Decision Fatigue

An Art of Manliness article on the power of morning and evening routines linked to an article that discusses an important concept: decision fatigue. Since I have argued that willpower is a finite resource, I am not surprised. The NY Times article cites the work of Roy F. Baumeister, but another classic is the Stanford marshmallow experiment. 

The adult version of this test goes like this:

A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.

Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.

This is a rough and ready test of conscientiousness, but it is worth remembering that conscientiousness is a very big bucket. There are lots of sub-traits that fall in this category. Here is a list of sub-traits from one test:

• Self-Efficacy
• Orderliness
• Dutifulness
• Achievement-Striving
• Self-Discipline
• Cautiousness 

The sub-traits have formal similarities, but they can actually have a complete lack of correlation. My sub-trait scores on C have almost exactly zero correlation.

For all that, the marshmallow test is known to predict future success in life. The individual traits of C are harder to predict than the overall bucket, but the whole mess of them are generally helpful in life. 

An interesting result from the work of Baumeister: eating restores willpower. 

The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.

Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff.

Again, not too surprising for me. I've known for a long time that I lose my temper when I get hungry. People who have more C can suffer fools gladly longer than I can when hungry. Since mental energy is material, this is to be expected. There is a fun Newtonian twist to this. One of Baumeister's students didn't believe that glucose could really affect willpower. He proved that overall energy usage didn't really change in the brain, no matter how much willpower the subject had. What he didn't expect, however, was that there was an equal and opposite reaction in which areas of the brain receive energy when your willpower is depleted, and the balance is restored by eating.

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

If you wish, you can apply the standard evolutionary biology mental shortcut at this point.

One of the virtues of the Aristotelian account of the virtues is that as you become more experienced in living a virtuous life, good choices become habits that no longer require thought. This frees up your mental energy for bigger and better things.

Grit

John D Cook linked to an article on "grit" by Venkatesh Rao. This article really got me thinking. Ever since I discovered the utility of psychometrics for personality, I have spent a great deal of time pondering the relationship between the gifts we are given, and what we do for ourselves.

Venkat's primary point in his post is our modern economy doesn't align well with the academic disciplines the elite are educated in. He says people call him a generalist because he has a PhD in Aerospace Engineering and he ended up in marketing. However, from his perspective, there was a straight line between those two points. Thus his physics metaphor of external and internal coordinate systems.

The trouble is, we still tend to think in that external coordinate system, and may spend years trying to make that aerospace education turn into an aerospace job when our true skills and interests may lie elsewhere. Katz's now infamous article, Don't Become a Scientist, addressed precisely this mismatch between the disciplinary expectations produced in grad school, and the actual behavior of the job market.

Venkat then turns to what he calls grit, and I would call conscientiousness. He correctly notes this is probably the best predictor of success, over IQ, over family connections, over just about anything. People who bust ass almost always do well.

One point where I would disagree with Venkat is this:

Grit is the enduring intrinsic quality that, for a brief period in recent history, was coincident with the pattern of behavior known as progressive disciplinary specialization.

I don't think this should be in the past tense. Progressive disciplinary specialization is becoming more and more associated with C and less and less with g. What we may be getting is less and less value for our money and effort, because disciplinary specialization [in science at least] often means working under your 50- or 60-something PI in relative anonymity as cheap. but skilled labor.

This is a really good working definition of conscientiousness:

Grit has external connotations of extreme toughness, a high apparent threshold for pain, and an ability to keep picking yourself up after getting knocked down. From the outside, grit looks like the bloody-minded exercise of extreme will power. It looks like a super-power.

Venkat goes on to discuss how what can look like brutal hard work can actually be easy, depending on your skills and interests. Quite true. I think the big takeaway here is that building on your strengths can be more effective than trying to remedy your weaknesses. This is a subject of intense personal interest to me, because once I discovered that I have low conscientiousness, many of my frustrations became comprehensible.

Conscientiousness is a finite resource. As a Thomist, this doesn't surprise me. The part of our mind that touches infinity is our intellect, the rational, reasoning, undying part of us. The rest of us is mediated through a thoroughly material, fallible, limited body. Willpower, like strength, can be depleted because it is material.

Once I knew this, I could understand why my reach continually exceeded my grasp. I like Renkat's point about flow and the results that can come from just keeping doggedly at something. But for me, doggedly keeping at something is very, very difficult. I just don't have a lot of capacity [potentia] for self-discipline. The revelation for me was realizing this is a stable personality trait. There are things I can do, for sure, but it is a limitation I will probably struggle against for my entire life. Since my conscientiousness is so low, I actually do need to exert continual will just to keep showing up.

Engineers sometimes talk about "finding the cliff". This means looking for the failure point so you know where your assumptions are still valid, and where they are not. I found the cliff in my own conscientiousness in college. I was a junior in a physics program, and I knew that I had the mental horsepower to do as well as anyone in the program. I seriously expected to be at or near the top in all my courses. My assumption of mental horsepower is probably accurate. What I was missing was an accurate assessment of my capacity for hard work. This was the point in college where I had to stop goofing off and seriously apply myself if I wanted top honors. I tried to do that. I pushed myself beyond my limits. [who can't give 110%?]

The price I paid was I became sicker than I have ever been in my life. It was years before I really recovered. I fear that I treated my friends poorly during this time. I'm surprised they still talk to me. I was miserable. The worst part of it all was that in order to save myself, I had to give up. I'm being hard on myself. I did just fine in college, but I had to seriously adjust my expectations [the soft bigotry of low expectations] about what I was capable of. This runs against the grain of everything my education had instilled in me, so I thought I was a failure.

Thus it was an incredible relief when I discovered that I had indeed fought the good fight, and finished the race. First place just wasn't for me. I did well with what I had been given.

Thus, while I like the insight with which Renkat advises us to take the path of least resistance, I cannot take him literally, for me the path of least resistance involves a couch, videogames, and that computer guy shape. I have a family to provide for, so I have to keep grinding it out. There are some weaknesses that can simply be avoided, using the mountain metaphor. These are simply relative weaknesses, what are called contraries. To be decisive is the opposite [contrary] of carefully considering the options. Both are strengths in their place. Being too lazy to show up to work is a privation of the good of being a hard worker. This simply needs to be resisted with the tools we have at our disposal.

Further reading:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/08/19/the-calculus-of-grit/

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1993-40718-001

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200510/the-winning-edge

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/08/29/gritty-coordinate-systems/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/what-is-success-true-grit/

http://www.tempobook.com/2011/08/17/daemons-and-the-mindful-learning-curve/

Aquinas and Neuroscience

Non-linear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas, by Walter J. Freeman.

Abstract
We humans and other animals continuously construct and maintain our grasp of the world by using astonishingly small snippets of sensory information. Recent studies in nonlinear brain dynamics have shown how this occurs: brains imagine possible futures and seek and use sensory stimulation to select among them as guides for chosen actions. On the one hand the scientic explanation of the dynamics is inaccessible to most of us. On the other hand the philosophical foundation from which the sciences grew is accessible through the work of one of its originators, Thomas Aquinas. The core concept of intention in Aquinas is the inviolable unity of mind, brain and body.

All that we know we have constructed within ourselves from the unintelligible fragments of energy impacting our senses as we move our bodies through the world. This process of intention is transitive in the outward thrust of the body in search of desired future states; it is intransitive in the dynamic construction of predictions of the states in the sensory cortices by which we recognize success or failure in achievement. The process is phenomenologically experienced in the action-perception cycle. Enactment is through the serial creation of neurodynamic activity patterns in brains, by which the self of mind-brain-body comes to know the world rst by shaping the self to an approximation of the sought-for input, and then by assimilating those shapes into knowledge and meaning.

This conception of the self as closed, autonomous, and selforganizing, devised over 700 years ago and shelved by Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza 300 years ago, is now re-emerging in philosophy and re-establishes the meaning of intention in its original sense. The core Aquinian concept of the unity of brain, body and soul/mind, which had been abandoned by mechanists and replaced by Brentano and Husserl using the duality inherent in representationalism, has been revived by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but in phenomenological terms that are opaque to neurscientists. In my experience there is no extant philosophical system than that of Aquinas that better ts with the new ndings in nonlinear brain dynamics. Therefore, a detailed reading and transcription of basic terms is warranted, comparing in both directions the signicance of key words across 700 years from medieval metaphysics to 21st century brain dynamics.

My gratitude to the Social Pathologist, who pointed me to this paper inadvertently. Aquinas is my homie too.

Possibility in Nature

James Chastek has a brief post on Two meanings of "chance" that is very brief, but has revealing comments, including this one:

There is a very long history of denying the reality of chance, and there is some force to it- the sciences not infrequently find causes for things thought to be by chance, like the generation of gnats, or hand washing and patient health.

Here is the important distinction between luck and chance. It wasn’t important here, but it is important in itself. Luck (good and bad) results from some ignorance or deficiency in the power of the agent, chance in nature proceeds from some deficiency in interior causes, primarily from matter.

Aristotle called chance a real cause, but cause per accidens. It is not a proper cause, but it is that which is responsible for something, and so satisfies some notion of cause. This is a tricky question, one that De Koninck dedicated much of his career to.

The modern educated common wisdom basically accepts the billiard-ball model of physics, and tends to assume a mechanistic view of nature built upon this model. However, the trouble is that material things are not really perfect enough to be deterministic. There is an order of being argument lurking in the background here, that only a perfect cause could make something happen the same way every time, whereas every material thing is less than perfect, and therefore cannot be a part of a deterministic chain of causation. It is, however, close enough to make it work most of the time.

I suspect that some of the resistance to this idea is that chance is a kind of negation, as Chastek says in an earlier post, "a supposedly pure world of complete unintelligibility". Chance or possibilty seen as a lack of knowledge thus undermines our ability to know the world, because it would seem that as pure unintelligibility, chance events would mean that anything could happen. Thus, I think there is a fear that denying the deterministic account means denying the power of modern science.

However, in an Aristotelian account, chance can serve a purpose in nature. It is not really that anything could happen, but rather things tend toward certain ends, even if they don't quite make it all the time. Thus you end up with distributions of measurements when you study natural things in the modern mathematical way. Sometimes there can be a "true" number towards which the natural thing is tending, and the tightness of the distribution is related to the power of the cause. The actual power of modern science is to be able to say, the probability the value found is between this number and that, is X%.

I think chance could perhaps be posited as one of the things that allows sufficient uniformity in nature for us to be able to predict things for the most part. It seems that if everything were in fact completely deterministic, every event would be unique, and in a sense, unpredictable for us, because one of our primary ways of knowing is inductive, working from particular events to what happens for the most part. Thus a universe with some looseness to its physical causes is actually more intelligible to us rather than less.

Act and Potency

Edward Feser posted a lengthy reflection on Act and Potency. Act and potency are critical concepts in Aristotelian/Thomist philosophy, and will repay the attention given them. Act and potency start within what Aristotle called physics, the study of changable or mobile being. Aristotle's physics was continuously studied for almost 2000 years, first by the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Muslim Aristotelians, the Scholastics, and then by the budding natural scientists of the Renaissance and Early Modern eras.

Aristotle resolved a dilemma in early Greek thought that was in itself quite an accomplishment. Parmenides had argued against the cosmology of the Ionian philosophers by saying that true change was impossible. His argument is a masterpiece of logic. Being is. Non-being is not. For something to change means that what is not becomes what is. However, from nothing comes nothing. Thus change is impossible.

Perhaps this seems trite. However, Parmenides created such a formidable argument that both Plato and Aristotle, who are considered the two most eminent philosophers who ever lived, both devoted considerable time to answering him. Aristotle's physics is a response to Parmenides. Aristotle claimed that Parmenides was pretty much right, but he added an additional layer of distinctions that makes the matter more comprehensible. It is definitely true that being cannot come to be from non-being. However, nonetheless, things do change. Thus there must be both something that comes to, and a subject of the change that persists through the change.

In order for something to change, it must have potency. It must be able to be something else in some fashion. To change into something else is act, because then potency has ceased, and new being has replaced it. However, a new potency arises, because this new being can yet be something else. Act and potency always go together.

From this relatively simple foundation, Aristotle eventually ascends to the contemplation of being itself, the study of metaphysics. St. Thomas went even further, and used these distinctions in his Five Ways. However, as Feser notes, modern philosophy has rejected or forgotten much of this, so Aristotle and Thomas are now hard to understand because these disctinctions have been collapsed.

Cross-posted at Dead Philosophers Society