Brain as Belief Engine: Patternicity and Synchronicity
posted by Frank Pasquale
I recently got a chance to hear Cass Sunstein’s presentation on “Believing False Rumors” at a conference on privacy, free speech, and the Internet. Sunstein discussed the many dynamics leading to errant “informational cascades,” including self-defeating attempts at correction (which paradoxically tend to entrench the original mis-impression). This article by Michael Shermer discusses some biological bases for the problem:
In a September paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko test my theory through evolutionary modeling and demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity. They begin with the formula pb > c, where a belief may be held when the cost (c) of doing so is less than the probability (p) of the benefit (b). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.
Shermer calls our propensity to find “meaningful patterns in meaningless noise” patternicity. The same phenomenon could be observed on Wall Street. As Michael Lewis reports, when “asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell[, t]he man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up.’” “Fixated on Friedman,” they were willfullly blind–though perhaps my moral judgment on results here is influencing my view as to their intent.
November 26, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Posted in: Culture
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Responses (5)
A.J. Sutter - November 27, 2008 at 7:42 am
Does anyone share my concern about the encroachment of biological and “evolutionary” explanations into law and public policy? Cass Sunstein is a big proponent of this line of “reasoning”. When experiments are cited, e.g. those mentioned in Thaler & Sunstein’s Nudge, they’re usually based on participation of college or grad students in Anglo-Saxon, or at least Western, countries. Maybe they’re OK as evidence of how some Western people react, but Thaler & Sunstein’s readiness to generalize the results to biological explanation is misplaced. Now to invoke mathematical modeling, a current fad in biology, threatens to assimilate “biology” to economics. Mathematical models that can provide plausible ex-post explanations are taken as true. In the case of the model cited, notice how it’s phrased in terms of a prevailing economics/policy tool of the day, cost-benefit analysis. You’d think that the current visible impact of junk economics (i.e., most, if not all, of neoclassical theory) would be making more people cautious.
Evolutionary explanations are notoriously easy to create ex-post. But it’s rather difficult to test them in vivo. I find it very troubling that this kind of unverifiable explanation might be given any weight by policy-makers. I think in retrospect (though, I hope, much sooner than that) we will recognize that this style of argumentation has a lot in common with the “scientific” racialist, eugenicist, etc. enthusiasms of a century ago. The utterly undemocratic tenor of Nudge betokens nothing benign. I’m surprised you’re so credulous.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - November 27, 2008 at 10:18 am
I share A.J.’s concerns, as many legal scholars seem a bit too anxious to paint a scientific gloss over their intuitions, hunches, “theories,” what have you. There remains a failure to apprecitate the liabilities of “scientism,” and an apparent naivete allows for a lack of awareness of the literature having to do with science and technology studies as well as the philosophy of science.
With regard to the mathematical modeling (and as I’ve said elsewhere), one need not regard mathematics as such as a sin (rather, it’s a certain sort of mathematics and its rhetorical employment) to appreciate the post-positivist and scientistic “penchant for quantities” and the “fetish for measurement” that infect the natural and social sciences, symptomatic evidence for which is seen in the overweening preference for game theory, cost-benefit calculations, and Bayesian probability estimates (its paradigm of statistical inference serving as the epitome of empirical argument). In Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (1987), Richard Miller cites Bayesian reasoning as the latest incarnation of positivist fantasy, “an excess of formalism in which truisms about likelihood (plausibility, simplicity, and so forth) are given one-sided readings and abstract results are developed at too far a remove from the problems to be solved.” Miller avers this latest round of falling head over heels for formalism is caused by “the triumph and prestige of the physical sciences, or ingrained ways of thinking in a highly monetary society, or both…”
Much of this is an endeavor to formalize inductive reasoning so as to place it on par with its deductive counterpart, thereby according it the “rigor” and “robustness” that makes everyone’s eyes glaze over. As Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni remind us: “It is a category mistake to treat deduction and induction as two versions of the same category, because deduction and induction are of very different categories. Deductive arguments are abstract structures of propositions. Inductive reasoning is a process of change in view. There are deductive arguments in the sense of reasoning about deductions. There is inductive reasoning, but it is a category mistake to speak of inductive logic.”
The avowedly neo-classical economist and economic historian Deidre McCloskey has documented the virtues and vices of the employment of mathematics in economics but while some in the profession may be listening, those in law and economics remain blissfully ignorant (as they apparently are of Hausman and McPherson’s Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy, 2006 ed.). Both McCloskey and Philip Mirowski would agree that it is no virtue to continue to commit the sins of economics, which “come,” in the words of the former, “from a pride in formalization, the making of great machines and monsters” (one of the latter’s books is aptly titled Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, 2002). Hilary Putnam is on target: “This revolt against formalism is not a denial of the utility of formal models in certain contexts; but it manifests itself in a sustained critique of the idea that formal models, in particular, systems of symbolic logic, rule books of inductive logic, formalizations of scientific theories, etc.—describe a condition to which rational thought can or should aspire.” To paraphrase and quote again from Putnam, our conceptions of rationality cast a net far wider than all that can be scientized, logicized, mathematized, in short, formalized: “The horror of what cannot be methodized is nothing but method fetishism.”
But evolutionary explanations sound SO SCIENTIFIC (just ask Steven Pinker…who is an otherwise very bright, clever and charming fellow)! I agree with Jerry Fodor (at least on this topic) who thinks David J. Buller’s Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (2005) did not go far enough in its critique of evolutionary psychology, but one wanders if those eager to resort to evolutionary explanations have attempted to read any critiques that might spoil their fawning enchantment with such nonsense. In other words, as Putnam has said, we need to remind ourselves again and again that “the ‘scientific’ is NOT co-extensive with the ‘rational.’” In other words, the practice of science does not exemplify the quintessence of rationality or reason. Rather, it is but one embodiment or expression of such in one significant realm of intellectual inquiry and human affairs in general.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - November 27, 2008 at 10:20 am
And I didn’t even discuss the “brain is mind” conflation…some other time.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - November 27, 2008 at 10:23 am
Oops. That should have been “mind is brain” conflation.
Jeff Lipshaw - November 29, 2008 at 5:16 pm
My take in a slightly different context: Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers: The Scientific Demarcation Problem in the Gilson Theory of Value Creation.
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