Common antidotes to psychological biases

Psychological biases can be working in any situation. This text is about common antidotes to all of them. Each of them also has some specialized antidotes which I will not go through today. Most people think they are more invulnerable against the tricks of persuasion professionals than average. Most people think they can be rational in any situation. This is not true. When the moments come that you think you are the best way prepared to ward off all manipulations, you have the highest odds to be vulnerable. This applies even to people who know about the ways they are manipulated. It can be the worst position to suffer from persuasion. It is the position that can have the largest possible bad effects on the decisions you make. Confidence in your abilities is the worst foundation for these moments. Be suspicious about your abilities.

Even though I mentioned that confidence is bad for you, you have to first recognize these situations in which you are vulnerable. And this can make you feel you can resist anything. It is better if you do it before you have to deal with them. Avoiding them is the best solution. One of the most common situations, when you cannot avoid the effects of persuasion professionals, is when your willpower is low. This happens when you are tired, stressed, have external influences like other people to lead you the way, etc. One of the best signs of these situations is your overreaction to stimuli, whatever it is.

Bitter pills can work. When you voluntarily expose yourself to less harmful persuasion professionals, you can recognize your vulnerability to them. This makes you less confident about your abilities to resist them. When professionals have deceived you with small things, you can have better odds in avoiding persuasion attempts in bigger things. For example, book salesmen are not as harmful as car salesmen. Analyze your reactions to salesmen, their tricks, and how they deceive you or try to do it. Plan in advance. Do not expose yourself to a situation that can cost too much. You can also see these professionals at work, but with other customers, if you do not trust yourself enough to be a customer. Go to a cafe that has direct access to a shop or two. Have a coffee and watch it. You do not even have to hear what they say and you can still learn. You will learn less, but with smaller problems.

You can also practice your reactions to these situations. If you like to wander in a mall or you have to go and buy something from them, you can use so-called if-then scripts. For example, if a persuasion professional approaches you to sell you something, then tell him your wife takes care of these things in your family. You can also tell him that you have a job interview and you have no time to talk. You can invent more of these scripts yourself. Use your imagination and I am sure you will find something to say.

Some situations are more dangerous than others. If someone creates new expectations and wants to fill them, you have to be smart. For example, a company sells you some sugary and fatty foods and it also sells diets to lose weight, you have to be careful about it. That company wins twice. First, it sells you an unhealthy snack, and then it sells you something that lessens the bad effects of it. The other sign of a hidden agenda is selling something you have not experienced before. Try this new product X and enjoy it. This can be something like a test drive, or a new service, etc. When new things are free, be extra careful.

Frame these situations in different ways if you want to avoid them. Distance yourself from them. Think like you are an outsider. For example, ask yourself what others would do if they were you. Would they say yes or no? Practice their answers. You can also find outsiders about their opinion in advance. Use your critics if you can. Try to be neutral. Think about finding the truth and nothing but the truth. Be aware of your prejudices. Be careful when your response is too strong for the situation. It is the best sign that something is wrong.

This is all for today,

-TT

Losses, Gains and Possessions

You tend to worry more about losses than you care about the gains. This is one form of excessive self-regard. Even though you worry more about losses, you tend to be optimistic about having fewer possible risks than others. You believe that other people suffer more from unemployment, bad break-ups, and bad illnesses. The availability of possible risks changes the way you see them. You do not have to suffer from these incidents yourself. You just have to see them happening to someone else. If you lose something, your risk level rises to get it back. Overreaction to these incidents is a normal human trait. It protected your ancestors from irreversible harm. Today´s world is different.

The ratio of hurting more from losses than enjoy gains is about two to one. 200$ gain feels as good as 100$ losses feel bad. This fact leads to many irrational decisions. It can have bad effects on the outcomes of your life. This does not mean you should always choose the option of getting larger gains than avoid losses. You can do this when losses do not cause you any bad damage. For example, it is smart not to bet your last 1000$ if you can win 1500$ and chances are 50%. But you can bet your 1000$ to win 1500$ when chances are the same if you have a significant amount of extra money. In the long run, you have to use these possibilities to your advantage if you want to have a life you deserve. Constant choices for avoiding losses are not the best way to live your life.

Losses and gains produce some other irrationalities in your life. One thing that makes the difference is the total amount of your gains and losses. This applies not only to the sums of money but to how many times you lose or gain something. It s more painful for you to lose 100$ twice than losing 200$ once. When this happens to you in the sum of gains, winning 100$ twice feels better than winning 200$ once. There are limits to the effects of gains and losses. Losses feel less painful after a certain point. For example, if you have 1000$ and you lose 100$, it feels less painful than if you have 500$ and you lose 100$. The same applies to gains. For example, gaining 100$ when you have 1000$ feels less good than having 500$ and winning 100$. This applies to your wellbeing too. After a certain point, your wellbeing doesn´t increase when you get more money than you felt before.

Possessions

Anything you own is more valuable to you than before you owned it. If you pay 100$ for an item, its value to you increases. This applies not only to your possessions but the effort you put to get them. IKEA furniture is a good example of this effect. When you buy something from the store, you have to assemble it. Putting screws, using a hammer, and other efforts to put pieces together increase the value of the items. When you put these two things together, your items become much more valuable than you paid for them. Your emotional attachment to your possessions grows when the time goes by. The more you use them or the more available they are to you, the more valuable they become as their availability in your mind grows. Riots and revolutions usually happen after something are taken away from people. They do not happen when people never had anything. Even small possessions that are taken away destroy governments.

Framing losses and gains differently

Framing losses and gains differently can help you get what you want. Frame all the undesirable things in a way that they feel like losses. For example, risks with negative expected value can be framed to feel like losses. For example, frame lottery tickets as losses of the money you pay for them, not to the opportunities to gain millions. Risks with positive expected value can be framed in ways that not doing them feels like losses. For example, not accepting a coin toss to win 1500$ and lose 1000 will be a loss of 250$ of expected value. There is a certain way to make gains feel better and losses feel less bad. Always bundle your losses and separate your gains. Separating gains and losses is a bad idea when the gains are bigger. Talk about investments, not losses.

Valuing possessions

Avoid most pay later to get something now deals. You will feel like an owner before you have paid anything. This possession may feel more valuable than they are. Do not underestimate the value of ownership. If you cannot afford something, do not even try it. Be realistic about your possessions. Most of them are not so valuable to others than they are to you. Do not overprice things you own if you have to sell them. Ask experts about their real value. Most and for all, understand the value of your currency. The dollar is a dollar and pound is a pound, no matter how much effort you have put to your possessions and how available they are in your mind.

-TT

Do you update or calibrate your beliefs?

One of the forms of excessive self-regard is that you overrate your beliefs about the world, people, and ideologies, etc. Beliefs are good when they are right. You could not get anything done without them. Reality proves that most of your beliefs are right. Therefore, doing choices based on your beliefs make your life better. Unfortunately, you have to update or calibrate your beliefs in the modern world or you will lose the grasp of reality. To a certain extent, this happens to all of us. It has happened to me, at least.

Belief formation is a simple process

You form your beliefs with a simple process. First, you hear or see something. Second, you choose to believe it. Of course, sometimes you choose to ignore it. Let's keep things simple and focus on things you have approved in your mind. Most of your beliefs have common sources. When you are young, some kind of authority figures is the first sources of your beliefs. Your parents, other family members, and teachers tell you what to believe. Sometimes your friends are your sources. No matter who the sources are, your ability to question them is poor. When you get older, the number of your sources grows. At some point, the number of sources starts to diminish.

Beliefs and reinforcing feedback loops

The longer you live, the higher the odds that you do not calibrate or update your beliefs. Your beliefs are hard to change because you process new data in a way that strengthens your existing beliefs. The validity of your beliefs is hard to question because your brain seeks the data that confirms your beliefs and ignore the data that question them. This process is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps strengthening until you disrupt it. The same reinforcing loop is at play when parents transfer their beliefs to their kids. This loop can continue centuries.

One of the misunderstandings about one´s beliefs is that the smarter you are, the better you are in changing your existing beliefs. The fact is a complete opposite. Even though smart people are better at processing data, they are also better at corrupting the data. They are better at finding people, research, and facts that support their point-of-view. They also have stronger beliefs because they can better explain themselves why their beliefs are the right. Therefore, they discard the evidence that contradicts their beliefs even when it is right. If the data is in the form of numbers, the better you are in twisting them to support your beliefs. The majority of the less smart people have higher odds of changing their beliefs. Intuitively, this makes no sense to you at all. The smarter you are, the more useful it is to you to find other people who disconfirm your beliefs.

How to calibrate and update your beliefs

Most scientific facts have been proven wrong. In the course of history, things that have been certain in people´s minds, like the earth being a center of the universe, have changed to other facts. You have to be prepared to update your facts and beliefs when new facts contradict them. It is not a sin to change your beliefs. The biggest sin is to cling on your false beliefs after you have learned new data about them. Unfortunately, the complete opposite has higher odds of happening. When you get disconfirming data about your beliefs, your brain often clings on your beliefs even harder.

Sometimes facts do not change completely. Then, you have to calibrate and/or update your beliefs. If you want to do that, you have to first acknowledge the fact that most of your beliefs are not certain. Nothing in life is 100% sure or 100% wrong. Therefore, you have to define odds with everything. You have to think about how confident you are about anything. For example, you can be 99,999% confident that gravity exists or you can be only 75% confident that you are qualified enough to do your job. You can also use a range of possibilities and put odds to the range. For example, you are 80% sure that your income will be between 50,000$ and 75,000$ in five years.

One way to see if your beliefs or facts need updates and calibration is to check their long-term track records. For example, if you believe in socialism, find out how well it has worked in the history of mankind. After you have done your due process, ask yourself whether you have found proof that it has worked before somewhere. If you have ways to measure the effects of your beliefs and facts on you, do it for a long time. Then think again if you have to update them or not. For example, if you have had a diet for a year, one way to see if it has worked is to measure your weight and/or the length of your waistline at least twice a year. Adjust your beliefs about your diet if you have to. You can also find out expert opinion about your beliefs or ask their critics to give you feedback about them.

This is all for now,

-TT

Two system archetypes and feedback loops

To understand this text, you should first read about feedback loops if you are not familiar with them.

Systems have the same principles and share common characteristics. Systems that have enough common characteristics can be described as archetypes. Systems that belong to the same archetype have a similar structure, goal, or purpose and their behavior is similar over time. Similar feedback loop behavior is the main common denominator in system archetypes. Reinforcing feedback loops produce archetypes more often than balanced ones. Reinforcing loops usually produce behavior that is too much for the balancing loops. It is a rare occasion when balancings loops produce archetypes.

Limits to success archetype

Sometimes success is too hard to handle. Most people are not prepared to handle it. Limits to success archetype usually have a self-reinforcing feedback loop and a balancing loop that keeps reinforcing loop stable. When the balancing feedback loop cannot handle the acceleration in the self-reinforcing loop, problems will start to occur. After a while, the reinforcing loop cannot produce growth and your balancing loop becomes the dominant one. Then your success starts to deteriorate.

For example, when you become suddenly famous and successful and you are not prepared to have a balancing feedback loop that is strong enough to handle your success. The demands for your success will increase. Your growth can be in danger because later some limiting factor that was not a problem before like time appears. This growth becomes less sustainable because maintaining the growing demands more of your time. Suddenly, growth disappears because the balancing loop begins to dominate the system and your time and other resources are tied to the wrong places.

You have to make changes to solve the problem, but you have to figure out the main cause of it. Did your priorities change? Did the problem of saying no to less important things become a real problem for you? What you have to do is to find the right limits for these activities that weren´t your problem before? When you have found them and you cannot limit the time used for them yourself, you might need to hire somebody else to manage your time and say no to less important things so that you can focus your efforts on the most important things.

Escalation archetype

Competition is usually a good thing. But it can go too far and produce some unwanted consequences and escalate into a full-blown war between two or more competing entities. Usually, the escalation archetype is consisted of limited stock, competitors, and balancing loops. Escalation is more or less a zero-sum game. If two competitors have limited shares of goods, one of them cannot have more than 100%. This means that these two can have a combined share of 100% of the goods. Usually, competitors fight from a slowly growing amount of goods. And this fight usually is pretty stable because of those balancing loops. When some variables in balancing loops change as things escalate, self-reinforcing loops inside the balancing loops are shaped. These loops create problems.

Before escalation, the shares of goods are almost or completely stable between the competitors. All their efforts go to maintain this balance in the shares of goods. Escalation begins when one competitor changes its behavior and another sees that behavior as a threat to their position. What happens is that the competitor who was interested in maintaining balance has to react to the first mover´s behavior. For example, this can result in a price war escalation. The first mover reduces the price of their goods and the other competitor has to follow. This can change into a self-reinforcing pricing war with several rounds of price reductions. It usually ends when both competitors are not able to reduce their prices or one/all competitors are destroyed.

Competition is good for society and actors in it. Even escalation can be a good thing. Positive goals are good. Many escalating competitions can produce good results for societies. For example, competition in developing new medicines can produce better ways to cure diseases. If this competition escalates, it helps others. It can even help companies if they develop faster processes to develop medicines. The best way to reduce the problems of this archetype is to avoid it. Collaboration is often the best way to manage things. It should be your first choice.

There are many other system archetypes and most of them usually are about feedback loops and their mismanagement. Changes in the variables in feedback loops can produce unintended effects and these can change system behavior in a completely different direction. Sometimes it is about changing goals or dominant interconnections that produce addictions.

There are many good books about systems and you can find more information about different archetypes from them.

Source:

Learn to Think in Systems, Albert Rutherford

Until next time,

TT

Systems Thinking

This text is about introducing you to systems thinking. It continues from what you have learned about systems, feedback loops, and interconnections. Please check the previous links if you are not familiar with these themes before reading this text. This text gives you the rude basics of systems thinking.

You live in a complex world with lots of interactions between systems and their elements. It is hard to understand the world without systems thinking. It can be described as a typical mindset. It is used to get a big picture of your systems and how their elements produce different cause-effect relationships. Systems thinking does not work in a way that you focus on one element and forget its effects on others. This latter way of seeing things produces severe misunderstandings about the world. And systems thinking reduces the number of misunderstandings.

The world is full of systems within systems

Your skin is a system within your body which is a system too. You cannot understand your skin without understanding the interconnections between your body and your skin. When you do something to your skin, your brain reacts to your action. If you burn your finger on a stove, your brain sends a signal to remove your finger from the stove. For this to happen, your skin is a receptor of the heat which sends the signal to your brain that it has detected something that is too warm for keeping your finger on it. Without these interconnections, the skin in your finger would burn for a long time on a stove.

Systems thinking helps you to figure out the longer-term effects of the effects of your actions. It does not focus only on here and now the effects of your actions. When you do something without thinking about the longer-term effects, you can have many unintended consequences which you could prepare for, if you had used systems thinking. With systems thinking, you can have higher odds of understanding the future than without it. It also helps you to remove your focus from the causes you cannot change to causes you to have the power to change. This saves you lots of time and effort without having many negative effects. Systems thinking helps also you to make sense of the structure of your systems. It deepens your understanding of them. You can see how different elements in your system interact. When one element changes, others react to this change. Then the whole system behavior will change, at least a bit.

A process with many questions

To understand how your system works, you have to ask many questions. You have to figure out which effects are related to which causes. You cannot understand and/or improve your system without understanding what happens and why. You can also solve problems related to your system with this process. Many of the questions you ask are not related to any special system. They are the same questions, no matter what system is concerned. Problem-solving and system improvement process has three steps:

First, when you start figuring out the effects of one element, you create wider views about the element and the timeframe you focus on. You ask questions about the interactions of many elements and what the future of the system will look like. Questions, like ”How will system elements interact in the future?”, ”If I change one element, how will the other elements behave in the future?”,

Second, you start figuring out how does the system behavior arises and changes. You ask questions like, ”What are the key circumstances and how fast do they change?”, ”In what directions do the key interconnections move?”, ”Do the feedback loops in a system balance or reinforce the interactions of the system?”

The third and final step is all about improving the system. These questions focus on the simple truth that systems are almost always improvable. You can ask questions like: ”Is this system as simple as possible, but not simpler?”, ”Do I need all these elements to get what I want from the system?” or ”Can these elements be improved somehow? The question about the last step is: Does the system improvement produce better results than the time and effort you will put on it? If not, you have to focus on other things.

-TT

Paradox of options

If you go to your local supermarket, you will find too many shelves with too many options. I am almost sure that you have never seen all the products they have in their collection. If you start looking for all the options you have, it is almost impossible to make the optimal choice. Then you will either choose the brand you are familiar with or the product you have always chosen. The odds are in favor of the latter option. During the day, you will have tens of these kinds of decisions to make.

Some freedom is a good thing

Most people think that increasing the number of options is mostly a good thing. The world has changed from life with limited options to unlimited options. This change has a cost. You have limited bandwidth in use in your brains. You will get problems with too many options faster than you think. Your decisions will have three different bad outcomes if you have too many options. They reduce the number of decisions you make, they lower the quality of decisions, and the satisfaction you get from them.

Complexity increases all when you increase the number of options. Some complexity is good, but too many different options bring you analysis paralysis. Each added option multiplies the amount of work and time you use for making a decision. You cannot make any decision after a certain amount of options. What happens is that you use lots of time to make a decision that never materializes. And this time is away from other tasks or decisions. Sometimes not making a decision is a good thing. There are decisions you should not make. If the outcome of not doing the decision is better than the cost of lost time, your outcome becomes better and indecision is a blessing.

Too many options create another unwanted consequence. The quality of your decision becomes lower. Too many options can create a situation where you make a decision that is based on less important parameters. Mating is one of these situations. You might encounter many approachable possible partners in a nightclub. The odds of a decision based on outer appearance grow higher. And the outcome will have less quality. If you are trying to find a partner, you can probably increase your odds by going to a party with a smaller amount of possible partners and make a better decision.

Too many options bring less satisfaction. This is maybe the weirdest negative outcome. Why doesn´t it bring you more satisfaction because you have put more effort into making a decision? One reason for this is that you can imagine that many of your options could have been better than the option you chose. You are more interested in what you could have lost than what you did gain from your decisions. The attractive parameters of other options are more represented in your brains than the attractive parameters of your choice. You will start regretting immediately after the choice you made. These are some of the reasons why fewer options after a certain point mean higher satisfaction.

Sweet spot

Any decision you make has its sweet spot in which there is an optimal amount of options available. In this spot, the number of decisions, quality of them, and the satisfaction you get from being optimal. When you have a single option, you feel disregard for the decision. After you have added enough options, you will arrive at your sweet spot of options. If you will add more options after your sweet spot, each of them is bad for the quality of your decision. You can add options forever, but the result is that the odds of having a good outcome becomes smaller.

Sweet spots differ from decision to decision and from person to person. This makes them hard to find. The process of trial and error will help you find them. This requires situations that repeat each other. The problem with this process is that it consumes time. And your time is limited. You have to make decisions about considering your options. These decisions can be more important than your last choice.

More information about the topic you can find from Barry Schwartz´s book Paradox of choice or his interviews on Youtube.

Until next time,

-TT

Conscious and Unconscious actions

Consciousness is not a simple thing. If you say it is, you probably don´t understand it well. I will not go into detail about consciousness. Before you start reading this text, think about consciousness yourself. Do you think you are always conscious of what you do? Have you ever noticed that you did something without acknowledging it at the moment you did it? Think about more questions about consciousness yourself. Conscious and unconscious actions can be separated into five groups:

1. Always conscious actions
2. Actions that can be done either way
3. Skills that are practiced with conscious actions and become unconscious
4. Actions that can be made conscious but are normally unconscious
5. Actions that are always unconscious

The first group means that you cannot function without conscious thinking. For example, you have forgotten something and you know it. Then you have to put a conscious effort to remember what you have forgotten. This is the most uncommon group of these actions, but people think it is the most common one. Belief in human rationality lies in this misunderstanding.

The second group of actions is skills that can be done either way after once they are well learned. This group of actions does not usually require precise timing or fast execution. Driving is one of these skills. For example, you can take a similar journey from home to work every day without thinking about it consciously during the journey. Sometimes you have to consciously change your journey because of a traffic jam or to stop buying some groceries either in a way back home or to work.

The third group of actions is skilled and initially learned with conscious effort. Usually, this means lots of conscious repetitions. These actions move gradually from conscious to unconscious. The harder these actions get, the more conscious effort you need. Finally, this group of actions becomes automated. After the automatization of the action, conscious actions can fail. For example, if you had watched sports, you might have encountered professional athletes failing in easy situations where they had too much time to perform an easy action. Conscious actions are not as effective in those situations than unconscious actions.

The fourth group of actions is normally unconscious. These actions change into consciousness by getting some feedback about their effects. This feedback is usually biological and aims for controlling bodily functions. For example, you can have a sports clock that measures your heartbeats and you can consciously aim for getting your heartbeat higher or lower depending on your needs. You might acknowledge the changes in your bodily functions, but details of how you do it remains unconscious.

The fifth group consists of actions that are always unconscious and mostly spinal reflexes. You cannot intentionally grow your hair or change your blood sugar level. The latter happens at least when you are not consciously eating or you are sleeping. These actions are unconscious. And some survival reflexes are unconscious, too. For example, avoiding a surprising flying object that comes toward you. These actions keep you alive. Therefore, they are necessary. Without these spinal reflexes, mankind wouldn´t exist.

Some actions are performed better with your unconscious mind and some of them are performed better when you put conscious effort. Speed is one variable that separates the need for the unconscious mind and the use of consciousness. As you have noticed, most skilled actions do not require consciousness. When you look at the experts performing their skilled actions, they seem effortless. This is the result of thousands of repetitions done with conscious thought. Expertise is not the most usual way of performing unconscious actions. Habits are the most usual unconscious actions. The quality of your habits is the most useful indicator to see if you will be successful. What this means is that the outcomes of your good habits must be better than the outcomes of your bad habits.

You cannot only perform unconscious actions in life. Big decisions with lots of variables require conscious thought. They require more time. Therefore, if you have no time, you have to rely on your unconscious mind. It is more prone to errors. Separating the unconscious and conscious mind and decisions is not a perfect model. Without the unconscious mind, you wouldn´t make any decisions. You would think about irrelevant things for hours without making any conclusions without it. Therefore, both are very much needed in every decision.

TT