On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

A while ago I came up with the idea of Zettelblogging. That would be capturing, note taking and summarizing ideas in public. I think that anyone who tries this kind of approach finds it too disjointed to be public facing. Some of my notes are cryptic and tangential, while others are basically full book reviews and summaries. In the end, as casual as I want to be in my writing for this site, that seemed to just be taking casual blogging too far. I think the standard journaling and linking works well in the format.

Having just posted my weekly entry, Six impossible things before breakfast, I’m thinking a bit about where this is all going. This is another discussion of how to understand this contradiction between our subjective feeling of a unified, consistent identity and the fact that we can change our behavior so easily based on social context, whether we’re alone or observed, and when we engage in lying, acting or otherwise choosing to act in a way that is different from what we know to be our true selves.

I’m finding that producing a weekly post for Substack is providing complimentary tool to journaling. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just letting topic flow into topic to find out what the effort is about. Right now I’m interested in how we define and improve ourselves, so each week I pick a topic, collect some thoughts, outline a reasonable discussion, write, edit and publish.

As you might expect, noodling around a topic in public like this is a great way to discover ideas, try them out in front of an audience and refine ideas. I’ve made progress in understanding how the brain constructs its representation of self by considering our social behavior. Probably a few more weeks to wrap up this set of ideas and get into a bit more of the nuts and bolts of brain mechanisms.

I’ve written enthusiastically about my use of Google Gemini as a kitchen assistant. And I’ve found a few other uses for it and ChatGPT in summarizing areas of research very quickly at high level. They miss a lot and are really bad at backing up their information with facts. But as a start, they’re useful.

It seems to me that the reason they’re useful in this way is that they are so median. That is to say mediocre. When you search recipes on the internet there’s huge redundancy with bad ideas sprinkled in. The LLMs ignore the outliers and give you a nice middle of the road consensus. Which is my personal method- I look at a bunch of recipes, averaging mentally over the proportions and list of ingredients until I have my take for the moment. It’s easy to do this with an LLM, asking it to take out the olives or asking whether lemon juice would be a good substitute for the vinegar. And these models can be quite opinionated if their training set is opinionated. Of course some of those opinions are wrong (don’t salt beans during cooking), but useful.

But I made the mistake a week or so ago of asking them to help write a Substack post. I had a page of text notes and an outline. So basically all the ideas I needed to start the through composition of a first draft. So I thought, why not give my notes to Google Gemini and ChatGPT and skip that first draft?

So what I got was totally, as the kids would say, “mid”. I mean it was what a mediocre thinker would do with my notes. It put in all kinds of caveats and “as if” statements to route around my unique take on the relationship between brain and intent.

Not only did it water down the ideas to non-existence, if I tried to edit both or their essays back to my liking, it was like finding I had a set of false beliefs, as if an alternate universe version of me had written something I disagreed with.

I had to erase their efforts, take a walk, and come back to my notes and do that first draft. I’m not sure the product was the same as if I had never let those things near my work. So not only does the LLM flood threaten to dilute the content of the web, it may well threaten our ability to hold opinions far from the median.

In finishing up my manuscript and starting these Substack essays, I’ve realized that my way of looking at being human is now pretty far from that median. I’m in the midst of reading Anil Seths Being You and from the first page, I find the approach to be unhelpful. This idea these academics who study consciousness are stuck in a false dualist “mentalism” is becoming more clear to me and will probably be my next series of essays over on Substack once I get through the current set of ideas on Self and the Power of Pretending.

I’m on a three week long streak posting an essay on Substack. This week, I’ve extended the conversation about self and values to where values actually come from.

These posts are experimental, but at least being read on the site at a pretty steady rate. As I suspected, like other social sites the algorithm is putting my writing directly in front of some readers, something that is hard to do here on the blog other than through search engagement. But I have no plans to give up my casual journal efforts here. I added a Substack subscribe form to the site here to push my readers here to sign up for the posts there. I’ll probably archive them here at some point, but for now the idea is to see whether there’s really interest in reading my contemplations on brain and mind.

The idea on Substack is to keep to a publishing schedule and put out something of a complete thought in each. As I’ve written here, it’s a drawback of the blog format that it promotes this kind of running narrative and makes it difficult to communicate more complex, bigger ideas. The truth is that really only book format can be structured and long enough to really allow for exposition and elaboration of ideas. But I think that I can at least get better at explaining and chunking down ideas by regularly writing these explainers for the general audience on Substack.

Plus, it’s the start of the next intellectual journey. Or at least documenting where I’m going since slogging through turning “Deciding Better” into a book now that I’ve been at it close to 25 years. I’ve ended up in a place that I now realize is both in the mainstream of thought among neuroscientists, but pretty shocking to anyone outside of the neurosciences. It started when I began to realize that when we feel like we’re deciding, we really are more realistically being aware of what the brain is doing and if we wish, probing and rationalizing the choices we’ve made. The book is all about how to improve the process, but it can’t restore the illusion that there’s an “I” in charge of the brain. It’s quite the other way around.

So no wonder that in these first essays on Substack, I’m examining things from the other side: What is the “I” that I think I am. How is it constructed and to what extent can I control or change it. Plenty more to come.

I appreciate the comment on my post election thoughts from Dave at Nice Marmot, saying:

What James suggests smacks of “both sides” equivalency.

This is something I’ll freely admit to, but only as so far as trying to meet people where they are. My life is very oddly divided between members of the two sides. In fact, today, among the Trump supporters, the vibe was very much, “We won the Super Bowl. Season’s over and we’re ready for the next fight”. Which just reinforces my hypothesis that so much of this division is driven by group identification and cheering for one side over the other.

I know one thing from personal experience. It’s fun to deflate false views by logic and fact, but it doesn’t make you any friends. In fact, I generally see it harden positions as it ends up personal attack. I still remember getting upset at someone during the COVID pandemic who was in a group complaining about the truth about Ivermectin was being suppressed by the authorities. I guess I took it personally as a physician, but to this day, my interactions with that person are not the same, even though he was only repeating what he heard in his environment.

I had suspected that the outcome we got was more likely than the polls were showing and defended Nate Silver’s complaint about pollsters “herding” results to suppress outliers, which should be more common than reported just by chance. Mostly, it was a combination of the reaction to social change I kept hearing and the economy of the Biden presidency with its inflation. I don’t think that the achievements were really ever communicated. Per this nice summary: Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed? – The New Yorker. In fact:

“By a steep margin, Americans did not approve of Biden’s presidency. By an even steeper margin they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. They were demanding a new direction that Democrats never figured out how to offer.” Washington Post

So now we move from uncertainty to suspense. I’m following Dave’s planned move up north and wonder whether he may be a growing trend of regional migration where we cluster by economics, education and social attitudes. While I had expected demographic shifts to swamp regional divides, it seems like our system is also promoting localization among the group because of our non-proportional systems of governance.

From an ecological or systems level point of view, one can look a bit beyond the politics, human rights and economic effects of this election to understand how these things happen. I will say that it troubles me that we have half the country looking at the other half of the country saying, “I can’t understand how you could have voted for him/her”. And really meaning it. That they cannot summon an empathy, a theory of mind that lets them imagine being someone on the other side.

So first, as a human behavior, this is quite typical. To trivialize it in the extreme, the Yankee fan has no understanding of how anyone could be a Mets fan and that Mets fan (my family’s group identification) could not understand how anyone could cheer for those Yankees. In fact, some anthropologists have suggested that the more trivial or untrue the group beliefs are, the stronger the group affinity since facts can’t possibly sway a group member into defecting.

So we choose (or are born into) our group and that identification leads to our rationalization of our loyalty. And as long as beliefs aren’t upset by what I think of as “brute facts” that make belief untenable in the world, we hold those beliefs tighter and tighter.

So let’s just say that voting is a simple application of group identification where we try to figure out which party is aligned with our group identity. Some identify by party, some by creed, some by social standing, etc. Without going into detail, I believe it’s clear which party captured a bit more group identification this time around.

The second factor is our regional single representative by majority system of government. Which is opposed to a proportional system where groups are allowed seats in government based on the percentage of their support. In political science, “Duverger’s law” says that this type of single member district election will lead to a two party system. As I envision it, basically, every group is trying to be on the majority side because only the winners get to govern. So it tends to lead to a 50-50 split where anyone not feeling represented by the majority will defect to the other side to gain influence there and build a majority. I believe this year we had a lot of defections by those who felt they were not being heard by the side in power and put the other side into the majority.

It’s important to realize that this group identification and picking sides in an election is by feel. One side feels more right than the other. That’s why all of the arguments and fact checking don’t lead to a rational decision based on Multiple Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). And even if you ask how the decision was arrived at you’ll get a rationalization or an answer representative of that group fit with one side over the other.

It’s a process of alignment and realignment. And a losing party can’t steer to the correct side by analyzing previous outcomes because the many unspoken factors that provided that comfort with the other side can’t be fully surfaced because they vary for different individuals with their multiple group identifications. Making it even more difficult some of the factors either aren’t known to the individuals themselves or can be recognized by them but culturally must be left unspoken.

I’m no political consultant, but I’d really like to hear more empathy and understanding. To my way of thinking, honest empathy is the only way to improve our ability to engage others productively rather than simple cheering for our side and insults for the other side.

It’s getting towards the end of the year and I noticed I’ve neglected my Reading List page for this year. So I spent some time catching up.

It’s interesting to look back and see how I’ve divided my time between genre fiction, literature and non-fiction over the year. Lots of audiobooks this year, slowing down a bit in the second half once I’d run through Stephen King’s, Blake Crouch’s, and Hugh Howey’s big works.

I’ve long called this website by personal journal and the intellectual journey is well documented by the reading list. I’ve become interested in how we come to construct our beliefs and our perception of self by reading books in both Neuroscience and what is basically the anthropology of religious belief. It may be that as my intellectual memoir about how I came to understand how people make decisions that my next will be about coming to an understanding of belief and construction of self. It’s an idea that was central to Bateson’s understanding in The Ecology of Mind (see here and here).

One of the reasons why I caught up with the Reading page is what I think will be a need for an annotated bibliography for the manuscript in progress. Plus, as I map out some Substack topics, I realize that, although I see that I’ve mentioned these ideas here over the years, I’ve never provided simple exposition. This is something I hope to remedy over time.