Causes are hard (impossible?)

Take-aways and quotes from Jonah Lehrer’s WIRED article “Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us.”

1. The brain isn’t seeking the literal truth—it just wants a plausible story that doesn’t contradict observation.


2. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us (misleadingly) make sense of facts.


3. Every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.”


4. Causal explanations are oversimplifications. This is what makes them useful—they help us grasp the world at a glance.


5. Our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts, and most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough. But when it comes to reasoning about complex systems—say, the human body—these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.


6. Causal beliefs are defined by their limitations.


7. While Hume was right that causes are never seen, only inferred, the blunt truth is that we can’t tell the difference.


8. We live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. There is a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.


9. Even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

The Pursuit of Whatever, etc.

Logical “conclusions” (quotes deserved):


1. Generalizing (“stereotyping”) is okay, unavoidable even. And generalizing on certain categories (species, sex, age) makes a lot more sense than generalizing on certain other categories (race, ethnicity, what you ate for breakfast).


2. If all goals are arbitrary (and they almost certainly are), it cannot be logically argued that a goal is good or bad. But it *can* be argued that a goal is stupid (relative to another goal) given your own preferences/aims/desires. (E.g., you might be dumb to pursue happiness if [1] happiness is out of your control and [2] you prefer to pursue goals that are under your control.)

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Casual observations:

The Pursuit of Whatever


3. Logical arguments have almost nothing to do with what goals people actually pursue—that comes down to something like “feelings” or “inertia.” (Making the conclusion above pretty much worthless.)


4. What bothers me about a buddhistical worldview where you just embrace what comes and nurture gratitude and whatnot is that I actually want to be “out there,” living in Reality and all the tribulations that it entails rather than trying to “master” myself to stop seeing tribulations as tribulations. What you call Inner Peace I call Fuzzy Feeling Chasing.


5. You needn’t have one Goal or even a primary goal. Life does not have Meaning, it has many meanings, that is if you allow for the fact that “meanings” are arbitrary, that gene propagation is at the foundation of it all, and that we don’t really get to “choose” (consciously) our goals.

Education and Productivity


6. If you’re trying to become productive or rich, it’s probably a good idea to choose those skillsets or knowledge sets at the (very small) intersection:





7. The main problem/difficulty with self-education is the lack of feedback (sounds trivial, but it’s not) that comes from being surrounded by smart people.


8. “Create-your-own-syllabus” makes little sense because it presumes that you know what will be valuable or interesting before you get into it. You have to pick a starting point, but the most important (and exciting) part is where it leads you from there.

Stereotyping


9. The pattern recognition stuff that we do might be the only way we have of learning (or seeing or hearing). How do you understand yourself without beginning with a category like “human,” for example? I’m open to other possibilities, but I’m not currently seeing them.


10. It’s silly to think that “stereotyping” necessarily puts people inside tidy boxes. Two reasons: (1) a big part of what makes an individual unique is their combination of categories, and (2) no individual perfectly fits every pattern. There’s nothing about recognizing patterns in women in general that prevents us from recognizing that a woman in particular does not fit every pattern.


11. The general patterns (stereotypes) might merely be initial hypotheses (almost always unconscious ones) we use when trying to understand an individual.

Romance


12. Suggesting that I go on dates when I don’t feel romantic interest is like suggesting that I go sit on the toilet when I don’t need to poop. (I don’t mean to say that romance is shitty, just that it’s a bodily function.)


13. Dating is not (for most guys, most of the time) about screening for marriage. Nor should it be. Feeling like we’re interviewing wife candidates when we’re dating would be every bit as buzzkilling as feeling like we’re reproducing when we’re having sex. It turns it into something much more scientific and rational than it needs to be.

The Emptiness and Pretension in Foodie-ism


14. There’s very little depth (that I can see) in foodie-ism. I think a good analogy is “party rock.” You’re playing with combinations of ingredients (sounds) until you find one that’s tasty (dance-worthy), but it’s not art because it’s not communication. The only thing it offers is pleasure.


15. Foodie-ism is probably annoying (to me) for two main reasons: (1) it is almost inescapably pretentious, and (2) it invites cargo cult foodies, people who care about the appearance of foodies. If people used geeky terminology about the molecular compounds that underlie flavors, then that would probably bother me a lot less than, say, the ridiculous descriptions on wine labels. (Thanks, Xan.)

Humor and Comedians


16. People, and especially comedians, who are bothered (“tortured,” but they don’t have to be miserable) tend to have more interesting things to say than those who aren’t.


17. The worst kinds of comedy (to me) are the happy-go-lucky cheery stuff and the stuff where there is no point other than to find a combination of words or facial expressions that induces a laugh. The best kind is where you can kind of tell that the comedian is pretty deeply bothered by something, but their comedy is not full of bitter complaints; rather, they’re using irony and absurdity as a kind of response to their reality.

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Questions / things that are bothering me:


18. How is this “fact” possible?: “No prey species has ever become extinct as the result of predation.” Exceptions or logic, please.


19. If I really want sausage but I also don’t want to want sausage, am I more “satisfied” if I do or don’t eat sausage?


20. Do people tend to become more or less interested in exploring big fundamental topics about Reality (e.g., evolution, biology, astronomy, and philosophy) upon deciding that the Meaning of Life isn’t going to turn up? Why?

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Inklings (newborn thoughts that might or might not be the subject of future posts):


21. (Good) art/aesthetics/creative-production is probably the combination of three elements: (1) something that’s bothering (“inspiring”) you, and then, given that, choosing an effective (2) medium and (3) tone (e.g., romantic, mockery, logical, “free-style”). Notice that (a) beauty is optional, and (b) the core of a creative work is something that’s bothering (“inspiring”) you.


22. Why is it that aesthetics are (to me) semi-sacred? Is it because I believe that beautiful things are some signal of truth value? (Or am I just unconsciously engaged in some bird-song-like mating ritual?) What’s the evidence for and against beauty’s truth-signaling power? How does it compare to, say, humor/mockery?


23. More on humor vs. beauty: They seem to me just two examples of “tone,” and in a lot of ways seem to have similar properties, but the biggest difference might be that while we have some vague sense of what makes something beautiful (e.g., harmony, symmetry, proportions), we’re really still in the dark about humor. All of the theories about humor that I’ve heard are, to put it gently, uninformative.


24. My brain seems to operate much better in writing than speaking. It might have something to do with the slow pace or the visual explicitness of it. Or maybe it’s just an after-the-fact thing, where it gives me the luxury to re-arrange subjects & verbs, carefully choose which word to put at the end of a sentence, and flip around or delete entire paragraphs.


25. Related to the last point, probably the biggest surprise for regular readers who don’t know me in person would be just how inarticulate I am. If my writing seems conversational, like the words are pristinely pouring out of my head, then I have succeeded at deceiving you.