1/29/2014 Hope or naivety

 
This coming Wednesday at the Ideas Cafe, we will be discussing hope and naivety.

When people buy lottery tickets, are they being optimistic and hopeful that they may win or are they naive to participate in such low odds of winning?

Probability is everywhere in what we do.  Nothing is for sure until the outcome is revealed. 

It is easy to be disheartened by the uncertainties that are ahead of us. 

Without hope, why should we make an effort towards something that may not happen?

So hope is very important in overcoming the possibility of failure.

Yet we are generally much better at anecdotal evidence than assessing probability statistics.

We choose lotteries base on the size of the winning prize rather than the probability of success.

We avoid dangers such as nuclear power base on the dire consequences rather than the probability of failure.

How should we decide whether we should remain hopeful and forge ahead despite effort and resources used?

Is it just a matter of better than even odds of success?

Or the probability of success in combination of the benefit from the success as in size of the lottery prize multiplied by the probability of winning?

Maybe we are in a desperate situation and we have to hope against the odds because doing nothing is just not an option?

Or should we really try harder to think of other options?

Sometimes, just the benefit of having a hopeful attitude is enough to lift our spirits.  Should we be hopeful against all odds just to get the benefit of this positive attitude versus being pessimistic and down on our outlook?

We look at children and see them as naive, but we are also charmed by their innocence.

As adults, we like to think of ourselves as responsible beings and no longer are charmed by naivety in adult behavior.

Have we turned cynical and restrictive in our thinking and outlook?

A child like playful outlook is important in staying young as we grow old, is it possible to do this without being naive?

Are artists different from the general population because of their ability to see things differently, be more adventurous, maybe even naive in some of our eyes?

How do you draw the dividing line between having hope and being naive?

Meeting on confidence versus arrogance

We had our Ideas Cafe meeting Wednesday night on confidence versus arrogance.  It was an interesting discussion even though we found ourselves using the two words as if they are easily separated and defined. 

But they are not. 

Instead of using these two words to describe behavior and attitude,  it seems that these two words are used to substantiate one's admiration or dislike of another individual.

In other words, you like a person or agree with his approach, he seems confident to you.  If you don't like the person, arrogance is a word you reach for easily to explain your dislike.

On pushing further to separate the two words,  some differences do appear.

The feeling and apprehension one feels about a pending project can span from fear of failure, uncertain,  confident, to overconfident.

This feeling is based on ones assessment and may not include important unknowns so it cannot be truly assessed until after the fact.  Even then, luck may be a factor that can skew the conclusion.

This feeling is affected by one's previous experience in life, traumas, successes, and what one thinks of one's own abilities.

Arrogance is connected to a tendency to be confident or more, and also to feeling superior to others, tendency to belittle others to gain more glory.

A lack of empathy for others is another trait for arrogant people.

Since it is impossible to determine what the real level of confidence should be at anytime, this judgment is very subjective.  Hindsight is a much better judge and arrogance is often pinned on those who did not achieve their targets.

Leaders by necessity have to be confident to lead, and appear arrogant to those who don't agree. 

Humble enough to listen, confident to lead, respectful in disagreement with dissenters.  Is this really possible and will some still think this leader does not have enough vision to lead and too arrogant to change his mind?

Some examples discussed during the cafe was interesting.

The great boxer Mohammed Ali can easily be considered arrogant the way he proclaim himself to be the greatest and how he taut his opponents.  Yet most people do not think ill of him and consider it to be part of the boxing game rather than real arrogance.

Great political leaders in history like Napoleon and Churchill can easily be considered brilliantly confident or arrogant depending on which side you are on and what the outcome turned out to be or may have been otherwise.


Then there is the example of the doctor who sticks to his craft, be as efficient as he can to see as many patients as possible in order to do the most good to as many patients as he can. 

To some of us, he is a model of efficiency, dispensing health care to the best of his ability.

To others, he is a hurried physician with little empathy for his patients. Arrogance is often used in this context.

Are we heartless technocrats for just being utilitarian or are we selfish softies wanting more of the doctor's time at the expense of other patients?

Is the observer the real issue with deciding whether there is arrogance?

1/22/2014 Confidence versus arrogance

This Wednesday at the Ideas Cafe,  we will be discussing the difference between confidence and arrogance.

Are they the same thing?

The immediate reaction may be that this is just a matter of degree.  Too much confidence becomes arrogance.

But how is that dividing line set and along what axis?

Bob suggested that this may be just a difference in perspective of how one sees oneself versus others. Being self assured maybe a sign of confidence to the person but may appear arrogant to others.  What is more, the same reason for self confidence may be judge arrogance when it is used on others.

Goes along with Bob's "I erred, but you sinned" way of describing how we judge ourselves much more positively and leniently than we judge others.

Then there is hindsight.

If someone proceed with confidence and completes the task successfully, then he was obviously confident in what he intended to do.  But if he failed, he can easily be looked upon as being arrogant and underestimated what was required to perform the task.

All other factors such as luck and other contributing factors can well be overlooked in this judgment.

Maybe arrogance is not just the level of confidence but also the social interaction with the surrounding people. Not taking the effort to communicate with all concerned about the endeavor being undertaken, the preparation being done, the anticipated difficulties, etc.

In other words, is the arrogance judgment bestowed by people who feel they should be consulted or involved but were not?  Who were not able to see the reason for the confidence being displayed?

When should someone who judges others to be arrogant be judged arrogant for their part in judging others?

I often think of an expert as someone who not only knows what to do, but more importantly, what does not need to be done. The first time carpenter may use more glue and nails just in case to make a secured joint but the expert carpenter knows exactly where it matters to nail and glue.

So confidence is knowing from experience what is not required, more so than what is required.

Arrogance is making a bad decision on what is not required because one is not actually an expert in this area.

How do we know we have sufficient knowledge to be expert in one area and be confident?

Experience for sure, but also wisdom in knowing what is required.

Arrogance is the trap we fall into if we think we know what is required but we actually don't.

So it comes back to the conundrum, how do we know what we don't know?  For without knowing what we don't know, we cannot knowingly avoid the trap of arrogance.



  

Meeting on superstition

We had our Ideas Cafe meeting on superstition a couple of days ago and it was an interesting discussion.

There was an initial question as to whether a deity or supernatural being needs to be involved before we can consider a belief a superstition or is it just mistaken belief by connecting the wrong evidence to explain an outcome?

When a deity is involved as superstition the belief cannot be falsified.  It is evasive and open to the believer coming up with new explanations to defend his belief when challenged.  The involvement of a deity makes the belief beyond falsification as there is no way to prove the nonexistence of that deity.

There was also the thought that we should not be too dismissive in ruling out other people's beliefs as mere superstition.  After all, they may well be true and perhaps we should keep it in the grey area between true and false....just in case.

However, every belief carries with it predictions based on that belief and restrictions in behavior also based on that belief.  Beliefs that turn out to be wrong give us erroneous predictions as well as put us through unnecessary restrictions in our actions.

Power and influence accumulates on the proponents of these beliefs as these beliefs takes hold on our consciousness.

The price for these errors in prediction and action restrictions may not be significant in the beginning but gradually build into our lives until they become pervasive in our culture and difficult to remove.

Before we know it,  we are watching for other people's sensitivities to superstitions that we find hard to belief but unwilling to abandon.  The superstition then takes on a life of its own and become an invisible burden on our society, achieving a credibility that they do not deserve.

As to how superstition started,  it is likely due to the attributing a wrong cause to an event.

Causation is very difficult to establish.  At most we can only establish correlation through statistical summary of our experience. 

A favorite example I heard some years ago is that we can all agree that the rooster crows and the sun rises in the morning. That statistic on its own can back the claim that the rooster causes the sun to rise as well as the sun rise causes the rooster to crow.

We need double blind comparisons with individual causes removed over time before we can establish cause.  Even then, we are not completely sure if it is some buried variable that we have not yet isolated that is the real cause for our event.

We are not naturally statistical in our thinking so correlation is already difficult, never mind establishing causation.

But we are motivated to find the cause.

With confirmation bias, we tend to guess at a theory of the cause and look for evidence to back up that theory.  Evidence that do not fit our theory are easily ignored while those that conform to our theory become valued anecdotal accounts of why things are the way we think they are.

After the meeting, I happen to be reading Dan Kahneman again and reminded of his claim that one of common errors we make in decision making is that we think "what we see is all there is".

We look at an event and assume that we have all the information in front of us to determine the cause and decide what to do.

In the old days we automatically think that thunder and lightning is the super-natural's way of expressing displeasure with our behavior. It never occurred to the people then that they do not know enough about weather systems to understand thunder and lightning.

It is impossible to know whether at any one time we know all that we need to know before making a decision.

Humans are curious by nature and we want to be able to predict the future base on current and past observations.  Our knowledge have increased tremendously over the years and our lives have improved immensely because of it.  We just have to be aware that the process, while largely successful, has not been perfect.  Humility in accepting our current belief may be in error will help.

Being aware of our biases and weakness in thinking is our protection against drifting into superstition that will sap energy and resources from our lives.