Cognitive Dissonance and City Harvest Church

In the midst of the scandal involving the Pastor Kong Hee, City Harvest Church has come out strongly in support of their disgraced leader.


It may seem prudent to wait until a verdict is delivered, but the evidence is heavily weighted against Kong Hee and Co. And I do mean company; they ran the church like a business, selling packaged experiences, religious "happy meals" as someone close to me is wont to call them. There's an old saw: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one." I might add owning a church makes more financial sense than owning a bank. It's far more tax-efficient.

As for whether I think Kong Hee is guilty as charged, oh I do not doubt that at all. Remember,  a former church member had been vilified for asking just too many questions about the church's finances. The lack of transparency almost always points to some form of shenanigans behind the scenes (This, I might add, would probably apply to more than one large local financial institution).


Although it may seem counter-intuitive why City Harvest is so strident in their support, frankly, I'm not surprised. Even Charles Ponzi had his "supporters" after his fraudulent scheme was unmasked.

The Psychological Blog offers one perspective. I'm not going to quote it here, except to mention that the section on cognitive dissonance is germane.

The noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said: 

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

There is no one that City Harvest Church wants to convince more on the integrity of its leaders than itself.

"How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect"

From The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: October 5, 2009 

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.” 

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large. 

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. 

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.” 

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others. 

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.” 

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

A change of search

Like most people, the default search engine I use is Google.

I can't remember when exactly I started to use Google on a consistent basis, but it was almost certainly during my years in university in the early 2000s. Before Google, my preferred search engines were Infoseek and Altavista.

It requires an investment of conscious effort to experiment with new technologies and tools, particularly after we are already comfortable with using something else consistently. But sometimes it's well worth the effort. For instance, I made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox and then to Opera a few years ago and I have never looked back. This was before tabbed browsing was the norm among browsers. In contrast, changing search engines isn't a big deal really. I can think of bigger changes people make, like switching OS (e.g. Windows to Mac OS) or office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office to Open Office).

I have a professional as well as personal interest in new technologies because part of my job involves looking at how new tools can improve the productivity and efficiency of how people work, perhaps even in revolutionary new ways. Second Life, Facebook and Twitter are just some examples of the new collaborative technologies that have achieved mainstream status in the last few years.

So what's today's post about?

I've been looking at and thinking about the next generation of search engines, and I believe that it's time to start experimenting with them. There have been some spectacular flameouts (such as Cuil) in the last few years, with an allegedly new Google-slayer proclaimed practically every few months, but it appears that some of the more recent arrivals have started appearing to be more than just hype.

So, starting from today, I'm going to make a choice. I'll start all new Internet searches on Kosmix and Wolfram|Alpha (after it launches later this month) instead of Google. Twine may be a possible third option.

Of course, I'll probably still use Google a lot, but diversifying my search options will allow me to get a feel of how useful these new search technologies are, and whether I should incorporate them into my life and my work.

It's actually not a huge change for me. Wikipedia is already my first point of reference for a lot of things, and I formerly used Pubmed a lot in my previous department, so this is just a continuation of the trend in diversifying my search options for information.  

"Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory"

From The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: April 5, 2009

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit. 

For all that scientists have studied it, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious human organ — and, now, the focus of billions of dollars’ worth of research to penetrate its  

Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills. 

The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.

So far, the research has been done only on animals. But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people. 

The discovery of such an apparently critical memory molecule, and its many potential uses, are part of the buzz surrounding a field that, in just the past few years, has made the seemingly impossible suddenly probable: neuroscience, the study of the brain. 

“If this molecule is as important as it appears to be, you can see the possible implications,” said Dr. Todd C. Sacktor, a 52-year-old neuroscientist who leads the team at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn, which demonstrated its effect on memory. “For trauma. For addiction, which is a learned behavior. Ultimately for improving memory and learning.” 

Artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists sent men to the moon and spacecraft to Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats, the human mind, remained almost entirely dark, a vast and mostly uncharted universe as mysterious as the New World was to explorers of the past. 

Now neuroscience, a field that barely existed a generation ago, is racing ahead, attracting billions of dollars in new financing and throngs of researchers. The National Institutes of Health last year spent $5.2 billion, nearly 20 percent of its total budget, on brain-related projects, according to the Society for Neuroscience. 

Endowments like the Wellcome Trust and the Kavli Foundation have poured in hundreds of millions of dollars more, establishing institutes at universities around the world, including Columbia and Yale.

The influx of money, talent and technology means that scientists are at last finding real answers about the brain — and raising questions, both scientific and ethical, more quickly than anyone can answer them. 

Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance — but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related? Would a treatment that “cleared” the learned habits of addiction only tempt people to experiment more widely? 

And perhaps even more important, when scientists find a drug to strengthen memory, will everyone feel compelled to use it? 

The stakes, and the wide-open opportunities possible in brain science, will only accelerate the pace of discovery.

“In this field we are merely at the foothills of an enormous mountain range,” said Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia, “and unlike in other areas of science, it is still possible for an individual or small group to make important contributions, without any great expenditure or some enormous lab.”

Dr. Sacktor is one of hundreds of researchers trying to answer a question that has dumbfounded thinkers since the beginning of modern inquiry: How on earth can a clump of tissue possibly capture and store everything — poems, emotional reactions, locations of favorite bars, distant childhood scenes? The idea that experience leaves some trace in the brain goes back at least to Plato’s Theaetetus metaphor of a stamp on wax, and in 1904 the German scholar Richard Semon gave that ghostly trace a name: the engram. 

What could that engram actually be?

The answer, previous research suggests, is that brain cells activated by an experience keep one another on biological speed-dial, like a group of people joined in common witness of some striking event. Call on one and word quickly goes out to the larger network of cells, each apparently adding some detail, sight, sound, smell. The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells. 

The billion-dollar question is how?

In the decades since this process was described in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists have found scores of molecules that play some role in the process. But for years the field struggled to pinpoint the purpose each one serves. The problem was not that such substances were so hard to find — on the contrary. 

In a 1999 paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience, two of the most prominent researchers in brain science, Dr. Jeff W. Lichtman and Joshua R. Sanes of Harvard, listed 117 molecules that were somehow involved when one cell creates a lasting speed-dial connection with a neighbor, a process known as “long-term potentiation.” 

They did not see that these findings were necessarily clarifying the picture of how memories are formed. But an oddball substance right there on their own list, it turned out, had unusual properties.

A Helpful Nudge

“You know, my dad was the one who told me to look at this molecule — he was a scientist too, my dad, he’s dead now but he had these instincts — so anyway that’s how it all started,” Dr. Sacktor was saying. He was driving from his home in Yonkers to his laboratory in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, with three quiches and bag of bagels bouncing in the back seat. Lunch for the lab.

The father’s advice led the son, eventually, to a substance called PKMzeta. In a series of studies, Dr. Sacktor’s lab found that this molecule was present and activated in cells precisely when they were put on speed-dial by a neighboring neuron. 

In fact, the PKMzeta molecules appeared to herd themselves, like Army Rangers occupying a small peninsula, into precisely the fingerlike connections among brain cells that were strengthened. And they stayed there, indefinitely, like biological sentries.

In short: PKMzeta, a wallflower in the great swimming party of chemicals that erupts when one cell stimulates another, looked as if it might be the one that kept the speed-dial function turned on.

“After that,” Dr. Sacktor said, “we began to focus solely on PKMzeta to see how critical it really was to behavior.”

Running a lab is something like fielding a weekend soccer team. Players come and go, from Europe, India, Asia, Grand Rapids. You move players around, depending on their skills. And you bring lunch, because doctoral students logging 12-hour days in a yellowing shotgun lab in East Flatbush need to eat.

“People think that state schools like ours are low-key, laid back, and they’re right, we are,” said Robert K. S. Wong, chairman of the physiology and pharmacology department at SUNY Downstate, who brought Dr. Sacktor with him from Columbia. “You have less pressure to apply for grants, and you can take more time, I think, to work out your ideas.”

To find out what, if anything, PKMzeta meant for living, breathing animals, Dr. Sacktor walked a flight downstairs to the lab of André A. Fenton, also of SUNY Downstate, who studies spatial memory in mice and rats. 

Dr. Fenton had already devised a clever way to teach animals strong memories for where things are located. He teaches them to move around a small chamber to avoid a mild electric shock to their feet. Once the animals learn, they do not forget. Placed back in the chamber a day later, even a month later, they quickly remember how to avoid the shock and do so.

But when injected — directly into their brain — with a drug called ZIP that interferes with PKMzeta, they are back to square one, almost immediately. “When we first saw this happen, I had grad students throwing their hands up in the air, yelling,” Dr. Fenton said. “Well, we needed a lot more than that” one study.

They now have it. Dr. Fenton’s lab repeated the experiment, in various ways; so has a consortium of memory researchers, each using a different method. Researchers led by Yadin Dudai at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel found that one dose of ZIP even made rats forget a strong disgust they had developed for a taste that had made them sick — three months earlier. 

A Conscience Blocker?

“This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and raises huge ethical issues,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a neurobiologist at Harvard. “On the one hand, you can imagine a scenario in which a person enters a setting which elicits traumatic memories, but now has a drug that weakens those memories as they come up. Or, in the case of addiction, a drug that weakens the associations that stir craving.” 

Researchers have already tried to blunt painful memories and addictive urges using existing drugs; blocking PKMzeta could potentially be far more effective.

Yet any such drug, Dr. Hyman and others argue, could be misused to erase or block memories of bad behavior, even of crimes. If traumatic memories are like malicious stalkers, then troubling memories — and a healthy dread of them — form the foundation of a moral conscience. 

For those studying the biology of memory, the properties of PKMzeta promise something grander still: the prospect of retooling the engram factory itself. By 2050 more than 100 million people worldwide will have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, scientists estimate, and far more will struggle with age-related memory decline.

“This is really the biggest target, and we have some ideas of how you might try to do it, for instance to get cells to make more PKMzeta,” Dr. Sacktor said. “But these are only ideas at this stage.”

A substance that improved memory would immediately raise larger social concerns, as well. “We know that people already use smart drugs and performance enhancers of all kinds, so a substance that actually improved memory could lead to an arms race,” Dr. Hyman said.

Many questions in the science remain. For instance, can PKMzeta really link a network of neurons for a lifetime? If so, how? Most molecules live for no more than weeks at a time.

And how does it work with the many other substances that appear to be important in creating a memory?

“There is not going to be one, single memory molecule, the system is just not that simple,” said Thomas J. Carew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and president of the Society for Neuroscience. “There are going to be many molecules involved, in different kinds of memories, all along the process of learning, storage and retrieval.”

Yet as scientists begin to climb out of the dark foothills and into the dim light, they are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not.

Mate Choice

After reading Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings, I've gone back and read the previously published Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, also by the same author.

Simple Heuristics isn't meant for a casual audience; it's a collection of technical papers that have been simplified (no pun intended) into essay form more suitable for a research (but non-expert) audience to read.

The book covers a diverse range of topics, but that all share the common theme of what are called 'fast and frugal' heuristics that allegedly model how humans make decisions under "bounded rationality" and in real, ecological environments.

I found the chapter on mate choice particularly interesting. The authors of that chapter basically recast the Secretary problem with substantial tweaking as a model for the problem of selecting a mate (by which I mean lover, partner or spouse). 

They constructed a computer simulation of the model, which was essentially a population of 100 participants each having a mate value of 1 through 100, and devised various decision-making strategies for the participants. These strategies were meant to model the "aspirations" in mate choice among the participants, and aimed to maximize the number of couples successfully paired off and also minimizing the difference in mate value between partners (as a proxy for how 'compatible' participants were with each other).

The results of the simulation were intriguing, and even more so if we take a little creative licence and relate them to the real world as analogies.

I am not backing up the following statements, as they are simply conjectures on my part based on a reading of the paper. And I am also not elaborating on how I came up with these conjectures, as that would involve regurgitating the contents of the paper here. If you're interested, go read Chapter 13 of the book. To get a flavor of the model, go read this by the same authors. 

Assuming that a person eventually chooses to settle down with a person at least as desirable as those that they have dated (for fun only, not auditioning for a mate),

1. If a person hasn't dated much before deciding to start searching for a partner in seriousness, then chances of getting hitched are high, but so are chances of being mismatched (i.e. compatibility issues and maybe divorce).

2. Conversely, someone who has dated a lot is less likely to get hitched, but if and when they do, they are likely to be more compatible with their partner.

3. Managing your expectations helps in getting hitched. And it helps especially if your 'market value' is low.

4. Dating has nothing to do with seeing who's out there; it has everything to do with discovering how your 'market value' stacks up out there. This is related to managing your expectations. If you know what you're worth (really what you're worth!), getting hitched is simply a matter of managing your expectations.

5. How a person determines their market value is by the number of proposals or rejections of interest they get. More importantly, the quality of the people rejecting or proposing matters greatly. High market value types should put less store in the number of proposals received from lower market value types, while low market value types should put less store in the number of rejections from higher market value types.

"For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving"

From The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: September 4, 2008

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them.

“This is what I would call a foundational finding,” said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “I cannot think of any recent study that’s comparable.

“It’s a really central piece of the memory puzzle and an important step in helping us fill in the detail of what exactly is happening when the brain performs this mental time travel” of summoning past experiences.

The new study moved beyond most previous memory research in that it focused not on recognition or recollection of specific symbols but on free recall — whatever popped into people’s heads when, in this case, they were asked to remember short film clips they had just seen.

This ability to richly reconstitute past experience often quickly deteriorates in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and it is fundamental to so-called episodic memory — the catalog of vignettes that together form our remembered past.

In the study, a team of American and Israeli researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy. The electrode implants are standard procedure in such cases, allowing doctors to pinpoint the location of the mini-storms of brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.

The patients watched a series of 5- to 10-second film clips, some from popular television shows like “Seinfeld” and others depicting animals or landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person; the recorded neurons were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue deep in the brain known to be critical to forming memories.

In each person, the researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one film clip; many of them also responded weakly to others.

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report “what comes to mind.” The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

“It’s astounding to see this in a single trial; the phenomenon is strong, and we were listening in the right place,” said the senior author, Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Tel Aviv.

His co-authors were Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Michal Harel and Rafael Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Roy Mukamel, of U.C.L.A.

Dr. Fried said in a phone interview that the single neurons recorded firing most furiously during the film clips were not acting on their own; they were, like all such cells, part of a circuit responding to the videos, including thousands, perhaps millions, of other cells.

In studies of rodents, including a paper that will also appear Friday in the journal Science, neuroscientists have shown that special cells in the hippocampus are sensitive to location, activating when the animal passes a certain spot in a maze. The firing pattern of these cells forms the animals’ spatial memory and can predict which way the animal will turn, even if it makes a wrong move.

Some scientists argue that as humans evolved, these same cells adapted to register a longer list of elements — including possibly sounds, smells, time of day and chronology — when an experience occurred in relation to others.

Single-cell recordings cannot capture the entire array of circuitry involved in memory, which may be widely distributed beyond the hippocampus area, experts said. And as time passes, memories are consolidated, submerged, perhaps retooled and often entirely reshaped when retrieved later.

Though it did not address this longer-term process, the new study suggests that at least some of the neurons that fire when a distant memory comes to mind are those that were most active back when it happened, however long ago that was.

“The exciting thing about this,” said Dr. Kahana, the University of Pennsylvania professor, “is that it gives us direct biological evidence of what before was almost entirely theoretical.”

"While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks"

From The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: August 11, 2008

A decent backyard magic show is often an exercise in deliberate chaos. Cards whipped through the air. Glasses crashing to the ground. Gasps, hand-waving, loud abracadabras. Something’s bound to catch fire, too, if the performer is ambitious enough — or needs cover.

“Back in the early days, I always had a little smoke and fire, not only for misdirection but to emphasize that something magic had just happened,” said The Great Raguzi, a magician based in Southern California who has performed professionally for more than 35 years, in venues around the world. “But as the magic and magician mature, you see that you don’t need the bigger props.”

Eye-grabbing distractions — to mask a palmed card or coin, say — are only the crudest ways to exploit brain processes that allow for more subtle manipulations, good magicians learn.

In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality.

For the magicians, including The Great Tomsoni (John Thompson), Mac King, James Randi, and Teller of Penn and Teller, the collaboration provided scientific validation, as well as a few new ideas.

For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said.

“It’s a marvelous paper,” Michael Bach, a vision scientist at Freiburg University in Germany who was not involved in the work, said in an e-mail message. Magicians alter what the brain perceives by manipulating how it interprets scenes, Dr. Bach said, “and a distant goal of cognitive psychology would be to numerically predict this.”

One theory of perception, for instance, holds that the brain builds representations of the world, moment to moment, using the senses to provide clues that are fleshed out into a mental picture based on experience and context. The brain uses neural tricks to do this: approximating, cutting corners, instantaneously and subconsciously choosing what to “see” and what to let pass, neuroscientists say. Magic exposes the inseams, the neural stitching in the perceptual curtain.

Some simple magical illusions are due to relatively straightforward biological limitations. Consider spoon bending. Any 7-year-old can fool her younger brother by holding the neck of a spoon and rapidly tilting it back and forth, like a mini teeter-totter gone haywire. The spoon appears curved, because of cells in the visual cortex called end-stopped neurons, which perceive both motion and the boundaries of objects, the authors write. The end-stopped neurons respond differently from other motion-sensing cells, and this slight differential warps the estimation of where the edges of the spoon are.

The visual cortex is attentive to sudden changes in the environment, both when something new appears and when something disappears, Dr. Martinez-Conde said. A sudden disappearance causes what neuroscientists call an after-discharge: a ghostly image of the object lingers for a moment.

This illusion is behind a spectacular trick by the Great Tomsoni. The magician has an assistant appear on stage in a white dress and tells the audience he will magically change the color of her dress to red. He first does this by shining a red light on her, an obvious ploy that he turns into a joke. Then the red light flicks off, the house lights go on and the now the woman is unmistakably dressed in red. The secret: In the split-second after the red light goes off, the red image lingers in the audience’s brains for about 100 milliseconds, covering the image of the woman. It’s just enough time for the woman’s white dress to be stripped away, revealing a red one underneath.

In a conference last summer, hosted by Dr. Martinez and Dr. Macknik, a Las Vegas pickpocket performer and co-author named Apollo Robbins took advantage of a similar effect on the sensory nerves on the wrist. He had a man in the audience come up on stage and, while bantering with him, swiped the man’s wallet, watch and several other things. Just before slipping off the timepiece, Mr. Robbins clutched the man’s wrist while doing a coin trick — thereby lowering the sensory threshold on the wrist. The paper, with links to video of Mr. Robbins’ performance, is at http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrn2473.html.

“That was really neat, and new to me,” said Dr. Bach, who was in the audience. The grasp, he said, left “a sort of somatosensory afterimage, so that the loss of the watch stays subthreshold” in the victim. The visual cortex resolves clearly only what is at the center of vision; the periphery is blurred, and this is likely one reason that the eyes are always in motion, to gather snapshots to construct a wider, coherent picture.

A similar process holds for cognition. The brain focuses conscious attention on one thing at a time, at the expense of others, regardless of where the eyes are pointing. In imaging studies, neuroscientists have found evidence that the brain suppresses activity in surrounding visual areas when concentrating on a specific task. Thus preoccupied, the brain may not consciously register actions witnessed by the eyes.

Magicians exploit this property in a variety of ways. Jokes, stagecraft and drama can hold and direct thoughts and attention away from sleights of hand and other moves, performers say.

But small, apparently trivial movements can also mask maneuvers that produce breathtaking effects. In a telephone interview, Teller explained how a magician might get rid of a card palmed in his right hand, by quickly searching his pockets for a pencil. “I pat both pockets, find a pencil, reach out and hand it to someone, and the whole act becomes incidental; if the audience is made to read intention — getting the pencil, in this case — then that action disappears, and no one remembers you put your hand in your pocket,” the magician said. “You don’t really see it, because it’s not a figure anymore, it has become part of the background.”

The magician’s skill is in framing relevant maneuvers as trivial. When it’s done poorly, Teller said, “the actions immediately become suspicious, and you instantly click that something’s wrong.”

David Blaine, a New York magician and performance artist, said he started doing magic at age 4 and quickly learned that he did not need any drama or special effects. “A strong and effective way to distract somebody is to directly engage the person,” with eye contact or other interaction, Mr. Blaine said. “That can act on the subconscious like a subtle form of hypnosis.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with a dove, a plume of smoke or a burst of fire. As long as it doesn’t break magic’s unwritten code: First, do no harm. Frightening neighborhood parents, however, is allowed.

"The problem with the tech sector here is ..."

The rag had an article of the same title above today.

It was basically an interview with Tan Chade Meng, "the first Singaporean to work with Google", and his views on the tech sector, the lack of venture capitalist funding in Singapore, innovation and other miscellanea.

Frankly, the interview was quite useless. And banal. Hackneyed too, with the repetition of "cloud computing is the next big thing", and "social networks and Wikipedia will stay popular".

But this post isn't about Tan Chade Meng. I'm sure he's a brilliant engineer and a really nice guy. It also isn't about the deplorable quality of journalism in Singapore.

No, it's about innovation and career development in Singapore.

First, some comments on the article:

Does anyone other than me think it ironic that an engineer working for one of the largest and most successful companies today would say that young people in Singapore do not have the daring to start their own company but instead hope to join a big firm?

Granted, Tan Chade Meng started at Google in June 2000 when it was still early days with about ~60 employees, but crucially, by 1999, Google had already secured USD25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, as reported in Google's milestones. Hardly a super-risky startup career move.

Related to this is of course is the fact that starting a company or working in an unproven start-up generally carries substantial risks. Anyone who is charmed by the idea of working in a start-up should probably wise up to this fact, especially if they get all their news from the mainstream media. Stories of successful start-ups are a primo example of publication bias operating in conjunction with the availability heuristic. Perhaps survivorship bias as well. Who talks about pets.com today?

Oh, and by the way, the propensity to join a big company is hardly uniquely Singaporean. After graduation, many of my peers at Hopkins gravitated towards investment banks on Wall Street, management consultancies, and ... Google. This of course excludes the massive numbers who headed for medical school, law school and business school, hardly bastions of risk-taking.

As for opening up corporate culture to innovation, again, a problem that is hardly uniquely Singaporean.


Now let's talk about The Problem With The Tech Sector being the lack of venture capital funding.

I have a highly relevant previous post and a transcript of a New York Times article on this.

The lack of a strong tech sector, and more broadly, an entrepreneurial culture, here is not merely from the dearth of venture capital. Indeed, I would state that money isn't the major problem here at all.

It is so, so much more than that. I can think of many reasons:

GLCs with overwhelming dominance in many sectors of the local economy. The disadvantages that SMEs face in Singapore are well-known.

The lousy employment terms that many SMEs offer because of their lack of resources, which prevent them from hiring the talent they need, which in turn affects their profitability and ability to offer good employment conditions. SMEs complain loudly about their inability to attract talent, but frankly, the pay they offer sucks, the owners are stingy with handing out equity in place of cash, and there's little career development. 

The small domestic Singapore market, which makes starting a viable company harder.

The small stock market, which makes an IPO exit strategy harder.

The smallish corporate scene, which makes an exit-by-acquisition strategy harder.

Disengaged and disillusioned workers. Career dissatisfaction seems to be topical now in the media and blogosphere. See here and here.

Risk averse VCs who only want to invest in cash-flow positive companies.

Opportunity costs for entrepreneurs. Starting your own company looks slightly less attractive when you could be taking up a government scholarship and a 'high-flying' (for some, not for all) job in the public sector. Or raking in the big bucks in banking and finance. Or working in sure-fire 'successful' careers like law and medicine (I call these Singapore's respectable default career choices).

Conflicting government objectives. Oooh, this one's a biggie. I could write a whole post on this. But suffice it to say, many things that the government wants are inconsistent with each other. Singapore relies on heavy foreign direct investment, exports and 'hubbing'. These factors tend to favor large companies rather than small ones. They also make working in a bank that much more attractive.

Shoehorning young people into careers that turn out to be much less than they were made out to be in glitzy media broadcasts, all for the sake of stuffing warm bodies into the "next big industries", which in turn results in a disillusioned and disengaged workforce.

Scholarships tend to siphon off talent into the public sector.

High property prices, encouraging marriage and kids...these things tend to reduce the entrepreneurial drive. The last I checked, risk-taking entrepreneurship tends not to be associated with work-life balance, heavy mortgage payments, the lack of affordable childcare, and doing right by one's family and kids. As an aside, if single people are more likely to be entrepreneurs, well, it's hard to stay single and entrepreneurial when you're staying at home (because you can't afford private property and you can't buy a HDB flat, and rents are astronomical) and the parental units are nagging for you to 'settle down'. Parents also in general want their kids to opt for 'stable careers'.

Short of Sleep at a Formative Age

This post is on the Sleepy Kids article posted in the July 20, 2008 edition of the Sunday Times.

The text of the article is unimportant. The data is interesting though:

Out of 200 primary school kids polled:

64% are getting fewer than 9 hours of sleep each night
24.5% are getting 9 hours
12.5% are getting 10 or more hours

(The recommended number of hours for a child between the ages of six to twelve is 10 to 11 hours, as told by the pediatrician interviewed for this article.)

Out of 940 secondary school students polled:

80% are getting fewer than 8 hours of sleep
2.6% are getting the recommended 9 hour

(The recommended number of hours is 9 hours for teens.)

So it appears that most kids and teens these days are chronically short of sleep, which isn’t a surprise given their hectic schedules and the hypercompetitive environment that they are growing up in today.

The ironic thing is, I don’t think most parents are aware that they are hurting their kids’ potential (and hence chances to ‘succeed’) with these killer schedules. It’s been shown that lasting brain damage can be a consequence of sleep apnea or sleep deprivation. It’s probably worse in kids, given that brain tissue in the growth and developmental phase is highly plastic.

Book Bundles: The Black Swan, Art of the Long View

The Black Swan (4-stars) has been a business bestseller for the past year, particularly in light of the author’s options trader background and the recent subprime mortgage crisis and continuing credit crunch crisis.

The book’s central idea is that the most consequential events that have shaped recent history and will continue to do so in the future belong to the black swan variety: they are low probability, unknown unknowns (in Rumsfeld-speak) that cannot be anticipated, and that have a disproportionately large impact.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses his book as a platform to discuss among other things: epistemology, the limitations of the Gaussian distribution and the law of large numbers, and the cognitive fallacies and biases present in humans (which I felt would have been better dealt with from a behavioral psychology viewpoint; see books by Gerd Gigerenzer, Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman).

At first blush, Art of the Long View (3-stars) would seem to be antithetical to Taleb’s ideas. It is a standard business school textbook (anathema to the non-suit wearing Taleb who nonetheless has a Wharton MBA) and was written by Peter Schwartz, one of the pioneers of Shell’s scenario planning methods. One of the central ideas of Black Swan is that forecasting is doomed to failure, and this would seem to conflict with Art of the Long View.

However, as explained by Peter Schwartz, scenario planning is not about forecasting events, but of imagining scenarios and opening the mind to possibilities. My interpretation of this is that by broadening one’s perspectives through scenario planning, one develops a keener sense of what is possible. At the very least, one develops a healthy respect for the uncertainties inherent in trying to plan for the future. Being cognizant of black swan effects does not preclude efforts in contingency planning that may yet turn out to be useful. Art of the Long View is useful in that respect as it helps to ameliorate the ‘surprise’ factor of a black swan.


Ratings System

2-stars: Casual reading only, or interesting but not easily readable, or important but narrow interest material.

3-stars: Interesting, readable and ideas of some importance.

4-stars: Interesting, highly readable, and ideas of considerable importance.

5-stars: Interesting, highly readable, important material of high relevance to most people.

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

I'm currently reading Gerd Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious.

I haven't finished it, but this book deserves to be read slowly and carefully. Even before finishing it, I can tell it's a real winner. If you are a Homo saipiens, and you have a functioning brain, you need to read this book.

5-stars.


Ratings System

2-stars: Casual reading only, or interesting but not easily readable, or important but narrow interest material.

3-stars: Interesting, readable and ideas of some importance.

4-stars: Interesting, highly readable, and ideas of considerable importance.

5-stars: Interesting, highly readable, important material of high relevance to most people.

"Warning: Habits may be good for you"

From the New York Times
Warning: Habits May Be Good for You
By CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: July 13, 2008

A FEW years ago, a self-described “militant liberal” named Val Curtis decided that it was time to save millions of children from death and disease. So Dr. Curtis, an anthropologist then living in the African nation of Burkina Faso, contacted some of the largest multinational corporations and asked them, in effect, to teach her how to manipulate consumer habits worldwide.

Dr. Curtis, now the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, had spent years trying to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap. Diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate.

But getting people into a soap habit, it turns out, is surprisingly hard.

To overcome this hurdle, Dr. Curtis called on three top consumer goods companies to find out how to sell hand-washing the same way they sell Speed Stick deodorant and Pringles potato chips.

She knew that over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors — habits — among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks, apply lotions and wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.

“There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”

The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins — are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth.

A few decades ago, many people didn’t drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long. Chewing gum, once bought primarily by adolescent boys, is now featured in commercials as a breath freshener and teeth cleanser for use after a meal. Skin moisturizers — which are effective even if applied at high noon — are advertised as part of morning beauty rituals, slipped in between hair brushing and putting on makeup.

“OUR products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”

Through experiments and observation, social scientists like Dr. Berning have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising.

As this new science of habit has emerged, controversies have erupted when the tactics have been used to sell questionable beauty creams or unhealthy foods. But for activists like Dr. Curtis, this emerging research offers a type of salvation.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures. Earlier this decade, two researchers affiliated with Vanderbilt University examined more than 100 studies on the effectiveness of antidrug campaigns and found that, in some cases, viewers’ levels of drug abuse actually increased when commercials were shown, perhaps in part because the ads reminded them about that bag of weed in the sock drawer.

A few years later, another group examined the effectiveness of advertising condom use to prevent AIDS. In some cases, rates of unprotected sex actually went up — which some researchers suspected was because the commercials made people more frisky than cautious.

To teach hand washing, about seven years ago Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group’s goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where almost every home contains a soap bar but only 4 percent of adults regularly lather up after using the toilet.

Over the last several years, such partnerships between corporations and those trying to save the world have become commonplace. Companies like Microsoft, Pfizer and General Electric have worked with nonprofit groups on health, technology and energy programs.

Not everyone is comfortable with the arrangements. Some critics complain that public health professionals are becoming too cozy with companies ultimately focused on their bottom lines. Others worry that these advertising techniques may be manipulative.

But what Dr. Curtis learned in Ghana suggests that saving the world may be as easy as hawking chewing gum, or, to use a more contemporary example, as simple as training Americans to spray perfumed water on couches that are already clean.

FEBREZE — the perfumed water used on couches — is one of the most successful examples of a habit-creation campaign, and, in a sense, the playbook for how Ghana learned to wash its hands.

Procter & Gamble introduced Febreze in 1996 as a way to remove odors from smelly clothes. Consumer surveys had shown that people were leaving their jackets and blouses outside after an evening in a smoke-filled bar. P.& G., which at the time already sold products that cleaned one out of every two laundry loads washed in American homes, decided to spend millions to create a spray to remove offensive smells.

The company ran advertisements of a woman complaining about a blazer that smelled like cigarette smoke. Other ads focused on smelly pets, sweaty teenagers and stinky minivan interiors.

But Febreze flopped. In fact, early sales were so disappointing that the company considered canceling the entire project.

One of the biggest problems, P.& G.’s researchers discovered, was that bad smells simply didn’t happen often enough in consumers’ lives. Interviews showed that consumers liked Febreze when they used it, but that many customers simply forgot that it was in the house.

At about the same time, the company’s staff psychologists were beginning to extend their understanding of how habits are formed.

“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. Berning, the P.& G. psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”

Academics were also beginning to focus on habit formation. Researchers like Wendy Wood at Duke University and Brian Wansink at Cornell were examining how often smokers quit while vacationing and how much people eat when their plates are deceptively large or small.

Those and other studies revealed that as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues.

For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve finished reading a document or completed a certain kind of task. The cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria, or feeling sluggish or blue.

Our capacity to develop such habits is an invaluable evolutionary advantage. But when they run amok, things can become tricky.

Consider a series of experiments Dr. Wansink performed with a bowl of tomato soup that was secretly connected to a tube that pumped more and more liquid into the bowl. Diners ended up eating almost twice as much soup as usual, though they didn’t report feeling any fuller after the meal.

Dr. Wood studied exercise habits among students who transferred from one college to another. When locations remained stable — the new school had an outdoor track just like the old school, for example — students continued running regularly. But if the tracks were too different, the exercise tapered off, on average. In another experiment, conducted by researchers studying smokers, those wanting to quit were more than twice as successful if they started kicking the habit while on vacation, when surrounded by unfamiliar people and places.

“Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”

The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize.

The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room, something studies showed their target audience did almost daily. P.& G. produced commercials showing women spraying Febreze on a perfectly made bed and spritzing freshly laundered clothing. The product’s imagery was revamped to incorporate open windows and gusts of fresh wind — an airing that is part of the physical and emotional cleaning ritual.

“We learned from consumer interviews that there was an opportunity to cue the clean smell of Febreze to a clean room,” Dr. Berning said. “We positioned it as the finishing touch to a mundane chore. It’s the icing that shows you did a good job.”

In a sense, a product originally intended for use on piles of smelly, dirty clothes was eclipsed by its exact opposite — a product used when women confronted a clean and tidy living room. And the more women sprayed, the more automatic the behavior became.

Today, Febreze is one of P.& G.’s greatest successes. Customers habitually spray tidied living rooms, clean kitchens, loads of fresh laundry and, according to one of the most recent commercials, spotless minivans. In the most recent fiscal year, consumers in North America alone spent $650 million buying Febreze, according to the company.

Dozens of other companies have also redesigned advertising campaigns around habitual cues. Beer commercials, once filled with busty women in ill-fitting tops, are now more likely to feature groups of buddies, because research shows that groups of friends are one of the strongest habit cues. Candy bar companies, through commercials, have tied their products to low-energy cues, transforming what was once a dessert into a pick-me-up for cubicle dwellers.

For Dr. Curtis and the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap, such tactics offered enormous promise in a country like Ghana.

That nation offered a conundrum: Almost half of its people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed.

“We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn’t change behaviors,” Dr. Curtis said. So she and her colleagues asked Unilever for advice in designing survey techniques that ultimately studied hundreds of mothers and their children.

They discovered that previous health campaigns had failed because mothers often didn’t see symptoms like diarrhea as abnormal, but instead viewed them as a normal aspect of childhood.

However, the studies also revealed an interesting paradox: Ghanaians used soap when they felt that their hands were dirty — after cooking with grease, for example, or after traveling into the city. This hand-washing habit, studies showed, was prompted by feelings of disgust. And surveys also showed that parents felt deep concerns about exposing their children to anything disgusting.

So the trick, Dr. Curtis and her colleagues realized, was to create a habit wherein people felt a sense of disgust that was cued by the toilet. That queasiness, in turn, could become a cue for soap.

A sense of bathroom disgust may seem natural, but in many places toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replaced pit latrines. So Dr. Curtis’s group had to create commercials that taught viewers to feel a habitual sense of unseemliness surrounding toilet use.

Their solution was ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched.

The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn’t really sell soap use. Rather, they sold disgust. Soap was almost an afterthought — in one 55-second television commercial, actual soapy hand washing was shown only for 4 seconds. But the message was clear: The toilet cues worries of contamination, and that disgust, in turn, cues soap.

“This was radically different from most public health campaigns,” said Beth Scott, an infectious-disease specialist who worked with Dr. Curtis on the Ghana campaign. “There was no mention of sickness. It just mentions the yuck factor. We learned how to do that from the marketing companies.”

The ads had their intended effect. By last year, Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis’s team reported a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet. Another measure showed even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent.

And while those statistics haven’t silenced critics who say habit-forming advertisements are worrisome, they have convinced people who run other public health initiatives that the Ghana experiment is on the right track.

Today, public health campaigns elsewhere for condom use and to fight drug abuse and obesity are being revamped to employ habit-formation characteristics, according to people involved in those efforts. One of the largest American antismoking campaigns, in fact, is explicitly focused on habits, with commercials and Web sites intended to teach smokers how to identify what cues them to reach for a cigarette.

“For a long time, the public health community was distrustful of industry, because many felt these companies were trying to sell products that made people’s lives less healthy, by encouraging them to smoke, or to eat unhealthy foods, or by selling expensive products people didn’t really need,” Dr. Curtis said. “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.”

________________________________

The article mentions research by Brian Wansink. His book is great (3-stars). Read it if you have problems with overeating, your weight, or if you're interested in cognition like I am.

Anchoring Bias

Anchoring bias is a common but fascinating cognitive bias, and it’s highly relevant to be aware of it now.

Anchoring bias in the narrowest sense refers to the phenomenon when the mind fixates on a number brought to its attention, and how when a person is asked to estimate a given, possibly unrelated figure, that person unconsciously uses the anchoring number as a point of reference for those estimates. The truly amazing thing about this cognitive bias is that the anchoring number need not bear any relevance to the figure that needs to be estimated.

Anchoring bias, like many cognitive biases, probably has its roots in evolutionary adaptations in what Gerd Gigerenzer terms “fast and frugal” thinking. It may be a heuristic designed to allow humans to process information quickly and accurately (in a prehistoric environment).

Why is anchoring bias highly relevant now? Because the global economy and stock markets around the world are now at or past an inflexion point.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, it should be common knowledge that economic problems are in focus around the world now. Stock markets have been tumbling far below their peaks in the wake of the (continuing) credit crisis, inflation is ravaging countries around the world when it formerly was not a problem, oil and food commodity prices have blown past their historic highs, and growth is slowing everywhere. We are entering a period of stagflation, with anemic growth accompanied by high inflation, when we were in an economic boom only several quarters ago.

At inflexion points when the direction of the economy and stock markets change, econometric forecasts and models are notoriously unreliable, and this is arguably when their forecasting performance is most vital.

And how does anchoring bias figure in all this? Think of all the economic numbers that are important to you, and then consider how anchoring bias has affected how you perceive these numbers, or how they are generated.

If you invest in stocks, think of how the target price of your favorite stock has changed since the go-go times of yesteryear. Is applying a ‘discount’ to the anchor of last year sufficient now that the external environment has changed so drastically?

If you rely on financial analyst reports, be especially wary of target prices that have been ‘revised’ and backed up by ‘adjustments’ to various models. What goes for the target price also applies to the entry price. If I had a penny for every analyst that I’ve read or heard say “such and such a stock is now great value since it’s corrected by X% from such and such a price”…well, let’s just say that the historic peak price is one helluva anchor for those unaware of anchoring bias.

If you’re watching the prices of oil, gold and other commodities, historic highs (whether inflation adjusted or not) also constitute huge anchors.

If you run a business, you’d better be aware of what goes into your sales and profit projections, instead of just extrapolating from your experiences in previous years.

Economists who do inflation or economic forecasts might want to re-look their entire model or all the underlying assumptions instead of just tweaking their previous forecasts.

If you’re bothered by higher prices for everything, well, I have no solution for you. However, you may want to note that your misery stems directly from anchoring bias and reality not matching up with expectations. We are lightyears away from the low inflation [in necessities, but not in assets] environment of the past decade.

If you’re looking to buy or sell a property, you should already be aware that real estate prices are especially sticky. Sellers are unwilling to let go at too low a price or too low a cash-over-valuation because the booming (in contrast to this year) property market of last year was full of anchors to reference from. A cooling property market is not so much marked by lower prices as it is by low liquidity.

[Incidentally, if you’re watching the US subprime mortgage crisis as closely as I am, you might be interested in research from iTulip here and here. The research has been made available free for one week only due to wide ramifications on the US economy, so you might want to read it now.]

Confirmation Bias ... again

I didn't expect to see another example of confirmation bias so soon after my previous post, but here it is again. I will discuss the annotated parts in bold (emphasis mine).


More remarrying, but number of break-ups also rising
By Melissa Sim
Straits Times, 10 July 2008

More people here are saying "I do" more than once.

Of the nearly 24,000 people who walked down the aisle last year, 17.5 per cent of grooms were remarrying and 15.3 per cent of brides were tying the knot again.[1]

The figures have been rising for several years. A decade ago, only about one in 10 marriages involved a partner who was remarrying. [2] Associate Professor Paulin Straughan, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, said this trend[3] is a good sign.

"Even though people have had an unpleasant experience, they don't give up on the institution of marriage and they try again," she said.[4]

The typical repeat groom was 41 years old and a remarrying bride was 35 on average last year; older than first-time newlyweds aged 30 and 27 respectively.

For Muslims, the remarriage figure was even higher.

Slightly over a quarter who took the plunge last year were not doing so for the first time, according to figures released by Singapore's Department of Statistics yesterday.

It found that divorces rose in tandem with marriages - which swelled to a five-year high of 23,967.

There were 7,226 divorces and annulments last year, up from 7,061 in 2006, a far cry from the 4,888 dissolutions a decade back.[5]

The reason for divorce among non-Muslims however, remained the same: living apart, unreasonable behaviour and adultery.

More people are also marrying outside their ethnic groups, according to the report.

Of those who tied the know last year, 3,940 or 16.4 per cent did so with someone of another race.

Ten years ago, there were just 2,290 inter-ethnic marriages, which made up just 8.9 per cent of the marriages that year.

Close to half of the inter-ethnic marriages last year were between Chinese men and foreign brides from countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines. [6]

Said Prof Straughan: "Inter-ethnic marriages will be much more common in a cosmopolitan society. It shows the high racial-tolerance level and open-mindedness of society." [7]

She added, however, that there were concerns in the case of foreign brides. "If there are language and cultural barriers, I worry that the marriage will not last and there will be no marital satisfaction." [8]

_____________________________________________________

If the population of a country is growing, whether through organic growth or immigration, it is expected that the number of marriages will increase. When the number of marriages increases, it is expected that the number of divorces will increase. When the number of divorces increases, it is also perfectly reasonable to expect that the number of remarriages will increase.

What matters is the rate of increase. Is the increase in the number of remarriages significantly more than the increase in the number of divorces?

Let's look at the data. 

10 years ago, 10% of marriages involved a partner who was remarrying [2]. Today, we are told that approximately 16% of marriages are of this variety [1] (we cannot use a simple average of 17.5% and 15.3% as we should be using a weighted average instead, so 16% is an estimate).

Therefore, there has been a 60% increase in marriages in which at least one partner was remarrying.

In constrast, divorces and annulments have increased by 47.8% [5] over the last 10 years.

At first blush, it would indeed appear that remarriages have increased proportionately more than divorces. Ah, but there is a pickle. Every divorce results in two divorcees, and by the definition of remarriages here, a remarriage may involve a person who is marrying for the first time. Divorcees do not necessarily remarry other divorcees.

The statement that remarriages have increased proportionately more than divorces can only be supported IF (and this is a big if) we assume that the ratio of divorcee-divorcee remarriages to divorcee-first timer remarriages has remained constant over the last 10 years. If proportionately more divorcees get remarried to single people rather than divorcees, we should expect the number of remarriages to increase proportionately more than divorces.

Unless we have better quality data with higher resolution, we cannot tell if the increased number of remarriages is indicative of anything except a trend in increasing absolute numbers [3], but this is a given considering the higher population. We certainly have no basis of saying that more people have decided that they don't want to give up on the institution of marriage [4]. Indeed, people may not have given up on the institution of marriage at all in the first place. There is no reason to lament the crumbling institution of marriage, and then brighten up at the thought that remarriage statistics appear to have shown that that is not the case.

Assuming that she has not been quoted out of context, Paulin Straughan appears to be interpreting the data in a way that suits her views on marriage, i.e. confirmation bias. Her view appears to be that increasing numbers of divorcees are now taking a second look at remarriage where before they might not have.

Instead of interpreting the increase in remarriages the way she has, I venture an alternative hypothesis. There has been no change in the mindset of divorcees towards remarriage. Instead, there has been a lessening of the stigma associated with divorce (supported by the higher divorce rate), and single people are now more open to marrying a divorcee. This has skewed the ratio of divorcee-first timer remarriages to divorcee-divorcee remarriages in favor of the former, which has led to an increase of remarriages that is proportionately more than the increase in divorces.

My hypothesis is falsifiable, and may turn out to be wrong. But in the absence of contradicting data, it is as good a hypothesis as Straughan's.

I'm not quite sure of what to make of [7]. [7] as a statement taken on its own is actually reasonable. The question is, how relevant is it to Singapore's context? Is the increasing number of mail order brides really indicative of greater tolerance [6]? Are we really that cosmopolitan of a society? This could be confirmation bias at work again.

I have a problem with statement [8]. As a sociologist, I would think that Straughan would be more concerned with spousal abuse and exploitation than marriage durability.

The report on marriages and divorces can be found here.

Confirmation Bias

Everytime I feel like I've run out of things to write, the rag obligingly presents me with fresh material to work with.

I don't usually read the forum page on the rag. For one, the letters are heavily edited. For another, the forum is heavily managed in such a way as to publish letters in support of the government's stance on various issues, while at the same time in the interest of 'balance', frequently publishes the more clumsily written opposing letters to act as straw men. It's all really quite unsubtle, and somewhat lacking in polish.

That, and the fact that some Singaporeans have made the forum page a platform for their complaints over retail purchases and experiences gone sour. How parochial.

But my interest was piqued by a recent letter that attracted a furore on Online Citizen.

Frankly, I couldn't give a rat's ass for Mr Syu Ying Kwok's opinions. Neither do I have much interest in the deluge of negative comments on Mr Syu's letter.

But what did trigger my finely honed sense for baloney was the distinct whiff of confirmation bias.

I left a comment on Online Citizen that I reproduce below:

“But what chills the bones is the fact that in the past three elections, an average of more than 20 per cent of the electorate voted for him or anyone else who stood for election with little consideration of his credentials or abilities.”

[My comments] this is a case of confirmation bias: interpreting the data in a way that supports one’s current beliefs. Mr Syu Ying Kwok evidently holds the belief that Singaporeans cannot be trusted to do the “right” thing, that is, vote for the party that *he* feels is best suited to lead Singapore. After all, Tan Lead Shake is so obviously an unqualified candidate, he thinks!

an equally plausible alternative explanation of why >20% of the electorate would vote for someone with seemingly little credentials is that >20% of the electorate *have* considered Tan Lead Shake’s lack of credentials, but would rather take a chance on an unknown candidate than the status quo of the PAP.

To turn the proverb on its head, you could say that it’s a case of going with the devil you *don’t* know because the devil that you do know is so inconceivably horrid that anyone else is preferable.

Assuming the second explanation holds, I don’t know about LKY or the PAP, but if >20% of the electorate is so manifestly disgruntled as to feel this way, I think I would start loosening up a little more or at least launch a massive PR blitzcrieg, rather than be all condescending and cast doubt on Singaporeans' ability to think for themselves in their “best” interests.

There are other possible explanations for why >20% of the electorate would vote for who seems like an obviously unqualified candidate. The explanation I proffered is by no means the 'correct' one. I do not pretend to know the hearts and minds of the electorate, unlike so many other people.

Incidentally, cognition is something of both personal and professional interest to me. So this is an inaugural post for a new label. All future posts that relate to cognition and metacognition will now bear this label.