The User Illusion

December 18, 2016

Book review: In The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size (Penguin Books, 1991, English translation 1998), Danish science writer Tor Norretranders dissects the powerful illusion that humans believe that what they see and think is accurate or real. The User Illusion (TUI) relentlessly describes human consciousness and the biological basis for the false realities that we believe are real. TUI is about the constraints on knowledge. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the curse of always increasing disorder (entropy), information theory and mathematics all make it clear that all sentient beings in the universe operate under severe information constraints. That includes the limits on the human mind. To believe otherwise is a mistake, or more accurately, an illusion.

TUI’s chapter 6, The Bandwidth of Consciousness, gets right to the heart of matters. Going there is an enlightening but humbling experience. When awake, the information flow from human sensory nerves to the brain is about 11.2 million bits per second, with the eyes bringing in about 10 million bits per second, the skin about 1 million bits per second, with the ears and nose each bringing in about 100,000 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot, right? No, it isn’t. The real world operates at unknowable trillions of gigabits/second, so what we see or perceive isn’t much. 

Fortunately, humans needed only enough capacity to survive, not to know the future 10 or 100 years in advance or to see a color we can’t see through human eyes with just three different color sensing cell types (red, green, blue). For human survival, three colors was good enough. Evidence of evolutionary success is a planet population of about 7.4 billion humans that’s rapidly heading toward 8 billion.

Given that context, that 11.2 million bits/second may sound feeble but things are much weirder than just that. The 11.2 million bits/second are flowing into our unconscious minds. We are not conscious of all of that. So, what is the bandwidth of consciousness? How much of the 11.2 million bits/second we sense do we become aware of?

The answer is about 1-50 bits/second. That’s the estimated rate at which human consciousness processes the information it is aware of. Silently reading this discussion consumes about 45 bits/second, reading aloud consumes about 30 bits/second, multiplying and adding two numbers consumes about 12 bits/second, counting objects consumes about 3 bits/second and distinguishing between different degrees of taste sweetness consumes about 1 bit/second.

What’s going on?: It’s fair to ask what's really going on and why does our brain operate this way. The answer to the last question is that (i) it’s all that was needed to survive, and (ii) the laws of nature and the nature of humans, which are severely limited in data processing capacity. The human brain is large relative to body size but nonetheless only it processes information at a maximum rate of about 11.2 million bits/second, most of which we never become consciously aware of. That's human bandwidth because that’s what evolution resulted in.

What’s going on is our unconscious mind taking in information at about 11.2 million bits/second, discarding or withholding from consciousness what’s not important or needed, which is about 50 bits/second or less, and then presenting the little trickle of important information to consciousness. That’s how much conscious bandwidth (consciousness) that humans needed to survive, e.g., to finagle sex, spot and run away from a hungry saber tooth cat before being eaten, find or hunt food, or do whatever was needed to survive. In modern times, our mental bandwidth is sufficient to do modern jobs, build civilization and advance human knowledge.

If one accepts the veracity of the science and Norretrander’s narrative, it is fair to say that the world that humans think they see is more illusion than real. Other chapters of TUI and the science behind the observations reinforce this reality of human cognition and its limits. For example, chapter 9, The Half-Second Delay, describes how our unconscious minds make decisions about 0.5 second before we become aware of what it is we have unconsciously decided. Although there's room for some disagreement about it, we consciously believe that we made a decision about 0.5 second before we became aware of it. Current data suggests that decisions can be made unconsciously about 7 to 10 seconds before we're aware of the decision.

In other words, we operate under an illusion that our conscious mind makes decisions when that's the exception. The rule is that our unconscious minds are calling the shots most of the time. When it comes to perceiving reality, the low-bandwidth signal the brain uses to create a picture is a simulation that we routinely mistake for reality. As Norretranders sees it, consciousness is a fraud. That’s the user illusion.

Questions: Is some all, some or none of this credible? Why? Can conscious reason or thinking contradict an unconscious decision once it becomes conscious, i.e., if free will is defined as conscious control of decisions, is there such a thing as human free will?

Term limits proposed for congress

December 18, 2016

In a December 9 Washington Post opinion, senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and representative Ron DeSantis (R-FL) stated that they plan to introduce a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms that senators can serve to two terms (12 years) and three terms for representatives (6 years). They stated that this is a way for Congress to show it heard the voice of the people.

Cruz and DeSantis asserted that “on Election Day, the American people made a resounding call to “drain the swamp” that is modern Washington. . . . . Thankfully, there’s a solution available that, while stymied by the permanent political class, enjoys broad public support: congressional term limits. . . . . Passing term limits will demonstrate that Congress has actually heard the voice of the people. . . . . huge majorities of rank-and-file Republicans, Democrats and independents favor enacting this reform. Indeed, according to a Rasmussen survey conducted in October, 74 percent of likely voters support establishing term limits for all members of Congress. This is because the concept of a citizen legislature is integral to the model of our democratic republic.”

Normally, it’s reasonable to believe that any talk of amending the US constitution is idle chatter with essentially no chance of any amendment becoming law. But these aren’t normal times. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called for term limits. House Speaker Paul Ryan also backs the idea. Maybe there's more than a vanishingly small chance that this could happen. Or, maybe not.

What do term limits do?: Since term limits have been in place in various state legislatures, it’s worth asking what impact, if any, that has on governance. The evidence suggests that term limits tend to have documented unintended, but presumably unwanted, consequences that don’t obviously outweigh whatever benefits there are to the people’s will or anything else other than beneficiaries of the change.

Pro-term limit politicians and partisans routinely ignore those consequences, while the public is basically unaware of them.

Unintended consequences of term limited legislators include:

1. Loss of state legislator influence to special interests, lobbyists and career bureaucrats who are not generally accessible to elections and voters.

2. A power shift from state legislative leaders to governors, legislative staffs and unelected bureaucrats.

3. A decrease in state legislator professionalism, e.g., because there simply isn’t time for a legislator to become specialized and expert in a policy area.

4. A decreased for state legislatures role in crafting state budgets because less sophisticated short term legislators are outmaneuvered by more experienced executive branches.

5. Less legislative innovation as evidenced by (i) a reduced capacity to take advantage of flexibility in federal program guidelines, and (ii) a lower rate of innovation awards from the Council of State Governments.

6. A failure to fill legislatures with citizen legislators, while experienced professional politicians are replaced with less experienced professional politicians who are climbing their career ladders.

As discussed before, democracy doesn’t work the way voters generally believe it does and/or should. According to the research data, unintended consequences of term limits on legislatures is another disconnect between voter ideals and reality.

Questions: Is there any reasonable chance that a constitutional amendment on term limits for congress (or anything else) might become law under current political conditions? If the effects of term limits found by political science research are true and apply to members of congress, is pushing for term limits desirable or not? Is the research data on the effects of term limits on legislatures credible or not? Is the concept of a citizen legislature is integral to your model of our democratic republic as Cruz and DeSantis argue?

Recent activity at Biopolitics and Bionews

October, 26, 2106

Recent rational politics-related posts on (i) my Disqus channel Biopoltics and bionews, and (ii) other Disqus channels include these:

On the republican party establishment and its future: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/the_republican_party_establishment/

Wikileaks: Journalism or espionage: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/wikileaks_valiant_journalism_or_espionage/

My experiences with politics: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/my_experiences_with_politics/ (this one generated intense hostility from multiple people)

data-based philanthropy: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/my_experiences_with_politics/

Debasement of democracy and the rule of law: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-politicalrhetoricbusters/debasement_of_democracy_and_the_rule_of_law/

Lies & BS in politics: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/lies_bs_in_politics/

The biology of subjetive facts and biases: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/the_biology_of_subjective_facts_and_biases/

Religious attacks on a pragmatic political idology: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/the_biology_of_subjective_facts_and_biases/

Empathy, conflict and war: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/empathy_conflict_and_war/

The rationally irrational citizen: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/the_rationally_irrational_citizen/

Book review: The rational voter myth: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/book_review_the_rational_voter_myth/

Moral courage in politics: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/moral_courage_in_politics/

Book review: Superforecasting redux

In Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction, social scientist Philip E. Tetlock and journalist Dan Gardner (Crown Publishers, September 2015) observe that at its heart, politics is usually about predicting the future. The exercise boils down to finding and implementing policies that will do best for the public interest (general welfare or common good), regardless of how one defines the concept.

What most accurately describes the essence of intelligent, objective, public service-oriented politics? Is it primarily an honest competition among the dominant ideologies of our times, defense of one’s social identity, a self-interested quest for money, influence and/or power or some combination? Does it boil down to understanding the biological functioning of the human mind and how it sees and thinks about the world? Is it some something else entirely?



Subject to caveats, Superforecasting comes down on the side of getting brain biology or cognition right. Everything else is subordinate. Superforecasting describes Tetlock's research into asking what factors, if any, can be identified that contribute to a person’s ability to predict the future. Tetlock asks how well intellectually engaged but otherwise non-professional people can do. The performance of volunteers is compared against experts, including professional national security analysts with access to classified information.

The conscious-unconscious balance: What Tetlock and his team found was that interplay between dominant, unconscious, fact- and common sense-distorting intuitive human cognitive thinking (“System 1” or the “elephant” as described before) and our far less-powerful but conscious, rational thinking (“System 2” or the “rider”) was a key factor in how well people predicted future events. The imbalance of power or bandwidth between conscious thinking and unconsciousness thinking is estimated to be at least 100,000-fold in favor of unconsciousness. The trick to optimal performance appears to be found in people who are able to strike a balance between the two modes of thinking, with the conscious mind constantly self-analyzing to reduce fact distortions and logic biases or flaws that the unconscious mind constantly generates.

Tetlock observes that a “defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based. It has to be that way. System 1 can only do its job of delivering strong conclusions at lightning speed if it never pauses to wonder whether the evidence at hand is flawed or inadequate, or if there is better evidence elsewhere. . . . . we are creative confabulators hardwired to invent stories that impose coherence on the world.”
Coherence can arise even when there's insufficient information. In essence, the human mind evolved an ‘allergy’ to ambiguity, contradictions and concepts that are threatening to personal morals, identity and/or self-interest. To deal with that, we rapidly and unconsciously makes those uncomfortable things go away.

It turns out, that with some training and the right mind set, a few people, “superforecasters”, routinely trounce professional experts at predicting future events. Based on a 4-year study, Tetlock’s “Good Judgment Project”, funded by the DoD’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, about 2,800 volunteers made over a million predictions on topics that ranged from potential conflicts between countries to currency and commodity, e.g., oil, price fluctuations. The predictions had to be precise enough to be analyzed and scored.

About 1% of the 2,800 volunteers turned out to be superforecasters who beat national security analysts by about 30% at the end of the first year. One even beat commodities futures markets by 40%. The superforecaster volunteers did whatever they could to get information, but they nonetheless beat professional analysts who were backed by computers and programmers, spies, spy satellites, drones, informants, databases, newspapers, books and whatever else that professionals with security clearances have access to. As Tetlock put it, “. . . . these superforecasters are amateurs forecasting global events in their spare time with whatever information they can dig up. Yet they somehow managed to set the performance bar high enough that even the professionals have struggled to get over it, let alone clear it with enough room to justify their offices, salaries and pensions.”

What makes superforecasters so good?: The top 1-2% of volunteers were analyzed for personal traits. In general, superforecasters tended to be people who were open-minded about collecting information, their world view and opposing opinions. They were also able to step outside of themselves and look at problems from an “outside view.” To do that they searched out and integrated other opinions into their own thinking.

Those traits go counter to the standard human tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already know or want to believe. That bias is called confirmation bias. The open minded trait also tended to reduce unconscious System 1 distortion of problems and potential outcomes by other unconscious cognitive biases such as the powerful but subtle “what you see is all there is” bias, hindsight bias and scope insensitivity, i.e., not giving proper weight to the scope of a problem.


 

Superforecasters tended to break complex questions down into component parts so that relevant factors could be considered separately. That tends to reduce unconscious bias-induced fact and logic distortions. In general, superforecaster susceptibility to unconscious biases was lower than for other volunteers in the GJP. That appeared to be due mostly to their capacity to use conscious (System 2) thinking to recognize and then reduce unconscious (System 1) biases. Analysis revealed that superforecasters tended to share 15 traits including (i) cautiousness based on an innate knowledge that little or nothing was certain, (ii) being reflective, i.e., introspective and self-critical, (iii) being comfortable with numbers and probabilities, (iv) being pragmatic and not wedded to any particular agenda or ideology, and, most importantly, (v) intelligence, and (vi) being comfortable with (a) updating personal beliefs or opinions and (b) belief in self-improvement (having a growth mindset). Tetlock refers to that mind set as being in “perpeutal beta” mode.

Unlike political ideologues, superforecasters tended to be pragmatic, i.e., they generally did not try to “squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates [or treat] what did not fit as irrelevant distractions.” Compare that with politicians who promise to govern as proud progressives or patriotic conservatives and the voters who demand those mind sets.

What the best forecasters knew about a topic and their political ideology was less important than how they thought about problems, gathered information and then updated thinking and changed their minds based on new information. The best engaged in an endless process of information and perspective gathering, weighing information relevance and questioning and updating their own judgments when it made sense, i.e., they were in “perpetual beta” mode. Doing that required effort and discipline. Political ideological rigor such as conservatism or liberalism was generally detrimental.

Regarding common superforecaster traits, Tetlock observed that “a brilliant puzzle solver may have the raw material for forecasting, but if he also doesn’t have an appetite for questioning basic, emotionally-charged beliefs he will often be at a disadvantage relative to a less intelligent person who has a greater capacity for self-critical thinking.” Superforecasters have a real capacity for self-critical thinking. Political, economic and religious ideology is mostly beside the point. Instead, they are actively open-minded, e.g., “beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected.”

Tetlock asserts that politicians and partisan pundits opining on all sorts of things routinely fall prey to (i) not checking their assumptions against reality, (ii) making predictions that can’t be measured for success or failure, and/or (iii) knowingly lying to advance their agendas. Politicians, partisan pundits and experts are usually wrong because of their blinding ideological rigidity and/or self- or group-interest and the intellectual dishonesty that accompanies those mind sets. Given the nature of political rhetoric that dominates the two-party system and the biology of human cognition, it is reasonable to argue that most of what is said or written about politics is more spin (meaningless rhetoric or lies-deceit) than not.

Is Tetlock’s finding of superforecasters real? Does that point to a human potential to at least partially rationalize politics for individuals, groups, societies or nations?