hayward, not the President of BP Americas, but the rig management and possibly one level above them (if only for putting such people in a position of authority).
I do think there is a real problem with BP's management culture which makes accidents more likely. They have a tendancy to move managers around from position to position, and they tend to stay at one place for no more than two years. The idea is to get a "broad understanding" of oil field operations as well as the corporate side. This means if they are ever going to get a top-level manager, they can't keep them in one place for very long. This leads to serious inconsistencies in management of a particular facility/rig. They also tie bonuses directly to how much of your budget was left over each year. This creates a perfect storm for accidents due to poor maintenance, as the easiest place to cut is the maintenance budget (safety & compliance and production always gets funded). I believe this is why BP has the worst record for environmental accidents in the industry by a huge margin. How that directly relates to this spill is going to be subtle, though. I would definitely name it as a contributing factor.