New deception and manipulation techniques enabled by machine learning technologies are massively more effective and covert than the old-school psychological tricks that consumers eventually grow out of. As we collectively regress back to a state of childhood-level naiveness, governments should to step in to protect everyone with the sensitivity they exhibit while protecting innocent children.
Several excellent recent studies show that, paradoxically, as a society becomes more egalitarian, the gender gap in occupational choice becomes wider, not narrower. A case in point: A study published last month in Psychological Science, by the psychologists David Geary and Gijsbert Stoet, looked at the academic performance of nearly half a million adolescents from 67 countries. What they found was that the more gender equal a country was, as determined by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, the fewer women ultimately took up STEM paths in college. Countries with the most robust legal and cultural protections for gender equality - along with the strongest social safety nets - such as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland, have the fewest female STEM graduates, weighing in at about 20 percent of the total (the U.S. has 24 percent). In contrast, countries with almost no protections, with few guarantees for women and where life satisfaction is low - such as Algeria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Albania - had by far the highest representation of women in STEM, approaching the researchers’ estimates of 41 percent, based on how well girls do in math and science in high school, without considering their other skills. Another study showing this paradoxical effect, from 2008, was led by David Schmitt. He and his colleagues found that gender differences in personality are way larger in cultures that offer more egalitarian gender roles and opportunities. This is not what one would predict if men’s and women’s preferences were exclusively constrained by cultural forces.
Brian Gallagher - Why Women Choose Differently At Work
Power exposes your true character. It releases inhibitions and sets your inner self free. If you’re a jerk when you gain power, you’ll become more of one. If you’re a mensch, you’ll get nicer.
Matthew Hutson - Why Power Brings Out Your True Self
Empowerment does not lead to equality. On the contrary, the freedom it unleashes removes all (population-level and individual-level) artificial constraints and surfaces the true inequalities of nature. Populations break out of unnatural distributions and individuals break free of societal expectations.
PS: For more on the true inequalities of nature read myth of equality and ethics as linearization.
Justice embedded in your genes. The further you fall the more potential energy you can mobilize to climb back.
In 2010, a team of researchers launched a research study, called the Strong African American Families project, or SAAF, in an impoverished rural belt in Georgia. It is a startlingly bleak place overrun by delinquency, alcoholism, violence, mental illness, and drug use. Abandoned clapboard houses with broken windows dot the landscape; crime abounds; vacant parking lots are strewn with hypodermic needles. Half the adults lack a high school education, and nearly half the families have single mothers.
Six hundred African-American families with early-adolescent children were recruited for the study. The families were randomly assigned to two groups. In one group, the children and their parents received seven weeks intensive education, counseling, emotional support, and structured social interventions focused on preventing alcoholism, binge behaviors, violence, impulsiveness, and drug use. In the control group, the families received minimal interventions. Children in the intervention group and in the control group had the 5HTTLPR gene sequenced.
The first result of this randomized trial was predictable from prior studies: in the control group, children with the short variant - i.e. the high risk" form of the gene - were twice as likely to veer toward high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity as adolescents, confirming earlier studies that had suggested an increased risk within this genetic subgroup. The second result was more provocative: These very children were also the most likely to respond to the social interventions. In the intervention group, children with the high-risk allele were most strongly and rapidly "normalized" - i.e. the most drastically affected subjects were also the best responders. In a parallel study, orphaned infants with the short variant of 5HTTLPR appeared more impulsive and socially disturbed than their long-variant counterparts at baseline - but were also the most likely to benefit from placement in a more nurturing foster-care environment.
In both cases, it seems, the short variant encodes a hyperactive "stress sensor" for psychic susceptibility, but also a sensor most likely to respond to an intervention that targets the susceptibility. The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments—but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: Some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments).
The Gene - Siddhartha Mukherjee (Pages 459-460)
Injustice has environmental origins. Under equal conditions, both sensitive and resilient types should on average experience the same elevation.
What happens if a self-organized system cannot grow? Is growth arrest a source of aging and death for networks? Is growth arrest a serious form of stress which leads to a series of topological phase transitions of the network, resulting finally in the disintegration of the net and death? Are we sentenced to grow in running away from our own death?
- Peter Csermely - Weak Links (Page 99)
Zero growth is an obviously unstable state, but non-zero growth is not necessarily healthy neither. Economic, physical and psychological systems thrive on small and positive inflationary coefficients.
Negative interest rates lead to deflationary dynamics that bring trade to a halt. Everyone delays their purchasing decisions and waits for prices to fall even further. Central bank sits still as well since it does not have any instruments for lowering negative interest rates even further. High interest rates on the other hand are also destabilising. Inflation gets out of control and cost of capital concerns cause companies to stop investing.
A deflating universe collapses to a singularity in a run-away fashion. Too much inflation on the other hand pulls space-time apart so quickly that matter gets too dispersed and planets (and therefore life-forms) can no longer emerge.
A deflating ego leads to depression. An overly optimistic view of oneself on the other hand leads to delusion. You need to fake it until you make it but also not lose touch with the reality by maintaining what psychologists call an illusion of objectivity.
If risk is what happens when you make good decisions but end up with a bad outcome, luck is what happens when you make bad or mediocre decisions but end up with a great outcome. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are mirrored cousins, driven by the same thing: You are one person in a 7 billion player game, and the accidental impact of other people’s actions can be more consequential than your own... Risk doesn’t care about how much effort you put into something, and neither does luck. Both just show up, unannounced, eager to humble you. The only difference is that risk humbles you as soon as it arrives, while luck humbles you down the road, once it vanishes, leaving you with only the memories you shared together.
Morgan Housel - Ironies of Luck
Let us define people who believe that all good outcomes come from good decisions and all bad outcomes come from bad decisions as naive.
Naive and lucky people (people who are lucky but do not know that they are lucky) systematically overestimate the upside potential of their good decisions because they can not see that a portion of their good outcomes are coming from their bad decisions. Consequently they feel like they can take bigger risks. At some point their luckiness can no longer compensate for their increased risk taking and their returns collapse back to a state of normalcy where they either make big gains or big losses.
Naive and risk taking people (people who take risk but do not know that they are taking a risk) systematically overestimate the downside potential of their bad decisions because they can not see that a portion of their bad outcomes are coming from their good decisions. Consequently they feel unlucky. They scale back their risk taking behavior and their returns collapse back to a state of normalcy where they either make small gains or small losses.
So you need to know thyself and shed your naiveness away in order to sustain the positive returns due to luck or risk. (Remember that each person tends to be naive in a different way.)
When I hold a book by a genius, I feel the weight of a lifetime of obsession. (Works of geniuses are always based on one single fundamental idea that is obsessed over and revisited in various forms across time.) Then I thank the author for going through such pain and prize the book like a treasure.
Geniuses should not be allowed to go to psychologists. Their obsessions are way too important to be tamed.
“[My troubles] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and [treatment] would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”
- Edvard Munch
Normality does not breed success, extremity does. This is essentially due to the fact that every activity favors certain character traits and the people who have extreme doses of these traits end up being extraordinarily successful. Of course, not all mentally sick people gain crazy amounts of fame, power or wealth, but those who do are often mentally sick.
Here are some traits I have noticed over the years:
As brain science unravels the roots of investors’ underlying behaviors, it may well find new evidence that the conception of Homo economicus is fundamentally flawed. The rational investor should not care whether she has $10 million and then loses $8 million or, alternatively, whether she has nothing and ends up with $2 million. In either case, the end result is the same.
But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech. Better insight into human psychology gleaned by neuroscientists holds the promise of changing forever our fundamental assumptions about the way entire economies function—and our understanding of the motivations of the individual participants therein, who buy homes or stocks and who have trouble judging whether a dollar is worth as much today as it was yesterday.
Gary Stix - The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts
Assuming that rational investors always beat the irrational ones in the long run, we can conclude that fortune favors the autistic. On a related note, being successful in business also requires a lack of empathy to the degree of being autistic.
This disorder can fake passion when it is absent and fuel grit when it is low, and thereby tremendously help a budding entrepreneur. Obsessing over details can sometimes cause dead-locks but can also act as a pillar for the kind of perfectionism that distinguishes the best entrepreneurs and designers.
"Appear as you are. Be as you appear." said Rumi. Good advice for humans, but horrible for corporations. There is an entire department called brand management, dedicated to make sure that this does not happen. Same goes for modesty etc. In fact, ideal corporations are expected to display all the defining features of narcissism. (e.g. an inflated sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, a fiercely independent attitude)
According to object relations theory, narcissistic people find the experience of need and dependency to be unbearable; as a result, they develop a set of psychological defences that embody an extreme form of anti-dependency. I don't need anyone. I can take care of myself because I already have what I need.
The Narcissist You Know - Joseph Burgo (Page 106)
That is why narcissist CEOs are the best. They envisage the whole company as an extension of themselves and do their best to minimize their dependency on employees so that no one can exert independent political power. To achieve this, such CEOs employ all sorts of operational software to suck any remnants of unique and valuable information the moment they are generated, meanwhile using all sorts of tricks to ease employees' existential anxieties and fool them into thinking that they are unique and valuable.
It is no surprise that bipolar disorder is very common among successful entrepreneurs. It is the biological embodiment of the following two best-practices in business:
Also bipolarity gives one an ability to freely trade energy across time. One can enjoy additional bouts of positive energy today by creating equal amounts of negative energy in the future. (Imagine an asynchronous version of the matter-antimatter creation process in physics.) Bipolar entrepreneurs can better navigate the highs and lows of the business landscape because they can gear up during the low periods and gear down during the high ones. (Entrepreneurs absorb external variations to create internal constancy for their team members who can then build the necessary functionalities.)
Apparently there exists some studies backing the common belief that insanity and creativity are closely associated. If so, why are so few of the successful scientists psychotic? After all science is a very creative discipline, isn't it? Here is a possible explanation:
Why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? Answer: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational ‘revolutionary’ scientists in favour of industrious and socially adept individuals better suited to incremental ‘normal’ science. High general intelligence (IQ) is required for revolutionary science. But educational attainment depends on a combination of intelligence and the personality trait of Conscientiousness; and these attributes do not correlate closely. Therefore elite scientific institutions seeking potential revolutionary scientists need to use IQ tests as well as examination results to pick out high IQ ‘under-achievers’. As well as high IQ, revolutionary science requires high creativity. Creativity is probably associated with moderately high levels of Eysenck’s personality trait of ‘Psychoticism’. Psychoticism combines qualities such as selfishness, independence from group norms, impulsivity and sensation-seeking; with a style of cognition that involves fluent, associative and rapid production of many ideas. But modern science selects for high Conscientiousness and high Agreeableness; therefore it enforces low Psychoticism and low creativity.
Bruce G. Charlton - Why are Modern Scientists so Dull?
When we witness people dying slowly under painful conditions, we wish for our future selves some form of a sudden death. A beautiful heart attack for instance.
This desire is baseless though since sudden death is always available in the form of suicide. The entities doing the dying always prefer a slow death, while those doing the witnessing always prefer a sudden death.
Same holds for companies. When a company goes suddenly bankrupt, people working for it feel very disappointed. Their years of work is gone without an explanation, without being given a proper chance of failure. Same people, when faced with a competitor refusing to die despite repeated close calls, will feel agitated and murmur to themselves "Come on, just give it up."
Apparel retailers herd around emerging fashion trends in order to minimise their piles of unsold garments. Venture capitalists cluster around emerging technology trends in order to maximise their chances of catching extreme returns.
Both cases are driven by fear and uncertainty. Both result in sameness and competition. While retailers are shaken by the volatility of taste, investors are befuddled by the complexity of creation.
To persist you can either be inflexible and freeze your local environment into constancy or be flexible and continuously morph along with your environment. Former is the direction digital entities pursue and latter is the direction biological entities pursue. (Either way, at the extreme end, complete correlation with the environment results in complete diffusion of identity.)
Non-adaptive entities like pieces of code can only survive via dockerization. Adaptive entities persist in a weaker sense but they can do so by themselves. Non-adaptive entities on the other hand can only persist with the help of adaptive entities whom they need for the execution of the dockerization processes.
Going back to our childhood neighbourhoods and seeing them completely changed is so sad and destabilising. I wish we could dockerize our moments so that we can visit them later.
Dockerization in this sense is the ultimate form of nostalgia.
