Prospect Theory

Okay, I spent the last two blogs talking about Enlightenment philosophers. Hopefully you noted I wrote about the variety of thoughts that were being thunk at that time and how they played against each other. I have also written in the past in a not-so favorable manner about the Enlightenment. So, was the Enlightenment a good thing or not? This entry will sort some of that out.

Enlightenment thinking was an improvement over the decision making process that had been used prior to that. Prior to that, the occasional genius thought stuff up and the rest of us could chose to believe him or not (it was almost always a him). So we had Confucius or Jesus, Aristotle or Moses. Frequently your choice would be determined by your parents or the law telling you to believe or die. The Enlightenment thinkers figured out how to avoid the punishments of the Inquistion but they were still just sitting down at a table with a pen and thinking about it.

The eighth painting in the series "The Rake's Progress" where the fashionable come to watch the whacky antics of the mentally ill.

When you stop and think about where ethics come from or how the world began, you are using a rational thought process, so it was natural for these philosophers to assume that humans are rational thinking beings. When we decide that we shalt not kill, it isn’t God telling us not to do that, we figured out that if we didn’t kill anybody we would be happier. We don’t covet our neighbor’s wife because we don’t want our neighbor coveting our wife. We’ll all be happier if we agree on that, right? This was eventually immortalized in the famous words that we are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is this idea of calculating our maximum happiness that forms much of the theory of capitalism and our modern way of looking at the world.

The problem is, we are not rational at all. It took a couple hundred years before anyone stopped and did any analysis of these ideas or any experiments on how people really think. Economists only experimented with ways to trick us into buying things. They came up with elaborate theories about how allowing people with money to do whatever they want will somehow benefit all of us. Never mind that they got that money by putting a value on our labor then skimming off some of that value into their pockets.

But before I get off on a liberal politics rant, let’s get back to how we think. The first time I heard of Prospect Theory was on TV and radio shows about money. Studies were done that showed that people don’t think straight when it comes to money. If you were given $30, then given a 50/50 chance to win or lose $9, 70% of you would take that bet. But, given the choice of getting $30 for certain or a coin flip to get either $21 or $39 dollars, only 43% take the coin flip. The two scenarios have exactly the same odds. The only difference is when you make the decision. We generally don’t calculate odds, we base our decisions on irrational things like is the $30 in our wallet or not.

What the TV and radio shows did not tell me is that this theory was not developed by economists, it was developed by psychologists. They had to convince the economists that everything they had been basing their theories on for 300 years was wrong. In 2002, these psychologists, Tversky and Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Of course that doesn’t mean that economists really care. They still tell us that the trickledown theory really works.

What does this tell us about the science vs. religion debate? 300 years ago some well off people just decided that we were rational thinking creatures, that there was no mystery to where ideas come from. This flew in the face of thousands of years of tradition but also in the face of anyone who thought about it and wondered why they got mad at some stupid little thing or lusted after something they knew they could never have. This was thrown in the bucket of irrationality, something those Enlightenment philosophers were above of course. If you didn’t understand rationality, you were probably just born that way and incapable of understanding them. And they wondered why some people didn’t like them.

Ironically, it took the ultimate tool of rational thinking, the scientific method, to prove that we are not rational thinkers after all.

Tsunamis, Then and Now

In 1755 there was an earthquake off the coast of Portugal. Early estimates were that up to 100,000 of the 300,000 people in Lisbon died as a result of the tsunami, the buildings falling and the fires. There were three reactions to this disaster that provide interesting parallels to reactions that we see today. The priests blamed the sinners, some of the new humanists blamed modern society for concentrating people in cities, and a few people took it upon themselves to investigate the nature of the event.

The priests were not marginalized nor made fun of like Pat Robertson in 2008 when he blamed the Haiti earthquake on a voodoo witch doctor that had made a deal with the devil 200 years earlier. These priests were able to freely roam the city and collect whatever rumors they might find of people who had not done their prayers or slept with the wrong person or whatever they might want to connect to the earthquake. That the earthquake occurred on All Saint’s Day just added to their reasoning, and I am using a very broad definition of “reasoning”. The accused were gathered together and ritually burned as a symbol of the eternity in hell that they were headed for.

Rousseau wrote a piece claiming that the number of deaths would not have occurred if people had not concentrated in cities, unnaturally. If they had been spread out in the hills in smaller buildings the tsunami would have been something interesting that happened somewhere away from most people and didn’t affect them much. This of course ignores all of the possible disasters that could befall people living in the hills in primitive dwellings.

Voltaire heard of all of this and used the power of his pen to respond. He wrote letters and poems and sat down for 3 days and immortalized the earthquake in the short story Candide. Candide is a fast paced story of an optimistic young man travelling around the globe finding fortune and misfortune. It is a mix of Quentin Tarantino, Monty Python and the Canterbury Tales. He wrote to satirize not only religion, but Optimism. Optimism was becoming an alternative to religion in the French Enlightenment and Voltaire saw no more reason in it than in the mythology of Christianity.

Voltaire was enjoying the pleasures of old age after battling the church throughout his life and bringing to light a new age of reason and rationality. He had the ear of royalty and aristocracy and had the means to help people who did not have such advantages. Voltaire was one of the last men who could speak and write on almost any subject and be considered an expert. Knowledge has grown too much since then and disciplines too specialized. People still write about how our cities should be built or where, but very few of them could stand out like Voltaire. When one person speaks or writes today, a hundred more claim greater knowledge and the rest of us find it difficult to invest the time to sort it all out.

We may have learned to not blindly trust the authority of the previous generation, but that generation had just as many and more obstacles to developing critical thinking skills as the current one does. We may not have Jesuit Priests roaming the streets looking for anyone asking the wrong questions, but we do have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Nintendo, NASCAR, Lady Gaga and Newt Gingrich muddying the waters of information. The school system never quite caught up with the rapid changes of science. In the rush to teach us how to get to the moon, it didn’t have time to teach us how to think about whether or not that was the right priority.

There was a study a while back that showed that recently more studies come out that refute earlier studies. For many, the reaction to this is to dismiss all studies. That misses the point of studying. Science has not figured everything out, if it did, it would stop. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to those who first started studying and asking questions in a critical way, a way that admitted that we didn’t know what was going on, that we were fallible and vulnerable, but that maybe we could figure it out by doing something other than sitting in a darkened room and making up explanations or referring to 2,000 year old books. The people who studied the causes and effects of the quake are now part of a long tradition. This is the first documented case of someone studying an earthquake. Letters were sent out around the area asking what they experienced. This resulted in much more conservative numbers of deaths. Today would be shocked if something like this happened and it was not studied.

The affect of this event was both long term and immediate. Portugal was rebuilt and reformed. The Jesuit Priests were exiled in 1759, although the decision was reversed later. This did lead to Portugal becoming the first country in Europe to build a secular education system. We are still feeling the effects of this tremor.

Second-Tier Philosophy

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists Friedrich Schleiermacher as a second-tier philosopher, although they say he is one of the most-interesting in that class. The “second-tier” moniker refers to his work being derivative of the big guys like Emmanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza. They also say he is clearly following Herder who they list as “of the first importance” although I don’t know much about him. Reading the stories of these men from centuries past who rethought what it is to be human always leaves me completely astounded. It has been difficult enough for me to form a worldview in fifty years and I have the advantage of being able to hear these philosophies synthesized into the poetry that plays regularly on FM radio.

Schleiermacher came well after Thomas Aquinas had attempted to reconcile religion with reason and in an the era when Kant and others were looking to abandon religion and re-ask the question of just what morality is based on if not divine decree. In some sense this may have been a defensive move, he was classically trained in theology after all. But although he made some clear statements about not being able to believe in the saving grace of a risen Christ, he said there was something more to religion than a set of rules or a place to be comforted. In later years he seemed to backpedal on his statements of non-belief. His true feelings are difficult to discern.

In his early and seminal work On Religion, he relinquishes both God and morality as unnecessary to religion. Instead he says, “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe.” This leaves a lot of room for philosophical discussion. Feelings can be defined in a couple of ways and are fallible, as is intuition, so what is he talking about? I will leave it up to the detectives of historical philosophy to sort that out. As a 21st century human being I have a lot more information to draw from about just what Schleiermacher could have been thinking.

He had no sense of the size and age of the universe like I do. He didn’t know that he shared atoms with stars that had burned and exploded a billion years ago. He didn’t know about energy fields and waves of light or strings that vibrate in other dimensions. All of these have spawned new philosophers, many of them only pretending to have anything worthwhile to add to the conversation. It is not terribly profound for someone today to say they don’t believe in God but there must be something else, something out there. If you said that 200 years ago, you would merit an entry in Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Schleiemacher was bucking two trends at once. He was part of a movement away from using religion as a basis for all ethical decisions, but he was not comfortable with the trend toward conscious reasoning as the only source of knowledge. As he says in Essence of Religion, "religious feeling should accompany every human deed like a holy music; we should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion"

If you abandon the idea that Gods or demons put thoughts into your head you are still left with the question of where thoughts come from. We still can’t find a thought and put into a jar but advances in neuroscience have led us back to the type of philosophy that Schleiemacher was considering. We know that we are descended from lizards and monkeys and parts of our brains still operate closer to how those animals think than what we think of as our rational selves. We are finding that emotions play a larger role in reasoning than previously thought.

The theory is called “motivated reasoning”. When faced with information that does not fit our current view, an EEG can pick up an emotional response that we are not aware of. That response directs our thoughts and the slower process of rational thinking, the thinking that we think we are doing, appears to be logical and rational but the emotional response has already directed that reasoning down familiar comfortable paths. Even acquiring more information, in other words “learning”, does not necessarily help. A more sophisticated person who should be capable of challenging his own assumptions is also capable of creating more sophisticated arguments to maintain his current view.

Chris Mooney recently laid out much of this in an article in Mother Jones magazine. He links to many studies and describes how this relates to the recent apocalypse prediction. He sums the article up with, “The upshot: All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some situations.” If we are going to work together on the biggest scientific problems that have ever faced humankind, we will need to be aware of the emotional reactions we illicit in others as we breach topics of recycling, global warming, gas mileage and religious pluralism.

In an October 1994 essay in Scientific American titled Descartes' Error and the Future of Human Life, Antonio R Damasio head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine found similar parallels with his work and the words of philosophers from the era of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”.

It is intriguing to realize that Pascal
prefigured this idea within the same 17th
century that brought us Cartesian dualism,
when he said "It is on this knowledge of the
heart and of the instincts that reason must
establish itself and create the foundation for
all its discourse." We are beginning to
uncover the pertinent neurobiological facts
behind Pascal's profound insight, and that
may be none too soon. If the human species
is to prevail, physical resources and social
affairs must be wisely managed, and such
wisdom will come most easily from the
knowledgeable and thoughtful planning that
characterizes the rational, self-knowing
mind.

Oprah

I’m not going off on a tangent of having this blog being about current events, but this week we get another big event in religion in popular culture. Oprah says “thanks” to Jesus on her final show. Not in a brief off hand way but in a very clear and strong statement. If you seem to remember having heard her say things that seem to contradict that, there is nothing wrong with your memory.

I really don’t care what products or individuals she has supported that go counter to Christian morals or her stand on abortion, gay rights, vegetarianism or whether or not I need a makeover. What I do care is that she has used religious techniques to sell herself. She has been criticized for it, and just like religious leaders throughout history, she has claimed that she helps people and that she is searching for “good” and that her critics should get on board. All that in lieu of responding to the criticism itself. Like any good non-denominational preacher, nailing down just what she means by “good” is hard to define. It has something to do with believing in yourself and buying your T-shirts from an up and coming single mother entrepreneur.

Oprah pot shots are really too easy and I’m sure you will hear a few in the coming weeks. You will no doubt also hear from the Christians who want to distance themselves from her. Her self-help message runs counter to giving up your life to Jesus Christ. She is perfectly positioned to go after the “spiritual but not religious” market that is currently growing. Her ability to wrap a variety of “law of attraction” type messages under one umbrella, without examining any of them too deeply, is likely to be appealing for some time to come. Atheism is currently defined as non-belief in existing deities. For some it includes non-belief in all supernatural phenomena, but for many that is not a problem. Oprah has no problem promoting all types of magic.

If Oprah was merely bringing some modernization to Christianity, saying it is okay to pick the best parts of the teachings and discard the miracles and dogma, I would be okay with that. But she stated that Jesus was with her even when she didn’t know it. This leaves her room to claim anything she has done could be attributed to divine intervention and still say that she thinks for herself when she needs to. The statement she made on her last show indicates some pretty strong belief, and it will be difficult to reconcile it with previous statements she has made about non-belief. Given her ability to sell just about anything, I don’t doubt she’ll manage.

There is more to this than just the evils of marketing and the shamefulness of using Jesus to promote yourself. Whether or not she is doing that consciously doesn’t really matter. I am more troubled by what she is doing unwittingly. By giving G-O-D credit for her accomplishments, she leads many to believe that they only need to do the same to accomplish just as much. She leaves a big question about all of the people who will never come close to what she has done, where is Jesus in their lives? A very strange god that selects one woman, makes her a billionaire, has her promote books and programs that have nothing to do with Him, and leaves a billion others living on less than one dollar per day.

Parts of the final show are available on her website. In one of them, I think it is titled "what Oprah knows for sure" she talks about doing whatever you do with passion and that you will receive in direct porportion to what you give. So, this woman who has spent 25 years listening to stories of tragedy and triumph, hope and despair, knows for sure that life is fair. I guess my teachers, my football coach, my parents and the kid who stole my lunch money were all wrong.

I hope someone in her inner circle has pointed out that her message is only
slightly removed from the “gospel of prosperity” that has been seen on conservative evangelical television for years. It supports perseverance and hard work, but at the same time tells you that if you fail, there is something wrong with you. There must be something that you didn’t follow correctly because there certainly can’t be anything wrong with Oprah’s message. But don’t worry, if you fail, you just need to read the next book in the book club, or get the new updated DVD series, or go to the right seminar. It is a strange and dangerous brew of self-reliance and co-dependence.

Not the end of the world

I really didn’t want to say anything about May 21st, but it was so widely advertised I couldn’t resist. The only good thing I can see coming out of this is a larger awareness of how many people there are that believe that the end of times is near and how that type of thinking causes tremendous harm. The belief helps to explain a lot of our current problems. Why worry about where you’re great grandchildren will get clean water, if the world will be gone by then?

I was in college when 909 people died in Jonestown, followers of a man who had a utopian vision. These were smart people who wanted to build a better world. I have been interested in cults ever since. I was really bummed that the people with the May 21st vans were right near my work last week and I missed them.

Harold Camping’s Family Radio is not necessarily a cult but it shares the common theme of a large following of something that is based on a mix of very logical and very healthy teaching with some absolutely crazy shit. I don’t doubt that his programs have helped some people. The stories of people spending every last dollar right up to May 21st are people who will need a different help. I heard a pollster talking about the many people who believe the apocalypse will come in their lifetime, but younger people said they hoped it would come when they were 80. Harold Camping is 89.

One of the best studies on the phenomenon of apocalyptic preaching comes from Leon Festinger. In the 1950’s he followed a small group who believed aliens were going to destroy the earth. They didn’t. A few left the cult, but most deepened their faith when their leader had a new vision that it was their faith that had saved the world. This may be the strategy that Camping takes, according to this YouTube that claims to have some inside information. This is not the leader’s ability to tell a better story, it is the mind at work attempting to deal with doing something incredibly stupid.

If you need a humorous break at this point, this one is great.

There are many Christians who not too happy about all of this.

Even National Geographic felt is necessary to weigh in.

The craziest ones to me are the ones that say the prediction is wrong, but they know the real truth

I have not read all of those or made any attempt to critique the quality of one over another. They all say something about how his problem is that he uses an allegorical method of interpretation. Some say we should instead take Revelations literally. Using that method, you’ll know that the prophecy has come to pass when you see something like this:

7 The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. 8 Their hair was like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth. 9 They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. 10 They had tails with stingers, like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months. 11 They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon (that is, Destroyer)

The Cost

Lots of links in this one, be sure to click on them for more information.

I attend a church that is opened minded enough to accept me regardless of my lack of faith, and small enough that the pastor can target his sermons to individuals. In a recent Sunday sermon, he spoke of Teilhard de Chardin and the anthropic principle. He talked of the convergence of Christian philosophy and its version of the coming of heaven with secular progress towards a more peaceful world. He said that to be a Christian, it is not necessary to believe in the details of the bodily resurrection of a man. It is enough to accept the moral of the story and find meaning in the symbolism. Ten minutes later, we were reading the ceremony for welcoming a new family of members and asking them to claim to believe that very thing. I’m sure the children in that family understood the consequence of answering “I will” to:

“Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior,
put your whole trust in his grace,
and promise to serve him as your Lord,”

much better than the historical significance of Chardin or discussions of a singularity. The second part of this proclamation of faith contains the contradiction of modern monotheism

“in union with the Church which Christ has opened
to people of all ages, nations, and races”

It is a proclamation that declares it is open to all people, but if you want to be in the club, you need to serve the right Lord. Any belief has this same cost. If you know someone who believes that George Bush was involved with planning the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, try to discuss the facts and respond to their logic and you will quickly understand the cost of belief. Try to discuss neuroscience with someone who believes they have traveled outside of their body, and you will see the cost of belief. Root for the wrong team at a soccer game and you will feel the cost of belief.

This is the dilemma that modern Churches find themselves in. They have dropped requirements to believe in most of the miracles or the historical truth of some of the events, they acknowledge contradictions in the gospels, they have re-interpreted long standing moral statements based on modern psychology, but they can’t drop the confession to Christ. If they did, what reason would they have for existing?

I AM

About 100 years ago, when The Times asked several writers to comment on what is wrong with the world, one of them offered a very simple answer,

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely Yours,
G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton converted to Catholicism later in life, he wrote poetry, plays and Christian apologetics as well as fantasy. He often employed paradoxes.

In its simplest form, his answer can be seen as a restating of the status of humans as “fallen”. God gave us a perfect world, but because we want to know more and we want to control that world, as represented by Adam eating from the tree of knowledge, we have demonstrated that we can’t just accept the paradise that we are given, so we have to suffer.

In a more reasoned view, one that includes a knowledge of billions of years of suffering by billions of species that never had a sense of where they came from or why they were there, it has a sense of a statement of responsibility. In either view, it is a universal statement. He is not indicating that he actually did something that trumps every other action by every other creature in the world causing the world to be wrong. By stating his willingness to be individually responsible, he invites you to write the same letter, sign your name and publish it.

What makes this difficult is that you have no guarantee that anyone else will follow suit. If you publish your letter and the only response you get is laughter, you will feel pretty silly and vulnerable. We know that there are many people looking to blame someone else for what is wrong with the world, so the person who says they are the problem is an easy target. If you publish your letter only because you want others to do the same, then you really aren’t being as sincere as your letter says it is. If you wait until many others have published their letter before you publish yours, then those who blame and criticize will say you are doing it only because everyone else is. You really can’t win.

Really, we live in a world of competition, survival of the fittest, right? There has always been war and nature is full of creatures eating other creatures to survive. It IS our nature. We all knew it and Darwin proved it. We don’t need people taking responsibility, we just need the right people dominating those who are wrong.

Unfortunately the American education system provides a truncated view of Darwin, and it only seems to be getting worse. Our understanding of Darwin was altered in his lifetime by his contemporary, Thomas Henry Huxley and since then by distortions like the idea of an Aryan race. Like any idea, either science or Holy Scripture, it has been misused.

Darwin spoke extensively of cooperation and love in the animal kingdom. Its importance to the survival of species is just as obvious. Humans cooperate in ways unprecedented in the rest of the animal kingdom, but the roots of it can be seen when a school of fish all turn at the same instant, a herd of antelope go to the water hole together or a bees make honey. You might say that democracy is in our DNA.

As yet, I have not seen bees building voting booths to select the queen. Their form of cooperation involves far less choices than we have and their limited communication prevents something like confusion over a book written 150 years ago ever being an issue. If democracy were as simple as checking a box every two years, we would be as blissfully happy as a bee knee deep in pistil. I’m all for writing your congressman and contributing to campaigns, but there is more to it than that. Any truly democratic action begins with a handful of people.

And that leads to the movie that was named after G.K.’s letter. Most of us only have the resources to write little letters, but this film maker is making the statement in a much bigger way. He follows up the “what is wrong with the world” question with “and what can we do about it?” When he discovers in the course of making the movie that over-consuming, hoarding of wealth, and accumulating more than you need is a big part of what is wrong, he sells his mansion and moves into a trailer park.

It makes for a good story, but still he is just one person. The impact of his choices remains to be seen. We can wait to see how that turns out, or we can vote with him and make some of our own choices to contribute to the movement.



Before you get the idea that I am presenting this as something else to believe in, some new dogma, I want to offer one bit of critique about the movie. There is a section about 1/3 of the way through the movie that I wish he had left out. It has to do with “Noetic Science.”

In February 1971, Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon, took out a golf club, and hit the longest drive in history. During his return flight he was overwhelmed with a profound sense of connectedness with the world. He has spent much of his life trying to understand what that was and how to tap into it as a resource to make the world better. This type of study, combining the experiential, individual senses that can’t be validated and quantified, with the data that can be, is called by some Noetic science. Others call it pseudo-science.

It has the appearance of science, but does not have the same rigor and has not stood up to the same type of peer review that non-pseudo-science has. Both of those types of science share the same sense of wonder. Both begin with a suspicion, a feeling, something unexplained that asks to be explained. Both end up leading to more questions as more knowledge leads to more wonder. Both need to be treated carefully, so that their answers are not considered the only right answers. If we aren’t careful, we’re just back to criticizing and competing.