Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
I frequently write about fear. Some of my recent posts are:
I do it because fear is like a seed that grows inside and drains your soul. Overcoming it is not a one-time act, it’s a process, a direction in life. There’s no moment in which it doesn’t try to find a crack and root itself in. There’s always something and you need to remind yourself why we should not be afraid of things we can’t control.
I try to not get too attached to items, within reason.
We need items to live and be comfortable but they’re all temporary and should not be worshipped or held dear. Worse, we need to plan for their taxes, insurance, storage, disposal, and replacement. Cars are a good example where many people tend to overspend. I believe the car needs to be able to move people between two points, needs to work well, and needs to provide good safety features. But a car should be replaceable, should not have a name, and should not be treated as anything other than a transportation device, and should not be a reason for a person to be in debt.
The things you own end up owning you
Tyler Durden
One small exception in my life are books, where I have plenty and like watching them. But I know I can get rid of books by donating them so I’m not too attached. I celebrate the books that leave home to open space for new books.
The one time I wanted to buy Bitcoin at $1 and didn’t. I made a mistake.
I believe it’s usually better to make a wrong decision than to not make any decision.
For example, I didn’t have access to a PC until I was about 17. As a result, I made an uninformed decision when choosing a university and ended up studying accounting. I got my first computer for my first year there. By the third year, it became painfully obvious that I had made a mistake because my entire life revolved around Internet but it felt too late to switch because I was close to graduation (it was 4.5 years in total). Do I regret it? Not really. I took a wide range of courses in accounting, finance, financial control, math, statistics, marketing. Years later, I applied again to another university and studied the right thing. Looking back, that bachelor’s in accounting turned out to be surprisingly valuable in my software engineering career.
But the post is about the cost of inaction. Here are some points:
Rather than a summary, have this encouraging look by the little Song thrush.
We make decisions many times per day. Most of them are quick, automatic, and unimportant. However, some choices can have a dramatic impact over our future. For example, a choice of one university over another can determine the career path. The choice of a partner. Buying one house over another, and particularly the financial aspect of that choice. Buying an old car with cash vs a new with credit. We are made in a way that follows the heart, which is essentially using intuition rather than judgement.
Our brains have an incredible capacity to produce quick, intuitive, and wrong answers to any problem. Once our action doesn’t solve the problem, we often have a bigger problem and a new chance to try solving it. Repeating the same approach can lead to a chain of bad choices. Feelings appear to be a force multiplier and can make any situation much worse than the original problem.
Is it true and why why is that? One theory that I liked comes from the work of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, which I read in 2016. It’s been quoted before on this blog as it’s essential to how I see the world.
The theory is that we are adjusted to living in the bush where a lion can hide and eat us. The intuitive response to anything moving in the bush has to be quick in order to prevent us from being eaten. There’s absolutely no need to have a quick and intuitive response when the car dealership makes an offer to us. In the past, you only make one mistake and you get eaten. In the modern world, the movement in the bush is not a lion.
Kahneman says that our brains have two modes. System 1, Intuition, produces quick and wrong decisions. System 2, slow thinking, can sometimes produce not wrong solutions.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Another famous book, called Crucial Conversations, explores the area of arguments. The recurring theme is that you won’t drive if you’re drunk. Don’t drive under the influence [of alcohol]. Just like driving, the choice of words during an important conversation can be of lasting consequences. Don’t make important choices under the influence [of emotion]. Our boss wrongs us. Intuitive response? Something with the F word. A quote from the book:
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
To make the matter worse, not only is the emotional response bad for us, but it’s also predictable on a group level. It gets exploited by politicians, marketers, grifters, and more ordinary humans who’ve learned how to do it. It’s an appeal to emotion, which makes you susceptible to mistakes. Enter that car, hold the wheel, feel the smell. You’ll love it. It can be yours.
Productive emotions have been used by mass media to increase the sales since at least the discovery of the tabloids (Ryan Holiday, Trust me, I’m lying). A fear-mongering title sells the newspaper. Anger, Fear, Greed, Guilt, Lust can make us respond in a certain way as a group. These switch us into System-1 mode and we make decision not in our favor based on intuition. We can be fooled and negatively impact our or our group’s future.
It not possible to switch our reptile system-1 brain off and it’s also unsafe. Gavin de Becker explores the fear and anger in his book The Gift of Fear. He lists pre-incident indicators in a long list of possible violent outcomes. For example, a group of young men hang out by an pedestrian underpass. One of them peaks at me and my heart drops. It’s the lion in the bush of our modern world. There’s no time, just turn around and run for help.
The book also covers the area of domestic violence and the tendency of people to ignore clear signs of coming attacks. A possible conclusion from that book is that when people show you who they really are, trust them.
Dr. Albert Ellis classifies the underreaction to incidents as Rationalization, one of the three groups of thinking errors from his book How To Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons. The modern day understanding of Rationalization classifies under it a group of behaviors that justify violence and wrongdoing by making up reasons for the violent behaviors where rational reasons do not exist.
So, all in all, ignoring the intuitive response is not good either.
Perhaps most decision making in the area of physical safety should use the intuitive brain first. Take ourselves out of danger and turn on the System-2. Anything in the area of purchases, investments, money, work, business, programming, health should use the slow brain. Any classification like that is prone to exceptions but the bare awareness of it can help, particularly when a manipulation tactic is being used on us. A countdown timer. A limited time offer. It’s just one, now or never, “I have five other offers for this apartment”. Yeah, sure you do.
None of the quoted books speaks about guaranteed good decisions. They all speak about probabilities. You can meet someone, say yourself “Oh, I’ll spend my life with them” 15 seconds later, and proceed to actually do it, and have a happy life. It’s not likely but it happens.
Ending with a reminder about an old post. Never miss an opportunity to be kind. The world is harsh and we can’t change it. We can only change our responses to events. Love and kindness make everything more tolerable.
Terraces made of bricks and rebars? Does the blue paint keep the terraces from falling? How? Why?
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