Interesting paper on bullshit

It seems we have different abilities to detect bullshit.

Artigo na Folha (news about me in a Brazilian newspaper)

A Folha publicou um artigo (quase a página inteira) sobre parte do meu trabalho
 (A Brazilian newspaper - Folha de São Paulo - has published an almost full page about part of my work, in Portuguese):
 
Fisico tenta mapear tipos de vies que assolam mente humana

Divulgação de Seminário (Seminar, in Portuguese and in Brazil)

Quinta, dia 26 de novembro, vou apresentar um seminário sobre o paper que postei aqui da última vez (Thou shalt not take sides). Vai ser na USP Lest (EACH), em duas partes, a primeira começa às 14:00. Seguem os detalhes e o poster:

Seminário do Grupo de Sistemas Complexos:

Dia 26/11/2015, quinta-feira, Sala I1, 330 (EACH -USP)

Primeira parte: 14:00 - 15:00

Segunda parte: 15:30 - 16:30

Título: Não tomarás partido: Cognição Humana, Lógica e Crenças

Resumo: Acreditar am uma descrição do mundo é uma atividade normal e incentivada. No entanto, de um ponto de vista lógico, não há suporte para essas crenças. E experimentos recentes mostram que as crenças que usamos para nos definir podem limitar seriamente nossa habilidade de procurar respostas corretas. Neste seminário apresentarei o argumento completo sobre porque não devemos nunca tomar partido. E veremos como nosso desejo por ideias corretas está por trás de diversos problemas, desde opiniões extremistas até a crise de confiabilidade em artigos publicados em áreas como Medicina e Psicologia.

Thou shall not take sides - preprint available

Does taking sides make us dumb? Our very fallible human reasoning

We all believe in something. And among these beliefs, we do not limit ourselves to moral choices. We also make statements about how we think the real world is. And we feel that these beliefs, this taking sides is not only not problematic, but it is also the right thing to do. A new preprint from André Martins at aArXiv.com defends that the opposite is true. By combining results from Logic and the results of several known experiments on how we human reasons, his paper shows that the very action of taking sides and believing should be avoided because it can prevent us from learning. Taking sides, it seems, turns even the very smart among us dumb. Simulations presented in the paper also show that simply wanting to have one option to believe might be at the heart of the appearance and strengthening of extremist points of view. Some serious problems that arise from our taking sides also identified as generating errors in scientific inquiries. The author presents a discussion of the problem, how it affects society and research in general and suggests ways to make the problem of believing less serious. When Socrates claimed he knew nothing, he had almost completely understood the problem. But we forgot it and we kept choosing descriptions of the world we choose to defend. The problem, according to the paper, is not what we believe; the problem is that we believe.

The Results

We have been aware for a few decades now that, when we humans reason naturally, we commit a staggering amount of mistakes. We make very basic logical errors, we are influenced by others in ways that can make us fail even trivial tasks where we would not have failed at all. And we fail at those tasks just to agree with our group. Our reasoning does allow us to navigate the problems of the daily life in a reasonably competent way but, without training, it does not go further than that. We are simply much dumber than anyone among us would want to believe. New trivially simple logical problems are often beyond our natural skills. More recently, researchers have also observed in their experiments that we the main function of our reasoning is not as a tool for solving problems by finding the best available answer. Instead of looking for truth or best answers, our reasoning seems to have, as its primary function, a simple argumentative cause. We reason to establish arguments to convince other people and, as long as our arguments work, they do not need to be right. Quite the contrary, they could even be quite incompetent and wrong, as long as they get the work done. As in any heated discussion, our brains seem to work to get us ahead in the fight with our opponents. And, in this fight, being right or wrong is just an incident. What matters is that we sound convincing. At the very least, we should sound convincing to the social group we belong, to those people from where we draw validation. And when our social group is attacked by outside ideas, we use our brain power not to examine the situation and try to find who is right. We use it to defend the group we feel where we belong. We hold sets of beliefs that show clearly that we do not reason in an independent, correct way. Instead, we look for justifications for the conclusions we want to be true. And, in an almost unexpected twist, the smarter we are, the better we are at the defending our conclusions. And that can make smarter people less capable of changing their opinions, of learning.

In a recent preprint “Thou shall not take sides: Cognition, Logic and the need for changing how we believe”, currently at the ArXiv preprint server at http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05169, André Martins, from Universidade de São Paulo has combined these results from Cognitive Psychology with our current knowledge on Logic about accepting propositions as true. By observing that our logical methods can not provide any certainty about statements about the real world and that the best we can hope for is to find ways to estimate probabilities for those statements, it becomes clear that our side-taking has no logical origin. While there are statistical methods that try to accept or reject ideas, they are actually a desperate attempt to justify our desire to have just one idea to believe. As it has always been clear that they never ruled out any ideas. While there are circumstances where one might decide to act as if one idea is true, in logical terms, only an estimate of probability makes any sense (and even this might be beyond our current reach for many problems, given our actual state of knowledge). The conclusion: we should never take sides and adopt beliefs as if those ideas were true. For there is no logical reason to do that and, when we embrace these identity-defining beliefs, our instincts make us unable to learn, they make our minds work to defend those beliefs instead of inspecting them. Taking sides and believing make us stupid; sometimes the more stupid, the more intelligent we are. Unless you actually just care about defending your side, regardless of who is right, you should not hold beliefs. You can and actually should have probabilistic beliefs, but those are just uncertainties where some ideas are more uncertain and others less uncertain.

Simulations in the preprint also strongly suggest that our desire to have one single idea to believe and defend is a fundamental key in understanding the origin and spread of unjustified extreme beliefs. Indeed, a simple change in the mental model of the agents, where they start looking for answer that combine the available ideas instead of looking for one to discard, has the amazing effect of avoiding extreme beliefs in the problems studied in the preprint.

Finally, why we actually can trust Science is discussed. And we learn that, despite being the competent and correct way to learn about the world, scientific work still has much room for improvement. As scientists are also humans, the preprint shows the consequences of the desire to have one single idea in the beliefs of different areas. And, while some scientific fields are lucky enough that the mistakes the researcher do there on a daily basis are of no consequence to the reliability of their ideas, in other areas the problems do cast much larger doubts on the reliability of our knowledge. The author shows that taking sides causes us problems in all aspects of our lives. We become less capable of learning, groups become extremists with no reason, and even our scientific knowledge has suffered greatly from this natural instinct. The conclusion is that we should start learning as soon as possible to never take sides on issues that are not just moral issues, but that include statements about how the real world is. It is not that our emotional side can drive us to wrong decisions, our ability to reason does exactly the same. We have tools to avoid that (or, at least, to minimize the problem), it is fundamental that we learn to use them. One of them is to never trust our own beliefs. They may be probable. But we simply never know if they are right.

Nossa burrice coletiva

Você tem um lado na discussão recente sobre o governo do PT, um lado que você crê fortemente que deva ser defendido? Considera o outro lado uma mistura que contém apenas burros e gente defendendo o próprio interesse? Seja o seu lado contra ou a favor, algo que você precisa saber é que, no momento em que você escolheu defender um dos lados e se identificar com ele, você, infelizmente e sem saber, comprometeu seriamente sua capacidade de analisar corretamente o problema. E, se você for uma pessoa inteligente, esse comprometimento pode até ser ainda mais sério. É um fenômeno observado em experimentos de Psicologia Cognitiva, não é sua culpa, é uma consequência de como nós, humanos, somos. Mas é algo que você realmente deveria saber.

Infelizmente, uma explicação completa com os detalhes de como raciocinamos em geral, de como argumentamos e de como isso deveria ser feito é bastante longa. Do tamanho de um livro. As partes da discussão existem em lugares diferentes, mas não sei de um lugar já publicado que inclua todas estas questões. Também por isso, no começo desse ano, eu terminei de escrever um livro sobre conhecimento e crenças. Ele só existe na versão rascunho e está submetido para publicação no momento, enquanto alguns amigos leem essa versão rascunho. Às vezes comento algo sobre o que está ali em uma rede social, mas acho que, como ele ainda não está acessível, tenho usado informações que estão lá em discussões menos do que eu poderia ou deveria. Não que a maior parte do que está lá seja original. Em termos de páginas, a maior parte é um longo contar de resultados, alguns bastante recentes, outros não, em áreas tão distintas quanto Psicologia Cognitica, Lógica, Indução Probabilística, Filosofia da Ciência e efeitos de interações em sistemas sociais complexos. O que torna o livro significativo é que, após juntar tudo, algumas conclusões se tornaram óbvias para mim e, espero que tenha feito um bom trabalho ali de mostrar o como de fato são óbvias. Mas, enquanto essas conclusões são frequentemente mencionadas em uma versão fraca, nunca as vi na versão mais forte a que cheguei, o que é a contribuição central do livro (e o motivo pelo que penso ele venha a ser uma obra importante em qualquer discussão sobre o pensamento e o que sabemos). Em particular, ele traz algumas conclusões importantes que são de aplicação óbvia na política. Com toda a palhaçada atual e a incompetência generalizada do debate, causada pelo sermos humanos frequentemente apesar e não por causa da incompetência do debatedor, acabei concluindo ser melhor fazer minha parte e comentar o que der. Ainda que seja só para desabafar sobre toda a burrice do debate, induzida pelas crenças e o tomar partido de gente que é, na verdade, inteligente.

O livro foi escrito em inglês pois julgo importante demais para terminar restrito a um país não muito relevante (e trazer para uma tradução, mais tarde, é muito mais fácil que fazer o caminho inverso). No blog, há um pouco mais de um capítulo dele, mas a versão final ainda vai passar por revisões. Ele começa assim:

“Nós todos temos nossas crenças. Nós discordamos sobre elas, mas até hoje sempre pensamos que seria certo defendê-las. Defendemos não apenas nossas preferências, as formas como gostaríamos que nossas vidas e sociedades se organizassem, as coisas que representam o que preferimos e que não tem outro padrão para serem avaliadas além dos nossos padrões individuais. Nós também aprendemos a defender nossas ideias de como o mundo realmente é. Frequentemente, temos opiniões em assuntos sobre os quais sabemos pouco ou nada. Espera-se frequentemente que defendamos essas opiniões também. E elas podem ser opiniões bem fortes. Organizamos partes da nossa sociedade ao redor daqueles que defendem as mesmas ideias. Criamos argumentos para defender nossas ideologias, nossas religiões, nossos grupos sociais. Certeza é considerada uma qualidade, dedicação às descrições pessoais que temos do mundo real, uma coisa boa. Respeitamos aqueles que parecem ter certeza e duvidamos de quem mostra dúvida. Nós pensamos que sabemos.

E estivemos errados o tempo todo.”, André Martins, The Stupidity of Beliefs, unpublished

Uma das conclusões centrais é que ter certeza sobre qualquer afirmação sobre como o mundo é (ao contrário de como você gostaria que ele fosse, seus gostos são seus, afinal e você sabe quais eles são) não apenas é errado. É também desastroso. É errado porque analisando por completo o problema do conhecimento, o que não dá para fazer aqui, não há como obter provas sobre o mundo real. Apenas avaliações das probabilidades de cada ideia e cada teoria são possíveis. Sim, várias vezes algumas ideias tem uma chance tão absurdamente pequena de serem verdadeiras que eu poderia encher uma ou várias folhas com os zeros necessários para representar o número. Mas, em muitas perguntas específicas, a incerteza que sobra é expressiva e nem como primeira aproximação daria para ignorar várias alternativas existentes.

Mas há um outro problema. Esses resultados mais recentes deixam claro nossos erros de argumentação. Outros nem tão recentes mostram como nosso raciocínio intuitivo, que leva as coisas que sentimos que são verdade sobre o mundo e problemas em geral, falha com frequência. Analisamos bem problemas cujas respostas certas são bem conhecidas por todos e fáceis. Mesmo quando elas ainda são fáceis, nossos cérebros, sem um bom tanto de treinamento que não recebemos na escola em lugar nenhum do mundo, erram e com frequência em problemas novos.

Quando juntamos as evidências sobre como somos e comparamos com o como deveríamos ser, é possível ver que nós organizamos nossa sociedade e nossas discussões de forma completamente errônea, reforçando as situações que nos induzem a não raciocinar corretamente. Algo que os experimentos e observações mostram é que nossa capacidade de argumentação não existe para nos ajudar a encontrar as respostas certas. Ao menos essa não é a causa principal da existência de nossa capacidade de argumentação ou, mesmo, sua aplicação mais comum. Até podemos usar argumentos de forma correta e podemos aprender a fazê-lo. Em geral, infelizmente, não é o que acontece. Se isso é uma consequência da evolução ou fomos educados para usar a argumentação dessa forma, ou se a causa é uma provável mistura das duas coisas, não sabemos ainda. O que tem ficado claro – e é engraçado pensar o quão óbvio isso é e o quão pouco ou nada se diz sobre – é que argumentamos para reforçar nossos grupos, para convencer nossos aliados. Ou conseguimos liderar nosso grupo ou preferimos nos ajustar ao grupo, quando alguma ideia nossa não é aceita. Estar certo é quase irrelevante nesse contexto. Continuar a pertencer a um grupo que você usa como identificação pessoal é praticamente tudo que importa. Os argumentos que concordam com sua conclusão, você (e todo mundo) aceita sem pensar. Os que discordam, você analisa até achar algum problema. Mesmo que o problema seja irrelevante, que você precise atacar o proponente ao invés de responder o argumento.

E há mais. Pessoas mais inteligentes, assim como pessoas mais treinadas, nós esperaríamos, deveriam ser capazes de chegar mais facilmente a respostas corretas. Mas, quando elas tem uma crença que defendem, o que se observa é que essa capacidade adicional significa uma maior capacidade não de análise, mas de defesa. De achar argumentos que seu grupo aceite, ou que, no máximo, pessoas indecisas não treinados em Lógica considerem bons. Raciocinar e argumentar sobre crenças que você defende é sobre pertencer ao grupo, liderando-o quando der, mas sempre pertencendo. Não é sobre estar certo, não é sobre o que é melhor para todos, não é sobre competência. E isso inclui não apenas o grupo que você acha estar errado e aqueles que pertencem àquele grupo. Isso inclui o seu grupo e inclui o seu raciocínio.

No caso do debate atual, as evidências de se você se tornou vítima desse fenômeno são claras. Se você classifica quem defende o outro lado como sendo burro ou vendido, você é uma vítima do seu cérebro e sua necessidade de ser aceito pelo seu lado. Isso não quer dizer que não existam burros e vendidos, eles existem dos dois lados e talvez até sejam comuns. É facílimo achar manifestações incompetentes de ambos os lados, o que, para o lado oposto parece apoiar suas ideias. Não apoia, não é nos incompetentes que você deveria prestar atenção, a menos que queira se igualar a eles.

Mas há também argumentos sérios em ambos os lados, que deveriam ser pensados sem paixão. Sem desqualificar o proponente, mesmo se você sente que a pessoa merece ser criticada. Há ideias do outro lado que você deveria sim ouvir e considerar e, algumas, aceitar. O seu lado não está certo em sua totalidade. A pergunta, no caso, deveria ser sobre o futuro, sobre o que é melhor para o país, para a sociedade, para você. Como cada fator (sociedade ou você) conta, é decisão sua, mas apenas o futuro pode ser mudado pelo que você fizer hoje então decisões são sobre o futuro. E análises erradas, mesmo que o erro seja humano e nada que deva deixar você com vergonha (afinal somos todos humanos e erramos igual, se não aprendermos a identificar e corrigir nossos erros), não vão ajudar você a mudar de decisão. Ouvir o outro lado quando ele apresenta argumentos bem construídos e aprender com ele seria um pequeno começo.

Mas o melhor, para evitar o quanto o ser cérebro engana você, é não ter lados. Pensar no que é melhor para o futuro, considerando todos os argumentos e pontos de vista mais sólidos, se esforçar fortemente para não se identificar com um lado ou outro. Ou você pode simplesmente ser manipulado pelo lado que escolheu, ser um escravo desse lado, em vez de realmente pensar.

Durante o segundo turno das eleições, houve um dia em que decidi distribuir ais para argumentos sem conteúdo a favor da Dilma ou a favor do Aécio. Não havia um único argumento a favor que não merecesse um ai. Mesmo gente que deveria saber melhor passava raciocínios incrivelmente burros desde que defendesse seu lado. Eu sonho com o dia em que qualquer raciocínio burro seja ridicularizado e não repetido ou compartilhado.

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night ..... Dylan Thomas

Group reasoning: Stereotypes, hatred, and all that

Belonging to a group is a powerful motivator in people actions and also in how they understand the world they live in.  Our social tendencies, our desire to live among equals are very obvious and have some positive consequences. But they also help the drawing of many of the arbitrary lines that divide us, like nation or race.


In his 'The Lucifer Principle , Howard Bloom presents two interesting examples of creating enemies as a way to gain support and power. He tells how Orville Faubus created a bogeyman, inventing a story where he claimed the black population in Little Fork was getting ready for violence when the schools would open, finally forced to integrate black and white students by a Supreme Court decision. Meanwhile, Faubus incited the violence and, by blaming in on the black people, he was able to be elected and re-elected until he decided to retire. A similar strategy was used by Fidel Castro, in order to get the Cuban people to follow his rule. In more recent examples, it is not even necessary to look hard to see how both sides in the Western versus Muslim societies "conflict'' gain the hearts and minds of the people inside each group simply by pointing at the other group as outsiders, as them, basically not granting the same humanity that the group "we'' belong to has.


Dave Grossman's 'On Killing analyses the question of how soldiers deal with the killing they are forced to inflict. While the book has serious problems in his analysis of historical cases (extending the morality of present time to the past and using too few information sources), it points to some interesting, if incomplete, data about the behavioral  of soldiers in our more recent wars. Typically, it seems that, in our modern society, most soldiers would naturally avoid firing their weapons and, when they do, they prefer to aim higher than the heads of their opponents. But this tendency can be trained away and techniques of dehumanizing the enemy already exist. Among them, simply attacking from far in a way where soldiers can aim at objects (tanks, for example) instead of human beings, can make it much easier to avoid the horrible feelings many of us would have from taking someone else's life.


Hatred is indeed a powerful element in how we deal differently with ingroup relations as opposed to outgroup ones. Eran Halperin et al, while studying Israeli-Jewish adults, have observed that hatred is indeed even more important to establishing of political intolerance than other strong inducers of intolerance, such as perceived threat.


Sullivan and Transue, in a review of previous research on political tolerance, observed some rather troublesome effects. For example, a previous study conducted during the McCarthy era by Samuel Stouffer, in  Communism, Conformity and Liberties, observed that an overwhelming majority of the Americans interviewed in the study were in favor of denying the political rights of free speech or participating in the political process to groups they considered a threat, such as communists or atheists. Interestingly, in this study, this tendency to deny political rights was weaker among community leaders. In a later study, James Prothro and Charles Grigg verirfied that, while their respondents actually agreed with general democratic principles such the protection of minorities, this consensus in favor of democratic practices disappeared when applied to controversial issues. The strength of tendency of not accepting divergent opinions was observed to depend on several factors, such as perceived threat, educational background, psychological attitudes and values and so on.

Group Thinking - Argumentative Theory of Reasoning II

Even though we can use our mental skills to try to find correct answers, it seems argumentation, for power and for bonding, is indeed a very important aspect to consider. But this does not mean we aim to win every discussion. The very purpose of winning a discussion is to have others agreeing with us. Therefore, argumentation only makes sense in a context where people try to arrive at some kind of consensus.

Asch experiment points exactly at that. When the group exerted its pressure over people, they were not observed to argument, but to accept the view of the others. The pressure to conform was strong enough that even a trivial task could end in an erroneous answer. It is worth, at this point, to remember the effect known as irrational consistency. In this case, when people hold a specific belief, they tend to also believe in a complete set of logically independent assumptions in a way that they all support their main belief.  While this makes no sense if one's objective is only to hold beliefs as close to the truth as possible (the best action or policy or choice is usually the best one for a set of reasons but also despite a number of problems it might be associated with), it makes perfect sense if the objective is defend a point of view and to conform with a group of people with similar ideas.

It seems we are not really so much interested in truth as we are at confirming our beliefs. We can see people using strategies on a daily basis built to avoid cognitive dissonance, to avoid finding ideas that they disagree with. Recently, my wife shared a post in a social media where a number of Brazilian religious leaders were mocked. These individuals openly request money from their followers (usually poor people who could really have better uses for the money) in exchange for the goodwill of their god. They claim that they could cure diseases easily. Since at the time she posted it, an outbreak of ebola was (and still is, as I write it) treatening  several countries in Africa, it would be only logical for someone who cared about the welfare of people and who genuinely possessed healing powers to use those powers at serious diseases we still don't have the cure for. The post, therefore, suggested three known religious leaders should head to the ebola region to treat the disease.

The tone was one of irony but, if the belief those individuals claim were true and they actually believed that, the suggestion was indeed not more than the logical consequence of those beliefs. The fact that there is something is fishy in this situation, however, is perceived by everyone. And a friend of my wife, who follows the same denomination, complained about the generalization of the post, where all leaders were basically described as liars. I couldn't help myself from joining the discussion. What is interesting is that, as soon as I just entered it with a joking remark, before I could actually reason about the problem, she decided to stop the discussion, to prevent possible damages to our relationship (we never met in person) and deleted her entries to the discussion. Including the post where she told she was leaving the discussion, I was only able to read the post because the comment was sent to my email account. When I actually logged to the site, planning to point out the proposal was actually the logical conclusion for her own beliefs, I could no longer see anything from her.

This refusal to debate things that make us uncomfortable is a very common effect. As a matter of fact, it is commonplace to even advise people to avoid discussions about politics, religion, or sports. When, obviously, if you were interested on finding out the truth instead of winning arguments, talking about those issues and, far more importantly, finding out about the facts and the competent analysis in those subjects, albeit how rare they might be, should be on your list of priorities. But we take disagreements as personal attacks (if I had to guess, I'd say that taking disagreement as personal offense is a problem that is even more serious among supposedly well educated people, such as lecturers in academic positions), and we use faulty reasoning whenever the conclusion feels like it would support us and we can get away with it.

It seems we indeed need something much better than our reasoning natural talents if we ever aim to find the best, correct answers.

Groupthinking - Teoria Argumentativa do Raciocínio (Portuguese version of the post on Argumentative Theory of Reasoning)

Nota: Depois de ter sobrevivido a quantidade de argumentos sem conteúdo que caracterizou a eleição no Brasil, achei melhor traduzir ao menos esse e os próximos posts. Há sempre uma pequena esperança de que alguém leia, se identifique e aprenda algo. Segue a tradução do último post, que é a primeira parte do que vou escrever sobre o tópico:

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Nós somos capazes de criar coisas incríveis, seja nas Ciências, em Tecnologia, ou como Arte. Nós fomos mais longe que qualquer outro ser vivo no nosso planeta e a escala de nossas conquistar não tem rival. No entanto, como temos visto, nossa capacidade de raciocinar, ainda que bem adaptada para o meio ambiente onde nossos ancestrais viveram, tem falhas graves e, ainda que sejamos capazes de realizar muito mais quando muitos de nós se juntam para isso, comunidades também são capazes de criar novos tipos de problemas quando tentamos descobrir a verdade.

Isso sugere a pegunta: por que somos exatamente como somos? Regras lógicas não são realmente complicadas e poderiam existir dentro dos nossos cérebros com um baixíssimo custo. Por outro lado, a Lógica Clássica (que discutirei em entradas futuras) assume que algumas afirmações sejam verdadeiras e, no mundo real, nós simplesmente não podemos assumir de início que certas premissas sejam a verdade. Dessa forma, é possível que a Lógica não tem sido facilmente aplicável nas circunstâncias de nossos antepassados. Ainda assim, resta o problema de quais forças teriam guiado a evolução de nosso intelecto até o ponto atual.

Hugo Mercier e Dan Sperber  propuseram recentemente uma ideia que parece capturar ao menos um aspecto essencial da resposta. Eles observaram que nossas habilidades mentais e verbais, o que dizemos uns aos outros, não evolui para a procura da verdade. Eles sugeriram que, sendo seres sociais, nosso raciocínio evoluiu num ambiente em que, se os demais acreditassem em você, você teria mais poder e uma melhor chance de se reproduzir. Isso teria significado uma pressão evolutiva no sentido de sermos capazes de argumentar e convencer os demais, independentemente de nosso ponto de vista estar correto. Sua Teoria Argumentativa do Raciocínio (Argumentative Theory of Reasoning) afirma que nosso raciocínio existe com o propósito de nos tornar competentes em debater e convencer. O que é frequentemente bastante diferente de se chegar à resposta correta.

De fato, Mercier observou que a ideia de que raciocinamos para tornar nossos argumentos convincentes (argumentos que podem ou não ser verdadeiros) para se aplicar também a  crianças e a outras culturas.  Isso não quer dizer que não sejamos capazes de utilizar nossos intelectos na busca de soluções corretas para os problemas que encontrarmos. Quando comparamos, em uma entrada anterior, nossas habilidades de resolver os problemas lógicos formamelmente idênticos das cartas e do consumo de álcool, vimos que, nas situações que são familiares, nós éramos capazes de raciocinar de forma competente. Achar respostas melhores pode também ter contribuído para moldar nosso raciocínio. Mas a evidência de que boa parte dele evoluiu apenas para nos permitir convencer os demais é bastante convincente.

Group Thinking - Argumentative Theory of Reasoning

We can create amazing things, be it in Science, Technology, or Art. We have gone further than any other living being in our planet, the scale of our accomplishments is unparalleled, we have made changes, for better and for worse, in the whole surface of our planet. And yet, as we have seen, our reasoning, while well adapted to the environment of our ancestors, has serious flaws and, while we can sometimes achieve much more when several of us are involved, communities can also create a whole new level of problems for the problem of pursuing the truth.

So, why are we exactly the way we are? Logical rules are not really complicated and could work inside our brains almost without any cost. On the other hand, Classical Logic (we will talk about different logics in future posts) assumes some statements to be true and, in the real world, we can not simply choose some premises to be true. In that sense, it might not have been easily applicable in many circumstances. Still the question remains, what were the forces that drove the evolution of our intellect to the point we are today?

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently proposed an idea that seems to capture at least one essential aspect of the answer to that question. What they observed is that our mental and verbal skills, what we say to each other, might not have evolved for the pursuit of truth. What they have proposed is that, as social beings, our reasoning evolved in an environment where, if you were believed, you would have more power and a better chance at surviving. And that meant a pressure to be able to argument well and convince people, regardless of the correctness of the underlying reasoning. Their Argumentative Theory of Reasoning states that our reasoning exists for the purpose of making us competent at debating and convincing others. And that is often not the same as arriving at the right answer.

And, as a matter of fact, Mercier observed that the idea that we reason in order to make convincing arguments (that might turn out to be true or not) seems to be applicable also for children and other cultures. All of this does not mean that we can not use our intellects to pursue correct answers to the problems we face. When comparing our abilities in the formally identical logical problems of the cards and of alcohol consumption, we have seen that, for situations we are used to, we actually reason in competent ways. Finding better answers must also have contributed to shaping our reasoning. But the evidence that a good part of it evolved simply to allow us to win arguments is quite compelling.

Group Thinking VI

Social influence, in the previous examples, was limited to the case where all participants in the group were initially treated as equals (even when the suggestion was to listen only to the most confident people, that was a characteristic determined a posteriori.). But it is not always the case. It often happens that, when we have to make a decision in a social context, one or more individuals hold a special position, for example, as bosses or as authorities in the subject.


In a very famous (and also infamous) experiment, Stanley Milgram decided to investigate how it was possible that nazism could dominate Germany, when most Germans were actually not murderous psychopaths. The setting of the experiment was simple. One scientist was at the room controlling the situation while two people, being tested, were assigned to two different roles. One of them was tied to a chair connected to a machine that could be turned on to administer electric shocks to the sitting person. The task of the second individual was to switch the button that caused the shock, when instructed.


Questions were asked to the first subject and when those questions were answered correctly, no shock was administered. However, each error was to be punished with a shock, starting at the small voltage of 15V. Each error made the shock 15V stronger than the previous one, up to a final shock of 450V.


What the second subject, who inflicted the shocks, didn't know was that no real shock was been applied and that the person tied to the chair was an actor instructed to act as if the shock was real. The actor would get some answers right and some wrong, showing just some discomfort at first. Eventually, the actor would beg for the experiment to stop, showing very clear signs of distress and pain. And the scientist would instruct the second subject to keep on with the shocks, despite those pleas.


Milgram reported that, despite many people showing signs of extreme stress while hearing the cries of pain from the actor, 65% of them kept obeying the scientist up to the maximum voltage. The experiment had several problems and can be criticized in many ways, including the serious ethical problem of the horrible psychological pain it caused to the people who kept pressing the button despite their own begging for the scientist to stop. Comparisons with nazism are indeed not exact for a series of factors and the 65% figure is actually the percentage of the experiment where most people agreed with the scientist, while other problems were reported on how well the experiment script was followed (see, per example, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments ).


Despite all those problems, and remembering that the 65% figure is almost certainly an inflated one, the experiment shows how one authority figure that we trust (a scientist conducting an experiment where we were assured nobody would actually be harmed) can make us even do actions we are viscerally opposed to. In this case, no change of opinion was actually observed, but actions were not what we would expect from normal, thinking human beings.

Group Reasoning V

The possibility of a better judgment when using groups is a tool we might want to employ, while avoiding the circumstances where phenomena like groupthink happens. That means that solid evidence on when we should expect problems and when the wisdom of crowds is expected to work on out favor is required.

Indeed, one first question that comes to mind is how strong the influence between the member of a group needs to be so that we should start to worry. Lorenz et al designed an experiment to address that question. During their experiments, they asked people to answer factual questions and, after they have expressed their opinion with no group influence, they provided information about the answers of other people. Each subject had, then, the opportunity of changing their original answer. What they observed was that, while the group was initially ``wise'' (in the sense of wisdom of crowds), the social influence tended to diminish the diversity of observed answers to such a degree that it was possible that the correct value was no longer included in the range of answers. And, despite that, the confidence of the individuals  in the social answer was increased! This shows that even weak social influence can undermine the wisdom of the crowds effect. The authors suggest that opinions should be obtained with no element of social influence in order to capture the advantages of group reasoning.

Of course, while desirable, it is not always possible to eliminate the social influence inside the group in a meaningful way. De Polavieja and collaborators, while studying this problem, have suggested that the beneficial effects of group reasoning can still be obtained, even under the presence of social effects if we just use the opinions of the very confident people, who did not change their initial opinions, despite the social pressure. Note that while groupthink can be a very powerful influence, it might not be enough to convince everyone and independent minded individuals might be able to retain the initial range of views. And, with that, the wisdom that was presented in the crowd before interaction.

Such a proposal, however, might be labeled as anti-democratic (the word democracy, unfortunately, is nowadays used even to defend positions that defend that just a small fraction of the interested parties should be listened to, arguments that use it should be read with extreme caution), depending on the context where it might be applied. The general advise to make the social influence between deciders as small as possible, however, stands. This does not mean that the different alternatives should not be presented to voters, quite the opposite. What the literature shows is that interaction between the voters should be minimum, not between the people presenting and debating the alternatives. In large societies, most voters do not interact with other, unlike the laboratory experiments and, therefore, it is not clear that groupthink will happen.

The situation is very different in committees or smaller gatherings. In this cases, the internal pressures inside the group might indeed destroy our ability to think and replace it with our desire to conform. This is not just true about the final opinions. In her work on the performance of groups and individuals, Gayle Hill also studied how the interaction might affect brainstorm sessions. What she observed was that, when people were asked to plan new ideas for a brainstorm session and bring them ready, the added independent work was consistently more creative than when the ideas were thought during a meeting.

The composition of a group is also a key factor in the quality of its reasoning. Ilan Yaniv studied how well a group was capable to avoid framing effects. Framing effects happen when people change their decisions simply because the question they had to answer was presented to them (framed) in different words. In this study, Yaniv observed that by increasing heterogeneity in the group, simply by assigning individuals to different frames, had a very strong impact on getting rid of the biases, while homogeneous groups performed much worse than individuals.

In a review of the literature in the area, Elizabeth Mannix and Margaret A. Neale discussed the benefits and problems observed under many different circumstances of increasing diversity in a groups. They concluded that there are types of heterogeneity that can make a group have problems in the areas of interpersonal attraction and liking, such as differences in race/ethnicity, gender or age. But, from an information processing point of view, diversity should be able to improve the group results, despite possible management problems it might cause. In particular, underlying, less obvious differences such as different backgrounds, education or personalities were indeed associated with improvements in performance.

The conclusion of all these experiments seem to be that there is, indeed, a lot of knowledge and intelligence in a group, but crowds are very stupid. They make mistakes individuals would rarely make.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning IV

The consequences of social influence that emerge from these observations are disturbing ones. I am sure that some readers might have trouble accepting, even after all the evidence presented so far on our reasoning shortcomings. But the extent to which we can be influenced by a group of people, even when that group is wrong, is something that is very well documented. In a famous experiment, Solomon Asch  proposed a very trivial question to his subjects, based on the figure bellow. 

 

The people involved in the experiment should just state which of the three lines in the right card (A, B, or C) had the same length as the line in the left card. When asked the question in the control situation, with no influence of anyone else, those who were being tested picked the correct option (line C) 99% of the times. The purpose of the experiment was to see how people would react when the information from others disagreed with their perception. In order to test it, a part of the subjects were tested in a situation where they first listened to the individual opinions of other people, who were actually actors. Those actors were instructed to provide the correct answer in some of the trials, but the wrong one (line A) in most of them. In each trial, all actors provided the same answer.

What Asch observed was that, when the actors provided the wrong answer before the individual being tested answered, this person would make the wrong choice up to 75% of the times. The effect required a minimum majority of 3 people to be observed. However, the effect did not become stronger as more actors were added, all in agreement with the wrong choice.


More recently, evidence about what might be happening inside our brains was obtained by testing the reactions of people while conducting  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains. Eisenberger et al were able to observe that, when we experience rejection, the participants showed brain activity similar to that observed when people experience real physical pain. Of course, this does not answer if people actually changed their perception of the world or if they would just agree with the majority while still somehow noticing that majority opinion was wrong.



While investigating that, Berns et al observed that both perceptual and emotional processes were involved in our brains in circumstances similar to those of the Asch experiment. Adding to that, Klucharev et al found clear evidence that our conformity to the group norms or opinions happen through learning mechanisms. This suggests that the influence of the group might actually change the way people perceive the world.



Social influence is pervasive and we are rarely aware of it. Even through social media, it was possible to detect that emotion can be contagious, without any non-verbal cues, simply by reading about the emotions of a friend. While this specific work was was criticized by the use of Facebook data without explicit user consent (implicit consent from accepting the terms of service was assumed by the authors, PNAS added a comment to the beginning of the article to point this possible problem), it highlights very clearly how we are actually influenced even with very little information.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning III

It is not always true that groups always outperform individuals, though. Comparisons between the estimates of a group and those of the best informed individual in the same group did not provide such a clear cut answer. In that case, the results of the experiments were not consistent between different problems. Sometimes the groups were able to provide better results than their most competent member, while, under different circumstances, the best member was capable of outperform the group.




As a matter of fact, Kerr et al.  concluded there is no simple answer to the question of whether individuals or groups are more biased. Both gains and losses have been observed as consequence of obtaining the opinion of groups. Different circumstances on how the group interact can make a significant difference on the outcome as well as the type of question or task proposed. The number of papers on the subject is quite large and, here, I will just comment on a few cases where problems have been observed. The cases I will describe are very far from exhaustive and no claim about importance is made.


A classical case of group decisions going wrong is the circumstance coined by Irving Janis as groupthink in Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Groupthink is what happens when the desire to conform and agree with others is such that it interferes with critical thinking. In those situations, people might adopt some idea that they believe better conform to the group norms, instead of actually providing their best independent evaluation. This can happen in a variety of circumstances, from groups with a strong sense of belonging (sport fans or religious communities, for example), to cases where one opinions have a strong moral value attached to them or when people simply want to show support for a leader (for example, their boss).



What is particularly troublesome about groupthink is that, when it is observed, it is not just the case that the group makes decisions that are worse than its most competent member. It can actually happen that the group will reason in ways that are much worse than the average individual of the group would. Examples of this can be often observed in the behavior of crowds in sport events, where insults and violence happen far more often than it would be reasonable to expect if those same people were deciding as individuals.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning II

Group decisions happen every day. We choose the people who will represent us in the government (in several countries, at least), we participate in groups of different sizes that have to reach an agreement about how to act (assuming a collective action does happen). Sometimes a group decision can be described as the sum of mostly independent decisions and actions, taken individually, as in an election. At other times, we assemble and discuss and the final estimate or the final action is decided as a result of the social process that happens between the assembled people. And, under different circumstances, a society may move in a direction that is just the consequence of how many individual actions interact with each other, with no real sense of group decision, except as a consequence of the sum of the behaviors and their interactions. One example of this is the fluctuation of prices as a consequence of the individual decisions of buyers and sellers. In this last case, all reasoning can be described as individual reasoning, while in the first two, decisions are made as a consequence of the sum of the opinions and, sometimes, the interactions between those opinions.


While the case of how the actions of people can influence the decision of the societies as a whole is very interesting (and I will return to it farther ahead), when we talk about the reasoning of a group, this is usually understood to be the first two cases. At this point, we will just discuss the cases where some reasoning is expected from the group, with or without interaction between its members.


After so many disappointments on our individual abilities, it makes sense to start with some good news. More than a hundred years ago, during the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, Francis Galton observed a contest where people attempted to provide the best guess for the weight of a fat ox . Of course, people proposed a range of different values, some close and some very distant from the true value (1,198 pounds). What surprised Galton was the fact that the median of the guesses was actually very close to the correct value at 1207 pounds. Later, he reported the average of the guesses was even closer to the real value, at 1,197 pounds!


This effect, where some average estimate provided by a group of people shows a remarkable agreement with reality was later coined as the Wisdom of Crowds. Galton associated this with the strength of a democratic government, where decisions arise from some kind of averaging over the opinions of many. Of course, the observation of one single case of a group estimate was not enough for a conclusion and several experiments were performed to test how well groups perform. In a 1982 review, Gayle Hill discusses the case of several papers published since Galton's initial observation. In her review, Gayle presented four different comparisons (in all cases, the results for groups included both groups working independently as well as groups where people were allowed to interact with each other): groups versus individuals, groups versus the most competent member, groups versus statistically pooled responses, and groups versus mathematical models. What she concluded from reviewing previous work was that, in the case of groups versus individuals, the groups tended to perform better, as expected. So, what happens when we examine the other possibilities (as well as other possible effects)?

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning

It should be clear by now that we should be very careful with any information our minds present to us. While our brains do a good job most of the time, they can easily be fooled and, depending on the circumstances, will fool themselves with no exterior help needed. As I have pointed before, this seems to conflict with all the amazing achievements we, as a species, were able to accomplish.

One possible explanation for this might be in that very phrase. We have accomplished as a species far more than any individual could. Even our greatest genius were able to do their work thanks to the many man who came before them (Newton's claim that he only saw further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants is so well known it has became a common place), in great disagreement with the descriptions of scientists in fictional works. The super genius who can understand anything fast has never existed outside comic books and other sources of entertainment. This suggests that, while we do lack something as individuals, it might be possible that our combined brain powers were responsible for all the advances and explanations we have created.

And, indeed, when observing human history, this seems to be the case. Each scientist contributed with a new piece to the large puzzle, some with larger pieces, some with smaller ones. But many of those pieces only made sense in the context of the knowledge society had at the time. We have new methods of preserving old knowledge. First, for whatever adaptive reason, our ancestors developed our language skills to a level not observed until now in any other species. Later we created ways to preserve that knowledge in permanent materials, through writing and several other information preserving technologies. And we are still creating new ways to do that today. It might seem that while we can be quite flawed as individuals, maybe mankind is much more capable than we are as humans.

This poses a question that deserves a new dive into the literature of psychological experiments: Are group of people better at reasoning and deciding than the individuals? If so, are they always better or that improvement only happens under some conditions?

Human Stupidity: Historical: Memory

Our reasoning and our perception of the world are, as we have seen, far from perfect. While both of them do a good job in many of our every day tasks, they are subject to errors and it is not an overstatement to claim we should be wary of our own conclusions. This imperfection of our cognitive abilities can make us wonder if other functions of our brains suffer from similar problems.

While our emotions lie outside the scope of this work (it is already recognized we can suffer from all kinds of emotional diseases and there is no need to deal with that here), there is another function that we traditionally believe our brains perform well. That function is remembering. People tend to think of their memories as stored boxes they can consult at a later date, providing accurate descriptions of the facts we experienced in our own lives. It might be hard to find a specific memory sometimes and we do worry about forgetting, from simple information we can no longer recall to more serious pathologies where a patient memories can slowly be lost in a permanent way. All this fits well with the information in boxes metaphor, as one can eventually lose those boxes never to find them again. Or lose them for a while, until some new circumstances bring them back to our attention.

Most people, however, do not doubt the contents of their memory. If they do have a memory, unless they suffer from some delusional state, that means they believe things happened exactly they remember. And we trust our memories so completely that we send people to jail every day based only on witness testimonies, that is, on what people remember they saw or heard. And while a lawyer can defend a client by claiming the conditions of the perception of the witness were not good enough, no problem is usually detected on the ability to remember. That is, the legal system understand our perceptions can be flawed and should not be trusted, under the right circumstances. But it assumes that a healthy person will not create false memories or somehow alter the original ones.

This assumption tends to be considered true not just by the layman but also, until recently, by many psychologists. And, as a matter of fact, many practitioners believed (some still do) in the concept of "repressed memory''. That is, an event that a person has experienced in the past and have not really forgotten about. Instead, just the conscious memory is missing, as that event would probably have been very traumatic. Many therapists worked based on the idea that these memories can be recovered through treatment. And that, when these memories are indeed "recovered'', they correspond to actual events in the life of the patient.

The first indication that there was something wrong with this picture came from the unexpectedly large number of cases observed in the 90s where people claimed to have recovered "repressed memories'' of abuses they had suffered. What was particularly suspicious was the fact that the stories those people told often include elements that were supposed to be rare, as, for example, satanic practices. All those cases were recovered under particular types of psychotherapy and, as it should be if those memories were real, arrests and convictions did happen as consequence. The strange number of these cases did make a number of researchers worried that those memories, as vivid and real as they seemed to be to those who had recovered them, might actually be an artifact of the therapy.

Research followed, as it should. In a series of very interesting experiments, Elizabeth Loftus observed she could indeed create false memories in the mind of her subjects. Cases of people who had been wrongly found guilty were later observed, not only related to ``repressed memories'', but also in many cases where the evidence of guilt consisted of witness reports. Simple things like showing pictures of innocent people to a victim could cause that same victim to recognize, later, a man in those pictures as the man who had raped her. It is not clear how many innocent lives were destroyed due to our lack of understanding of how our minds work. Or how many real culprits were not identified by the same problem (for an explanation of the main results of this line of research, there is a very interesting TED lecture).

The image that emerged from those experiments is a different one when compared with previous beliefs. Our memory seems to be much more fluid than any of us would have thought. It is not just that we can suffer from problems with perception. As we learn more about some event, our brains actually change the very recording of that event, so that it will fit with our new beliefs. Missing pieces of information can be obtained from sources as unrelated to the event as a picture one observes later. What we carry in our minds is actually a mixture of what we observed, what we expected to see and things we have experienced or thought later, all mixed ("Memory - like liberty - is a fragile thing'', Elizabeth Loftus}.

In order to finish the topic of our memory, there is an interesting phrase by Steven Novella that he published while discussing the problem of the reliability of our memories in his blog:

"When someone looks at me and earnestly says, "I know what I saw,'' I am fond of replying, "No you don't.'' You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under." Extracted from here.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Visual Illusions

Almost everyone has seen pictures that deceive our eyes in some way. Some of them have two possible interpretations, others make us evaluate wrongly the size or the alignment of geometric figures. More complex figures can induce the illusion of movement when no actual movement is happening. And yet, illusion is a concept that is actually hard to define from a philosophical point of view, since it requires comparison with the true nature of the object, something we would tend to define as perceived by our senses. The number of different illusions and the way they work is actually so large that systematizing them into a few types or a theoretical framework has proved to be a surprisingly hard task.



The way our brain interprets the information it receives from our eyes can be considered similar to the way we reason. The task is indeed similar. Given what we know, the brain tries to arrive at the best possible conclusion. It uses heuristics and rules we still are starting to understand. These heuristics are usually good for solving some set of problems, either problems our ancestors had to deal with (get food, find a mate, etc.) or problems we learned to solve during our life time. The same way our brains have to deal with images. Given the visual information our eyes receive, our brain tries its best to interpret what exists in the world around us. It extrapolates and reaches conclusions that are not conscious, simply providing us with its best guess. And, most of the time, that guess is remarkably good.


Just as we discussed before, the fact we sometimes make mistakes of interpretation of visual information is not necessarily a bad thing for our survival. Recognition of patterns, whether those patterns emerge in the financial market or are the behaviour of the game one is hunting, is a very useful skill. And if one is the first to identify it, there is more to gain. This can be enough to compensate for the cost of false detections. And, indeed, in general reasoning as well as in interpreting visual information, we are able to identify patterns very fast, which leads to falsely identifying random meaningless noise with something important. This general phenomenon is called apophenia.


One interesting and helpful example of how this applies to our visual perception is our tendency to identify faces everywhere, from simple typographical juxtaposition of characters like :) or ;-( to seeing faces on rocks or on toasts or on shadowy, blurred images from Mars. This is called pareidolia. Quickly identifying other people as well as inferring their emotional state is certainly an useful trait for a social animal like humans are (see Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).


While this can be interesting and allows us to create new ways to communicate and to give extra meaning to some forms of art, the reality is that much of what we see as faces is a probably hard-wired conclusion of our brains. Indeed, evidence from MRI scanning of our brains show that the specific areas of the cortex that become more active when we see faces also show the same type of activity when we just perceive something as a face . The timing of the activity is also consistent with an early interpretation of the image as an actual face and not a later re-interpretation of the image by our brains. Amazingly, it is already possible to do neural reconstruction of the face someone is seeing from the detected pattern of the activity of the brain.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Heuristics II

Heuristics, in the context of the literature about human reasoning, is a fancier name for these rules of thumb. Before that, the term, based on a Greek word, was used by Pólya in his book How to Solve It, with the meaning of his methods (or advices) for solving mathematical problems. In that sense, he proposed a basic separation of four steps that he considered helpful in finding those solutions. While talking about human reasoning, however, heuristics is a simple rule (or rules) we use to guess an answer. Opposed to a mathematical proof, here, there is no guarantee the answer will be correct or good. Of course, Pólya's heuristics provide no certainty that you will arrive at an answer, they just intend to help your chances of finding it. If you do not make any mistakes, mathematics will make it sure you do get the right answer, then. While human reasoning heuristics will often give you an answer, even if not the correct one.

A classical example of how our heuristics can help us reason is the problem of trying to decide which of two cities has the biggest population. Gigerenzer and Goldstein performed a series of tests of possible procedures for guessing between two cities, when using a number of cues about the city, such as if the city had a soccer team in a major league or if the city had a university.
The researchers were interested in comparing how heuristic reasoning would compare against statistical models they considered as rational. They tested different methods for making predictions from the cues, namely, multiple regression and neural networks. To their surprise, even without using all the information, some of their simulated heuristics were often able to outperform the supposedly rational models where all the available information was used.

The "Take the best'' heuristic was particularly successful, despite its simplicity. It basically orders the cues from more informative to less and then uses the best one where information is available. The simulations included the possibility a simulated agent might not know enough to use the best cue available, forcing the agent to check the next cue. As soon as one cue provides any evidence to which city might be the biggest, "Take the best'' uses that cue and just ignore any information from the other cues.

We observe here an effect that seems similar to how humans accuracy decreases with more information. However, we can not actually make that claim, since we don't know the exact reason for the human mistakes. In the case of multiple regression models, on the other hand, the reason is clear. While it is quite surprising at first that using less information might be better when using a statistical model, it is a known problem that statistical models that use many variables can overfit the data. This phenomenon will be further discussed later, when we discuss inductive logic and the use of probabilistic models. We will see how good prediction requires the use of models that both fit the data well and are as simple as possible.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Heuristics

Humans are considered (by humans) as the most intelligent species known (to mankind). And, when we observe how much we have been able to accomplish as a species and compare that to every other species on Earth, that statement makes a lot of sense. One could debate if some big brained animals might be individually as intelligent as an individual human (he question now seems far less absurd than decades ago, as we learn more and more about the abilities of some animals and our own shortcomings). But there is no denying that what we have achieved as a species is without precedents. We have vehicles exploring the deep ocean and other planets, while others are leaving the Solar System; we can communicate almost instantaneously around our world and we understand the world around us in ways that a few generations ago wouldn't even dream. We have been changing the appearance of our planet (for good and also for evil) in a scale not done by an any organism, probably since the appearance of the first plants that could photosynthesize (The oxygen they started producing, while vital for us, was certainly a pollution for most organisms that lived then and must have caused widespread death among the species that didn't adapt to the new environment, much like the widespread death we are causing. Polluting and killing is not our exclusivity at all). And, for the first time since life started on Earth, we have been able to subvert most of the survival rules that apply to other species, changing how evolution applies to us by making it possible for even the some of the weakest among our species to survive and reach an old age, safe from the dangerous and fatal natural environment.

Those are very impressive accomplishments and they do give us the sense that, while we are far from perfect, or even far from good enough, we have been able to do something right. Culturally, we even see ourselves as something apart from the natural world, as if we were somehow superior to nature and not just a very successful species of big apes. While the distinction between natural and artificial makes no sense (one might be tempted to say it is completely artificial), it does reflect the fact that we have, in the local scale, subverted the relation we have with the world around us. And, while there are many reasons to worry about the future, our present is actually almost unbelievably better than we our perception of it. Violent deaths have never been so rare, humans never lived such long lives, all due to the advances in science and in our cultural and political institutions as shown recently by Pinker. The data that show this to be a fact are not so hard to find and we only feel we are surrounded by violence and disasters as an effect of the news focusing on those events. And, since information circulates much better now, we can learn about almost any disaster in the planet. With billions alive, the total number of crimes and disasters is indeed large. Not only we can learn about natural disasters happening at the other side of the globe, now it is very likely that there are people living there who will be affected by it. But what really matters to any of us as individuals is the proportion of people who die or who suffer, not the total number that happens in a larger population and, much less, the total number of cases we can find in the Internet. What matters is the probability that a given tragedy will affect one person. And these probabilities have been steadily going down (with the important exception of the ills associated with old age, as, in the old days, they were quite rare, since basically nobody reached old age), to the point that, even without ever seeing the data, I would personally bet that the life expectation of an Egyptian pharaoh was much smaller than that of a poor and discriminated person, as, per example, a black poor woman living in a crime infested slum in Brazil. That this statement can be surprising to so many is just a consequence of the many problems with our reasoning.

So, what is actually happening? Are we completely stupid incompetents or are we incredible geniuses who mastered the secrets of the Universe and changed the world into a utopia? The answer is clearly that we are neither, even though there is some truth to the notion that we are very dumb and also to the notion that we are actually living in a Golden Age of mankind.

One first partial answer to the question of how we (or any other living being) can actually achieve so much while being quite dumb was suggested by Simon, in 1956. In his paper, Simon investigated if it was actually necessary for a living organism to have a well defined utility function as proposed by the EUT, as well as the intellectual capacity to analyze its environment and make the decisions that maximize that utility. Organisms need to find ways to deal with a multitude of different tasks, from feeding, to defending itself and reproducing if the species is to survive. Actually obtaining and interpreting all available data from observing its surroundings and choosing the best way to obtain the best possible outcome, when all those tasks are considered, is basically an impossible problem. It would require a mental capacity far beyond the one we possess and this basically infinite capacity would also need to happen very fast. You really don't want to sit and think what is the best choice when a lion is closing to you. Since finding the perfect answer is not achievable, organisms had to settle for less.

Assume there are a number of clues in the environment that you could use in a simple way to make some decision. If this decision will give you a better chance to survive than not using those clues, any organism that uses those clues will have an advantage when compared to organisms who don't (as long as processing this information does not consume so much energy that the benefit is smaller than the cost, of course). So, an organism does not need to find the optimum, or, in economic terms, to optimize its utility. It can actually function competently by finding efficient, but not necessarily error-proof, ways to interpret the information captured by its senses. Simon describing this non-optimal behavior as satisficing (Evolution does not requires any species to be the best to survive. Being better than the others would be sufficient, but even being better might not be a good strategy. The real concept is better adapted. Not stronger, or faster, or smarter, sometimes, being weaker can actually mean better adapted. In an environment with scarce resources, being too big and strong might require extra food that is not available. In this case, the weaker organisms, who are able to survive with less, are the best adapted to that environment. This applies to strength, but also to speed, to mental prowess or any other characteristic.).

That is, if simple rules of thumb make you more likely to survive, it makes sense to use them. Per example, if you are looking for the cause of a phenomenon, it makes sense to look for things that happen together with it. After all, if it is the cause, you do expect those things to be related. The fact that many variables can be associated with no causal connection means you will often believe that things are related when they are not.

Suppose you are belong to a family of farmers without any of our modern knowledge. You try to plant your seeds and sometimes things go well and the climate seems to be working in your favor. At other times, it gets cold too soon, or there is not enough water for your plants to grow. After a long time observing, your grandfather observed if he planted the seeds whenever a specific bright star appeared low on the sky just when the Sun went down, the climate would be right for the plant to grow. Your parents confirmed it as well as your own experience. So, you conclude that this star commands the success of your farming. While this conclusion is wrong, there is no cause there, the observation of movement of the stars is indeed associated with the calendar and the seasons. And your decision will indeed be better. If you extend the argument to the belief that the same star will influence the chance of your success in war, you will be very wrong. But, without better information, there is no way you can actually determine the better day to go to war. Going when you believe the stars support you is a costless mistake, from an evolutionary point of view, since it does not improve or decreases your chance of success.

Mistaking association for cause is indeed an incredibly common mistake. My own personal experience with association and causation is actually quite worrisome. I am used to telling my students that their exams are very likely to include a question where variables will be associated and I will ask about causes. And I make it abundantly clear, with examples and theory, that observational studies (I will define these later in this text), one can not conclude that there is cause and effect. And yet, a large percentage of these students make this very same mistake during the exams (of course, this might be related to the fact that I tell my students that, if they do not show up for class but succeed at the exam, I will give them the minimum required attendance, so it is possible that the students who make that mistake were not at those three or four classes when I tell them one of the exam questions. But my best guess is that it is not just that). Outside of the exams, this can be a low cost mistake, so, it is a reasonable rule of thumb, despite the fact that is is logically wrong.