To make things worse, complete stories, ones with more details tend to be more convincing. We thus not only gravitate to stories, but stories with embellishments. Are there better (and more likely to be correct) ways of satisfying our curiosity?

Andrew Gelman gives us a bit of a hint:

Many years ago, Don Rubin convinced me that it’s a lot easier to think about “effects of causes” than “causes of effects.” For example, why did my cat die? Because she ran into the street, because a car was going too fast, because the driver wasn’t paying attention, because a bird distracted the cat, because the rain stopped so the cat went outside, etc. When you look at it this way, the question of “why” is pretty meaningless.

Similarly, if you ask a question such as, What caused World War 1, the best sort of answers can take the form of potential-outcomes analyses. I don’t think it makes sense to expect any sort of true causal answer here.

Here’s a recent one I enjoyed that seems to be about Robin Hanson’s near/far biases and preference for visible signaling:

…white people in places like Los Angeles or Austin, TX will often promise to learn Spanish in hopes of being able to ask local taco stands about whether or not their carne asada is grass fed (”¿Ha leído usted Michael Pollan?”).

In order to reach this level of fluency and obnoxiousness, white people believe they must put themselves into a local immersion. This means a promise to watch only Spanish language TV, listen only to Spanish language radio, read Marquez in his native tongue, and watch foreign films with the subtitles turned off. There are some instances of white people doing this for almost a week!

When this technique is unavailable or fails, white people will immediately turn to books and computer software as a last ditch effort to make good on their promise. After about a week, most white people will give up and blame someone for their failure (”this software is terrible,” “there aren’t enough people in Portland who speak Farsi!”). But rather than discarding the books and software packaging, white people will simply put them in the most visible part of their book shelf. This allows white people to believe that they have not failed since they can resume their studies at any time until their death.

Read the whole thing!

Here’s a link to the full list.

My wife and I were speculating on how long last Friday’s Rosh Hashanah service would last. We both figured on two hours, but my wife said, “Services always last longer than you expect.”

He poses the question of rational expectations. Despite years and years of experience, Hamermesh (and myself, actually) are really bad at predicting when services will end, even though the prayers are always the same.

So what gives?

Possibly, if you think services are boring, your mindset can affect your expectations about how long services will last (in which direction would depend upon the type of person you are).  Maybe we just have poor memories for this sort of thing.

Personally, I think a large part is variability within the service. At my synagogue, the first day of Rosh Hashannah services lasted a half and hour longer than they did on the second day. The rabbi was in a rush the second day and let the first day drag out. They also started late, but since they started before I got there in both cases, all I observed was the end result.

I don’t think its a stretch to assume that the man had no meteorological basis for making this claim, yet we hear these sorts of statements all the time. Why do people commonly assume that there are physical relationships between past and future events? Or, even worse, that past events can somehow influence the outcome of future events even when lacking a direct causal element?

I’m currently working my way through some of David Hume’s philosophy. He seems to focus on one important notion; that causal relationships, even down to apparent the physical laws of the universe, are influenced by our perceptions. In other words, we assume, despite lack of evidence, that a falling object will conform to Newtonian laws of motion everywhere in the universe. We make inferences about effects without completely understanding the causes because all previous experience has given rise to these expectations – and so we want all future experiences to conform as well. Furthermore, because these experiences must be filtered through human consciousness, events (and our expectation about future events, causes and effects) are inherently biased.

This notion can be extended one step further, by discussing the statement from the guy on the radio.

Not only do people seem to have askeptical expectations about causal relationships (by assuming a deterministic worldview and ignoring the effect of subtle variations on outcomes) and too brazenly draw inferences about the world, but there is also the expectation that the human brain can bend outcomes at will.

Radio guy wills there to be a mild winter and has some expectation that this will occur – despite the lack of data that links weather patterns in this way. Sports fans often wear their lucky jersey or sit in a specific way, in order to meta-influence the game.

Hume was only half way there.

Not only do our minds distort our expectations for cause to preceed a predicted effect, often these expectations are based nothing more than hope, desire and observation biases. Once these biases are set up, we think that our [incorrect] expectations can have an affect on actual outcomes.

One study found that, on average, couples suffered 50% more sleep disturbances if they shared a bed.

Dr Stanley, who sleeps separately from his wife, points out that historically we were never meant to share our beds.

He doesn’t mention, however, whether or not this was his behavior before before he conducted the study. I’m not contradicting the results of the study, just briefly mentioning that observational biases occur in science all the time. Sometimes we observe what we want to observe.

I wonder if this isn’t a displayof information bias – besides for the obvious problem of the small sample size.  American politics and issues are probably on the news in Iran a lot more often than we’re exposed to Iranian politics.  Maybe there is some neutral terroritory that we can quiz to eliminate the information bias, which tells us nothing about the relative and subjective “informative-ness” of Americans and Iranians.