“Deep” or “profound” means nothing in research design. If you read it somewhere, see if it defined precisely in this context. If not, see if you can mentally replace it with a more precise word. If not, be skeptical of the validity of the claims.

- My Research Design professor

I’m being a bit cheeky but this has actually stuck with me over the years and I do think it’s helpful.

Depending on what I eat, it stinks more than or less. Have you tried tinkering with your food for those purposes?

Same here. That’s why if I’m eating alone I actually clean everything before eating (except for the plate or plates I’m eating from and the cutlery I’m using).

Ironsworn and Starforged

You seem to value fairness and justice. I worked at a shelter and it’s often not as simple. Often, the dependency that children have with their abusive parents (or partners with their abusive partners) is something that needs to be worked on first, before any attempt to leave is made.

Some people understand the history and the opportunities of living in a country without tying their identity to the country. They can contribute to it, accept diversity, and yet have a more trascendental sense of self. They understand the state can be helpful for certain goals, and not for others.

It’s like money. If we all agree that a piece of paper and some metal is valuable, then it is. We don’t have to worship it. We can use it when it’s helpful and not when it’s not.

Turns out, the more educated, wealthy, and connected a whole population is, the more they are able to go from conceptual senses of self like “I am French” to a more trascendental sense of self like “I am a living being like so many others, and I happen to live in France”. This can also be achieved with certain wisdom traditions, like with loving-kindness meditation. More broadly, it can also be achieved with reflection.

You may not realize it, but you’re pointing your laser towards having money and winning at games. These are sensible enough values, since a lack of money can make life difficult and losing at games can be frustrating. In this regard, you are much like other people who share those values.

You claim that “low yields games are objectively irrational”, a statement that only ever makes sense if you take for granted what objectivity is. From this perspective, it’s easy to argue that the Holocaust was a loss of rationality, a mass hysteria, but this ignores the thorough tracking, meticulous record-keeping, massive logistics planning, and investigation that it involved. Once again, rationality is a tool, it’s a laser that can be pointed anywhere, including bigotry and inhumane values.

There is a difference between science and values, between actions and values, between tools and values. The fact that most humans agree on values doesn’t mean they are ‘objectively true’. These humans are like fish in water, fish who don’t realize they’re in water. They have been socialized into the values of this culture and are absolutely certain they are right and others are wrong. Their gods are the only true gods (which is exactly what their neighbors, who hold other gods dear, believe). These humans don’t realize it, but they too are pointing their lasers toward their beliefs, their gods, and everything they hold dear.

Maybe it helps to look at this inside the brain. Decades of research has shown we build our concepts through relational frames, or conceptual Lego bricks. These tiny bricks relate concepts, such as “low yields games are worse than high yields games”, and they combine to create cognitive palaces. Rationality is a set of relational frames, a ladder of sorts that can be taken anywhere in the palace to help us solve problems and embody our values. Once again, to use the tool we need values; we point the laser; we take the ladder somewhere.

In our mental palaces, we like to keep things organized. We like coherence. But not all order is the same. There is something called literal coherence, which leads us to use deduction, logic, and probabilistic thought —rationality— so that we are right. “Aktchually” guys are literally coherent. Many OCD patients are literally coherent (it doesn’t mean they’re not suffering). They always carry their rationality ladder with them, even if it has a high price.

And then there’s something else, called functional coherence, where we care less about being right and more about what works, what’s helpful, what gets us closer to a valued life and what doesn’t. With functional coherence, we accept that we can’t clean the whole palace. It’s okay if there’s leaves on the paths next to the gardens. It’s okay if the books aren’t in alphabetical order. We know we can use the ladder when we need it, but we sometimes decide to be nimble and run to greet our loved ones, or decide to look in the mirror and be compassionate with whom we see, or really savor the banquet we’re about to eat. This doesn’t mean the ladder can’t help us put up the mirror or fetch the ingredients for our meal. It just means that we don’t get stuck with the ladder.

I’m using metaphorical language because it’s a fast way to convey information in limited time, but if you’re interested in how rationality is built through cognitive bricks, how we can sometimes get stuck in the webs of thought that we build, and how we can use our cognition to live a valued life, you can check out Relational Frame Theory.

Others in the thread have already hinted at this fact: logic and optimization are lasers that can be pointed at anything. Point it towards money and of course it’s irrational to forfeit profits for good wine. Point it towards the good wine and of course it’s irrational to forfeit evenings drinking good wine with friends.

Put another way, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Of course, this doesn’t mean most people don’t share some common values. Most people want both wine and profits!

Not only is logic and optimization a laser, but optimization can happen at many levels.

There are many experiments where the most egg-laying hens are selected and bred, but often these hens are aggressive and kill each other. However, when whole groups of hens (e.g. a group of 5 hens) are chosen, some of the hens do not lay eggs but are peace-makers and create the perfect environment for egg-laying eggs to lay many eggs.

In this example, optimization happened at the group-level and not at the individual level.

Similarly, rich people who leave high-tax societies end up in a ‘Lamborghini in a road made of mud’ situation. However, if rich people contribute to the societies that made them rich in the first place, everyone benefits. There are lower anxiety, depression, and suicide rates for everyone (including the rich) in more egalitarian societies. Here you can see the laser and the levels: the laser is either pointed at the luxury car or the quality of life, while the level is either the individual or whole society.

Group-level selection seems irrational for those who think that being an egotist is the only way.

Of course, life is not just about lasers and levels. It’s about values. Rationality is a tool. It can help us live valued lives or trip us up. If you want good wine, good cheese, money to buy something else, good friends, and a good society, that’s what matters.

You can actually train for this!

You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.

You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.

Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).

You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.

Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)

No 🤷

Thanks for the reply! So Excel maybe is not as fast as the meme would suggest, I suppose.

I agree with you. I love ggplot2. And I’m good at it. So it’s my software of choice when doing data analysis and when making graphs.

However, I understand that there’s an upfront cost to pay to use it: learning to code, tidying data, etc…

And beyond that, I don’t really do data analysis with spreadsheet software like Excel or LibreCalc. So I don’t know if a proficient LibreCalc user would be able to compete with a proficient ggplot2 user.

Sorry 😞 I’m out of the loop. Who is this?

Honest question: do you think this could improve with practice? Or does the ggplot workflow necessarily makes it all slower?

Not me, but a friend believed Obama was not American. Conversations over time (couple of months) changed them.

Not a proper conspiracy theory, but I used to be a dualist, thinking that souls exist and they’re separate from bodies. All of this changed with a long conversation with a materialist. He helped me see how my beliefs were historically determined, socially programmed, and not based on atemporal scientific principles. Overnight change to materialism.

The answer is contextual, just like people are contextual. Sometimes, my circles are all busy or stressed out and we can’t really be there for each other. Other times, strangers have saved me, like the couple that took me in when lockdowns started and I was far from home.

Have you heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Or the Princeton Seminarian experiment? Or the Milgram Experiment? All of them confirm that people are contextual. That’s lesson 1 in psychology, but we humans easily forget it. We focus on the person and forget the context. That folly of ours even has a name: Fundamental Attribution Error.

Thanks for the suggestions. Had time to try to print it. Didn’t work. I’ll try the other options later.

You have a good point! It does sound like my suggestions only help for repeated behaviors. For example, Tiny Habits seems to indicate that it’ll work for habits but not for novel situations.

You explicitly mention that it’s unlikely that research covers situations that are entirely novel and rare. Do you know about schema theory or relational frame theory? I ask because both of those theories explicitly deal with how entirely new information (such as entirely new situations) is processed in the human brain and how, depending on the schemas or relational frames that a person already had, the person will react in different ways.

But we don’t have to go into the theoretical weeds. The popular books that I mentioned earlier deal with novelty. For example, Lakoff shows how, inside the head of any person, a small set of beliefs can end up guiding most of the person’s moral thinking and therefore their choices. Not only that, but even the book titled Tiny Habits has sections dedicated to one-off behaviors. Heck, the book Drive deals with teams that are at the bleeding edge of knowledge and techniques, technologies and workflows that no human has ever dealt with before, and yet the book is able to show how there is a set of evidence-based principles that consistently motivate (or not) those very teams.

The fundamental issue is whether humans are able to recognize a situation and know what to do about it. Our brains have been endowed with the capacity to derive thoughts, to think up entirely new situations, to imagine scenarios. We can use that to increase the odds of responding effectively to situations we have never been in before.

Sure, recognizing the light when it’s eclipsed by plenty of shadow can seem cartoonish. We can decide to close our eyes and be left in the darkness. We can decide not to pay attention or learn from something we deem unacceptable.

Is there absolutely nothing that China is doing that the rest of the world could learn from? Do you know how much China is investing in green energy in relation to the west? Do you think I am unable to recognize problems in China while at the same time recognizing that it is the single largest investor in green energy on Earth today? Do you think I’m unable to recognize that the United States has a great elite educational system? Or that I’m unable to recognize that the USA has amazing elite research facilities? Or that during the twentieth century it was a world leader in terms of State investments in strategic technologies?

It sounds as if you’re frustrated at her for not recognizing that people disappear in China, sometimes people like critics of the government. Do you think there’s absolutely nothing good that China does?