Lone Gunman

Recent talk of the cor­re­spon­dence bias (here) reminded me of pos­si­bly the best com­mence­ment speech that I’ve not yet writ­ten about (and I’ve writ­ten about quite a few): David Fos­ter Wallace’s com­mence­ment address to the grad­u­ates of Kenyon Col­lege in 2005.

The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only pub­lic talk con­cern­ing his worldview, was adapted fol­low­ing his death into a book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Deliv­ered on a Sig­nif­i­cant Occa­sion, About Liv­ing a Com­pas­sion­ate Life and is essen­tial read­ing for any­one inter­ested in per­sonal choice: the choice of think­ing and act­ing in a way con­trary to our self-centered “default” worldview.

Actu­ally, scrap that, it’s just essen­tial read­ing for everyone.

Because the traf­fic jams and crowded aisles and long check­out lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a con­scious deci­sion about how to think and what to pay atten­tion to, I’m gonna be pissed and mis­er­able every time I have to shop. Because my nat­ural default set­ting is the cer­tainty that sit­u­a­tions like this are really all about me. About MY hun­gri­ness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like every­body else is just in my way. And who are all these peo­ple in my way? And look at how repul­sive most of them are, and how stu­pid and cow-like and dead-eyed and non­hu­man they seem in the check­out line, or at how annoy­ing and rude it is that peo­ple are talk­ing loudly on cell phones in the mid­dle of the line. And look at how deeply and per­son­ally unfair this is. […]

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the free­way, fine. Lots of us do. Except think­ing this way tends to be so easy and auto­matic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my nat­ural default set­ting. It’s the auto­matic way that I expe­ri­ence the bor­ing, frus­trat­ing, crowded parts of adult life when I’m oper­at­ing on the auto­matic, uncon­scious belief that I am the cen­tre of the world, and that my imme­di­ate needs and feel­ings are what should deter­mine the world’s priorities.

To read the speech I rec­om­mend the ver­sion from More Intel­li­gent Life linked above as it is true to the speech as it was given. If you pre­fer a slightly more edited read, The Wall Street Jour­nal’s copy and The Guardian’s copy may be more to your taste.

As intro­verts are a minority—a mere twenty-five per­cent of the population—there are many per­sis­tent mis­con­cep­tions about the intro­vert per­son­al­ity among the majority. After read­ing The Intro­vert Advan­tage, Carl King decided to com­pile a list of myths about intro­verts, explain­ing why each mis­con­cep­tion is false:

1. Intro­verts don’t like to talk.
2. Intro­verts are shy.
3. Intro­verts are rude.
4. Intro­verts don’t like people.
5. Intro­verts don’t like to go out in public.
6. Intro­verts always want to be alone.
7. Intro­verts are weird.
8. Intro­verts are aloof nerds.
9. Intro­verts don’t know how to relax and have fun.
10. Intro­verts can fix them­selves and become Extroverts.

The list itself is fairly obvi­ous and pedes­trian, but it’s King’s short descrip­tions that are truly insight­ful. For exam­ple, here are the expla­na­tions for myths four, five and six:

Intro­verts intensely value the few friends they have. They can count their close friends on one hand. If you are lucky enough for an intro­vert to con­sider you a friend, you prob­a­bly have a loyal ally for life. Once you have earned their respect as being a per­son of sub­stance, you’re in.

Intro­verts just don’t like to go out in pub­lic FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the com­pli­ca­tions that are involved in pub­lic activ­i­ties. They take in data and expe­ri­ences very quickly, and as a result, don’t need to be there for long to “get it.” They’re ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharg­ing is absolutely cru­cial for Introverts.

Intro­verts are per­fectly com­fort­able with their own thoughts. They think a lot. They day­dream. They like to have prob­lems to work on, puz­zles to solve. But they can also get incred­i­bly lonely if they don’t have any­one to share their dis­cov­er­ies with. They crave an authen­tic and sin­cere con­nec­tion with ONE PERSON at a time.

via Link Banana

The name Eliezer Yud­kowsky imme­di­ately con­jours in my mind the word ratio­nal­ity (thanks to his addic­tive piece of fan fic­tion, Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ratio­nal­ity). On a recent visit to his site, this con­nec­tion has now be strength­ened after I saw his excel­lent essay on the twelve virtues of ratio­nal­ity:

1. Curios­ity: A burn­ing itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pur­sue truth.
2. Relin­quish­ment: Do not flinch from expe­ri­ences that might destroy your beliefs.
3. Light­ness: Sur­ren­der to the truth as quickly as you can.
4. Even­ness: You are not a hypoth­e­sis, you are the judge. There­fore do not seek to argue for one side or another.
5. Argu­ment: In argu­ment strive for exact hon­esty, for the sake of oth­ers and also your­self […]Do not think that fair­ness to all sides means bal­anc­ing your­self evenly between posi­tions; truth is not handed out in equal por­tions before the start of a debate.
6. Empiri­cism: Always know which dif­fer­ence of expe­ri­ence you argue about.
7. Sim­plic­ity: When you pro­fess a huge belief with many details, each addi­tional detail is another chance for the belief to be wrong.
8. Humil­ity: To be hum­ble is to take spe­cific actions in antic­i­pa­tion of your own errors.
9. Per­fec­tion­ism: The more errors you cor­rect in your­self, the more you notice.
10. Pre­ci­sion: More can be said about a sin­gle apple than about all the apples in the world. The nar­row­est state­ments slice deepest.
11. Schol­ar­ship: Each field that you con­sume makes you larger.
12. The Void

I believe that the ninth virtue, per­fec­tion­ism, is the most ele­gant and I implore you to read the full essay if only to read that descrip­tion in full (and, I guess, to dis­cover what The Void is). How­ever the eleventh virtue of ratio­nal­ity, schol­ar­ship, almost per­fectly describes why I write here and may go some way to explain­ing my diverse read­ing habits:

Study many sci­ences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you con­sume makes you larger. If you swal­low enough sci­ences the gaps between them will dimin­ish and your knowl­edge will become a uni­fied whole. If you are glut­to­nous you will become vaster than moun­tains. It is espe­cially impor­tant to eat math and sci­ence which impinges upon ratio­nal­ity: Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy, heuris­tics and biases, social psy­chol­ogy, prob­a­bil­ity the­ory, deci­sion the­ory. But these can­not be the only fields you study. The Art must have a pur­pose other than itself, or it col­lapses into infi­nite recursion.

We know that delib­er­ate prac­tice is an impor­tant part of learn­ing (and mas­ter­ing) new skills–but what role, if any, does mere pas­sive expo­sure play? Can rel­e­vant back­ground stim­u­la­tion help us to reduce the amount of effort and prac­tice nec­es­sary to mas­ter a skill?

To answer these ques­tions Jonah Lehrer con­tacted the authors of a recent paper study­ing exactly this and found that pas­sive expo­sure can be as effec­tive as practice, drastically cut­ting the effort required to learn.

These exper­i­ments […] demon­strated that lis­ten­ing to rel­e­vant back­ground stim­u­la­tion could be just as effec­tive as slav­ing away at the task itself, at least when the sub­jects had prac­ticed first. In fact, the sci­en­tists found that we don’t even have to be pay­ing con­scious atten­tion to the stim­uli – sub­jects still ben­e­fited from the stim­u­la­tion even when dis­tracted by an entirely unre­lated task. […]

Yes you do have to do the task, just not for the whole time. The main result is that if you prac­tice for 20 min­utes, and then you are pas­sively exposed to stim­uli for 20 min­utes, you learn as if you have been prac­tic­ing for 40 min­utes. You can cut the effort in half, and still yield the same benefit. […]

On a prac­ti­cal level, the present results sug­gest a means by which per­cep­tual train­ing reg­i­mens might be made markedly more effi­cient and less effort­ful. The cur­rent data indi­cate that it may be pos­si­ble to reduce the effort required by par­tic­i­pants by at least half, with no dele­te­ri­ous effect, sim­ply by com­bin­ing peri­ods of task per­for­mance with peri­ods of addi­tional stim­u­lus exposure.

Along with the obvi­ous caveats (the study looked only at audi­tory dis­crim­i­na­tion tasks), the pub­lished arti­cle offers some prac­ti­cal clar­i­fi­ca­tions:

Learn­ing was enhanced regard­less of whether the peri­ods of addi­tional stim­u­la­tion were inter­leaved with or pro­vided exclu­sively before or after target-task per­for­mance, and even though that stim­u­la­tion occurred dur­ing the per­for­mance of an irrel­e­vant (audi­tory or writ­ten) task. The addi­tional expo­sures were only ben­e­fi­cial when they shared the same fre­quency with, though they did not need to be iden­ti­cal to, those used dur­ing target-task per­for­mance. Their effec­tive­ness also was dimin­ished when they were pre­sented 15 min after prac­tice on the tar­get task and was elim­i­nated when that sep­a­ra­tion was increased to 4 h.

To help con­trol and man­age progress on a dif­fi­cult or long-term goal, we often split that goal into many indi­vid­ual sub­goals. Once we begin to com­plete these sub­goals, our con­tin­ued moti­va­tion and progress toward the main, or super­or­di­nate, goal can be compromised.

A study pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Per­son­al­ity and Social Psy­chol­ogy in 2006 shows that by putting peo­ple in mind of their sub­goal suc­cesses or on their main goal com­mit­ment causes dras­tic dif­fer­ences in their future effort (the lat­ter is better):

The authors show that when peo­ple con­sider suc­cess on a sin­gle sub­goal, addi­tional actions toward achiev­ing a super­or­di­nate goal are seen as sub­sti­tutes and are less likely to be pur­sued. In con­trast, when peo­ple con­sider their com­mit­ment to a super­or­di­nate goal on the basis of ini­tial suc­cess on a sub­goal, addi­tional actions toward achiev­ing that goal may seem to be com­ple­men­tary and more likely to be pursued.

via Derek Sivers (Yep, via the post I linked-to in my pre­vi­ous post. I felt that this needed its own post as I wanted to pro­vide a bal­anced view on the study, not just say­ing, some­what incor­rectly, “suc­cess on one sub-goal […] reduced efforts on other impor­tant sub-goals”.)