The folly of fools
Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.
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2012–2025years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The main problem with human memory is that read operations are also write operations.
http://koehlerlaw.net/2010/09/on-human-memory-and-eyewitness...
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversk...
http://townhall.com/columnists/jacobsullum/2011/08/31/your_l...
Human memory is continually being reshaped, and is not a reliable archive of anyone's experience.
The other problem with the human brain's large capacities in general is that bandwidth to and from the brain constrains the brain's interaction with the environment. I have read (I'm sorry I don't remember the source off-hand) that human sensory organs have a huge information capacity, and the human brain has a huge capacity both to process and to store information, but the nervous system's connections between sensory nerves for input or between motor nerves for output are strictly limited in bandwidth, so you always have to ignore much of what you could perceive or do. A really good book about the built-in capacity for human self-deception is The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Folly-Fools-Deceit-Self-Deception/...
which is full of interesting information about limitations of the thinking of all organisms, especially human beings.
- Because the submitted article mentions the placebo effect, in the usual manner of popular articles, perhaps I should share here some links that are helpful for understanding what placebo effects are all about. Some of these online links cite quite a few useful scholarly publications.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/michael-specte...
"In other words, the best research we have strongly suggests that placebo effects are illusions, not real physiological effects. The possible exception to this are the subjective symptoms of pain and nausea, where the placebo effects are highly variable and may be due to subjective reporting."
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/angells-review...
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-rise-and-fa...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effect...
http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/revisiting-dan...
The statement in the article kindly submitted here, "Someone suffering from a low-level infection will recover just as nicely whether they take an active drug or a simple sugar pill" should be interpreted as "Animals have a lot of capacity for recovering from infections, and some treatments for infections are indistinguishable in outcomes from doing nothing" until a citation for a specific study involving infection in HUMAN subjects is brought into the discussion. Usually the "placebo effect" is just the no-op effect of the body healing over time with the body's own healing mechanisms, and the ONLY reliable findings of placebo effects in human medicine, according to the sources I am citing here, are self-reported subjective symptoms like pain and discomfort, not physiologically verifiable improvement in disease states.
So let's not rush too fast to assume an explanation for a phenomenon until the phenomenon is better defined. The submitted article goes on to discuss some animal studies related to seasonal patterns of light and darkness. These studies are related to the idea that the immune system is costly to maintain, drawing on many physiological resources of the living organism. That's a reasonably important point and is indeed the subject of much ongoing research. But human beings, with their very complicated behavior patterns for adaptation to many environments, probably have a system for regulating immune response that is harder to observe. I note for the record and for your reading enjoyment that the recent book he Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers
http://www.amazon.com/The-Folly-Fools-Deceit-Self-Deception/...
includes a chapter, with some citations to scientific studies, about immune system interaction with the brain suggesting a theory of self-deception in the aid of bodily healing, on evolutionary grounds. The whole book is interesting, and there is better established findings in it, so it is well worth a read whatever other science says about placebo effects.
- An interesting experiment (for a company that actually has a job and is not leading people on) would be to distinguish a job posting that says
"Hiring for this position will be based in large part on a work-sample test during a half day at our office"
versus
"Previous experience . . . preferred, but will train the right candidate."
We can tell that the United States economy is in recession (as is the case in many other countries with Hacker News participants) because we keep seeing new stories submitted every day or so about the hiring procedures of companies, with multiple comments. In a long FAQ post I've posted recently
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768
here on Hacker News, based on many helpful comments from other participants, I summarize a LOT of research on company hiring procedures. If you want to hire someone good in the United States, make a work-sample test part of your hiring procedure. Work-sample tests are much better than biographical reviews of resumes for finding good workers. If you want to get a good job in a well managed company, develop the skills to get past a realistic work-sample test for the position you seek. Many more details appear in the FAQ,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768
which is quite long but well worth a read if you are looking for a job or if you are a business manager trying to hire someone who will do a good job.
P.S. I still hear of young people who are gaining full-time, full-benefits jobs in today's economy. In the usual case, they are getting those jobs by showing what they can actually do as part of the hiring process, degree or no degree.
After edit: I recently read the VERY interesting book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deceptio...
(I wonder if this book has been discussed here on HN yet?) and that reminded me of one of the main reasons that hiring by screening resumes is demonstrably less effective than hiring by giving work sample tests: many people lie on their resumes. The author of the interesting submitted blog post was of course posting a fake job ad, and several comments here on HN point out that many job ads may just be fronts for recruiters rather than postings by actual employers. Participants here gave examples (NUMEROUS examples) of job ads getting responses that don't appear at all to fit the job, but an employer also has to worry about "false positives," applicants who look like they fit the job but who are inflating their educational credentials or multiplying their years of actual work experience. The only way to know what an applicant can do is to test. Perhaps announcing up front that the hiring process includes actual testing of job-related skills MAY screen out some of the poseurs from even sending in their fake resumes (although the many shotgun applicants who don't even read the job ad closely will still be sending resumes all over the place only to waste the time of anyone who receives the resumes).
One way the author of the blog post could have demonstrated statistical acumen is by labeling his data presentations "Self-Reported Experience" rather than "True Experience" and "Self-Reported Credentials" rather than "Education." He has NO idea what the actual educational credentials or work experience (or other aspects of biography) of any of his applicants really are. He would have been aware of this point if he had taken a good statistics course in college, but alas good statistics classes are very rare in the United States.
- If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.
A simpler animal could have a purely physiological, non-subjective experience of pain or fear: predator chasing === heart rate goes up and run run run, without "experiencing" fear.
For a social species, it may be the case that subjectivity carries a cooperative advantage: that if I can experience pain, fear, love, etc, it makes the signaling of my peers all the more salient, inspiring me to act and cooperate more effectively, than if those same signals were merely mechanistic, or "+/- X utility points" in my neural net. (Or perhaps rather than tribal peers, it emerges first from nurturing in K-selected species: that an infant than can experience hunger commands more nurturing, and a mother that can empathize via her own subjectivity offers more nurturing, in a reinforcing feedback loop.)
Some overlap with Trivers' "Folly of Fools": if we fool ourselves, we can more effectively fool others. Perhaps sufficiently advanced self-deception is indistinguishable from "consciousness"? :)
- The problem is when you consider the game-theoretic incentives of "Greater Madman" posturing, through the len of Trivers' "Folly of Fools" [0]: that the most effective way to fool others is often to first fool yourself.
It is entirely plausible that Darwinian selection pressures rewarded not just those who cynically postured as madmen, but those who actually were madmen (within some bound of Minimum Viable Rationality). Such madness only has to beat the average; unlike the MAD dynamics of nuclear weapons, during most of evolutionary history, a catastrophic error of genuine madness didn't result in destruction of the entire species.
