Life – Page 41 – Achilles & Aristotle

Dismal News

I was a big economics fan at school. Supply and demand, rational actors, natural monopolies and perfectly competitive markets – it made simple good sense to me.

It all got a bit more complicated at university. There, whacking great equations I couldn’t fathom, seemed the inadequate answer to real world problems.

Later in the world of work, thanks to my broad brush mastery of ‘the dismal science’ I had a brief, successful (and with hindsight massively inaccurate) career in forecasting the prospects for mobile phones worldwide. I concluded as many as one in ten people might have one – one day. Nostradamus eh!

This week I discovered from the clever people at McKinsey it’s no wonder I got it wrong by a factor of ten. I was guilty of anchoring, group think, saliency bias, confirmation bias and the halo effect, to name just five.

It turns out people simply cannot, and do not make ‘rational’ decisions. Even with the best data, the right experience and great wisdom, we are all doomed by the impossibility of escaping group biases. And the killer is the biggest bias of the lot is “self-interest bias” which we absolutely cannot escape, as it’s 100% built in.

What to do? The only conclusion is talk about it. When it comes to the really big choices in work and life, even the smartest person in the room will get the big ones wrong on their own.

But you can’t talk forever or you’ll succumb to groupthink or give in to loss aversion. Eric Schmidt of Google has a good motto: for a good decision you need discord… and a deadline.

Plus, I conclude, let go of your own ego, and at least let others showcase their prejudices before you give in to your own.

12 Common Biases

1) Affect Heuristic – a team has fallen in love with its own proposal.

2) Groupthink – we’re all in the same boat on this one.

3) Saliency Bias – overly influenced by analogy to something memorable that happened once before.

4) Confirmation Bias – no credible alternatives means “let’s do it!”

5) Availability Bias – time limited offers are disproportionately attractive, but if you had to make the decision again in a year’s time what information would you want first?

6) Anchoring Bias – a tendency to cling to the first number heard and judge everything else with reference to that starting point.

7) Halo Effect – the assumption that people and teams with past success will be successful again.

8) Sunk Cost Fallacy – we’ve spent a fortune already, so we may as well spend some more to get some of it back.

9) Overconfidence and Optimism Fallacies – nobody likes a pessimist.

10) Disaster Neglect – the worst that could happen is too horrible to think about – let alone consider in your plans.

11) Loss Aversion – humans naturally weigh losses more heavily than equivalent or even greater future gains.

12) Self Interest Bias – the one you can never escape on your own and the best reason to take your big decisions with other people.

Life, Poetry, Psychology

Mile High Spirits

Glug, glug
Pssst
Clink
Plink
Fizzzz
Ice
Slice
Mingle
Slurp
Tingle
BANG
Brain wobble
Cheery
Leery
Life
Gets
Easy

In the film ‘Flight’, soon to be disgraced alcoholic airline pilot Denzel Washington turn his back on a hotel minibar miniature. And then bang he’s done. Watch it.

He necks the lot, owns up to being a drunk at an accident investigation and goes direct to jail. Helluva moment in a powerful film. Ironic then that I tapped out the poem above on a flight home from Belfast whilst necking my own spirit miniature – a stiff airline G&T.

There is something in the tinkle, the ice cool fizz and the spirit hit which is more intoxicating combined than just the intoxication alone.

Dangerous things white spirits. I reckon they need to be carefully measured and properly rationed or they’ll getcha… just like Denzel Washington’s pilot.

Art, Life

Waves

I waved goodbye to ‘Japanese Prints‘ at the library today. Here it sits among the ‘recently returned’ next to someone else’s thriller and two DIY oil painting books.

Japanese wood block prints, I learnt, were the product of art, craft, populism, censorship and Japan’s desire for isolation from the rest of the world.

Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ is perhaps the most famous of all Japanese wood prints and belongs to the groundbreaking series ‘Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji’. Most Japanese prints were of famous actors, warriors or courtesans. Landscapes were few and far between, until this series.

But what is also unusual about this print, is it draws on the industrial prowess of 19th century Germany. It was the first Japanese series to exploit the new chemical ‘Berlin blue’ pigment (also known as Prussian blue) which had recently become available from China. It gave Hokusai a strong but fine blue for both sky and water unlike the sticky splodgy ‘Indigo blue’ and did not fade like the other more watery traditional blue pigments.

On the other side of the world, German chemists enabled Japanese artists and printers to create many thousands of fine prints. These then found their way back to France and inspired Monet, Manet and the Impressionists, as well as the ‘new wave’ Art Nouveau posters of Toulouse Lautrec, which adorned and still define Paris.

It’s a small world. Japanese wood blocks sat next to oil paintings in 19th century Paris too.

Life, Philosophy, Science

Dasein

Heidegger is a notoriously heavy read – and a controversial one, given he lived in Germany through two world wars and after. His concept of Dasein – the world as perceived and lived in by humans has made me think though.

It’s easy to imagine there’s a world without us. Of course there is. Surely? A world of maths, logic, science and mindless physical processes. Not to mention a less thought-filled living world of birds and beasts – nature red in tooth and claw.

So what’s so special about humans that Heidegger says we define our very own universe? I think I get his point. Everything we see, refer to, understand and know is in fact self-referring – it is based on human experiences, human timescales, human sensory apparatus and the human scale.

We can’t truly understand or describe the world from the point of view of an ant, let alone from the perspective of a celestial body. But a celestial body is dead, so it has no perspective surely? If I read Heidegger right – I think it does.

Knowledge, wisdom, trial and error, mindless and mindful – the course of the universe is to record more and more information in itself including embodied intelligence – information stored in physical forms.

In the same way as an ant contains within it information about carbon-based life, geological time and the process of evolution; even the most basic planet contains information about the elements, supernovae and stellar aeons which led to it.

From the blinding simplicity of the Big Bang to the unimaginably vast store of data which is a galaxy – let alone a universe of them – the course of ‘life’ has been captured, recorded, embodied and stored in both vast and minuscule stores of accumulated ‘relevant complexity’ – in effect: information.

As Heidegger suggests, our mentally comprehensible portion of this recorded information is determined by our embodied human faculties and timescales. But for the ant or the celestial body the ‘recording’ is at vastly different scales. Dasein or the ‘human universe’ is but a tiny portion of this. And what each of us sees and understands of it, is but the portion lit by our own tiny flickering candle.

That we see and understand even that much, is an accident of stellar and evolutionary history – our tiny illuminated moment in space and time. But for each of us it is a very fortunate and beautiful one. And Heidegger invites us to live it to the full.

Life, Philosophy, Psychology, Work

Balance

A few weeks back, a very wise friend I bumped into serendipitously mentioned this:

In the end, only three things matter:

1) How much you loved,

2) how gently you lived, and

3) how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

Whose words of wisdom are they? Transpires it was the Buddha.

Numbers 1) and 2) aren’t that earth shattering. And ‘living gently’ is maybe not that exciting.

I get the point; let go of hatred and anger. But like with Roman Stoicism, I’m a bit watchful that Buddhist ‘patience’ and ‘tolerance’ – good though they are – don’t turn into accepting stuff which is unacceptable or giving up on things which are important.

But number 3) is a gem. This week I ‘let go gracefully’ of something that ‘wasn’t meant for me’ and feel infinitely better for it.

Power, money and status are inviting and intoxicating, but there are are phases to life and choices to make. So this week I put my family ahead of my career and let go of seeking advancement. Not forever, but not for now.

The Buddha is bang on – by letting go of what was ‘not meant for me’, and doing it ‘gracefully’ on my own terms I have protected what matters, lost nothing and gained a great deal: a self-imposed burden removed, a lightness of spirit returned and a much readier smile on my face. Balance restored.