An Anecdotal View of Bias, Cuddling a Kitten Sized Bundle of Information.

I am not going to make this a dissertation in the same way as my other "fact-rape" posts so quit rustling your jimmies as this one's pretty lax on hardcore info. I advise you read this as I think that it is very important but beware, there is no adequate synonym for the word bias so by the end you'll be wondering if it's still a word.

If you read my previous post (34 people did! ZOMG internet faymuss.) about how we are not evolved to live responsibly and efficiently in the world that we built around ourselves you may have guessed that as far as neurology goes I judge our species to be maladapted and a bit naff... or at least not as good as we believe ourselves to be. One of the things that I mentioned- I think- was bias. It is because of biases that dumb things happen and why I find myself experiencing feelings of great animosity towards politicians that cannot interpret/accept facts and figures and seem to consider being a contrarian regarding everything in an opposing parties agenda an admirable trait. Bias is why social cohesion and progress towards things that are counter-intuitively, and sadly often intuitively, beneficial to mankind are things we find so darn hard.

Bias is also how our brains simplify the world around us into a representation of events that is much more readily understood than the reality of things. It is hard to consider, and honestly evaluate opposing points of view so our brain can be thought to make analogies for all the information around us that work to composite complicated, massive volumes of information into principles that kind of outline how we should react to our reality. I make the idea of reality personal because I believe the existence of polarised opinions to be an observable measure of such a claim.

If you believe that bias is something that does not particularly marshal your life then it is not unlikely that you have just exhibited a form of bias called "Bias blind spot". This is when you are more likely to view yourself as having less cognitive biases, and view others as having more than yourself. You may have just now concluded that what I just said was wrong in which case, congratulations! You probably committed the exact same bias... maybe. As I'm sure you can see, bias makes the pursuit of truth VERY hard. "We get it, everyone is dumb. Get over it." I hear you say. I realise I am majorly dissing the human race about what seems to be petty things but please, read on.

A few years ago there was a relatively large movement to get American congress to believe in the dangers of global warming, or in fact the actual existence of man-made global warming. The method that was put into play was to gather some of the worlds best scientists to present their research to congress in the hope that each opposed congressman would see the facts and change their stance in concordance with scientific research. After the conference it was found that despite all the evidence presented that debunked false claims and replaced ignorance with information in fact galvanised the belief's of congress. Rather than change opinions in the wake of highly intelligent scientists whose job it is to research and advance their subject of expertise the opinions of the opposition were strengthened*.

People cling to ignorant beliefs such as denial of evolution, young Earth creationism, socially acceptable feelings of grandiose where existence is seen as something greatly important and other fraudulent ideas because their biases prevent them from understanding the facts that disprove their beliefs. In more arbitrary areas of life the same can be said of opinions that are of equal merit.

As I begun by stating; I shan't make this a dissertation like previous posts, where the facts and figures make my point more like a blunt object for the bludgeoning of interest than the grind stone for sharpening my argument (but believe me, I could do it if I wanted to.) I just want whoever is reading this to understand how much of our life is ruled by these snap decisions we make based on vague principals our brain synthesises for ease of processing. It is because of bias that people make stupid decisions and more importantly it is why people in positions of power make stupid decisions that matter.

I would like to close with story time. One of the most interesting things that I have ever had said to me was during a visit to Birkenau (the Auschwitz you think of when people say Auschwitz) after the main tour of Auschwitz 1. I hesitate to use cliched language to explain how big of a deal this visit was to me as words such as "powerful" or "emotional experience" are used too often to describe trivial things. Just imagine an event in your life of much intellectual and emotional gravitas and I should hope the two experiences are comparable in their magnitudes.

I think my experience there may be for another block of text- that you may be chuffed to know I probably won't write- but in response to my extreme confusion and disgust at how religion can ignore the atrocities committed, that violate the notion of their loving deity, within a negligible geographical area compared to the vastness of Earth our Polish tour guide explained it like this: "You cannot understand as you are not religious."**

I was at first angry as I interpreted it as a repackaging of the argument used by apologists who say that because I do not have faith in God I am somehow unable to fathom how such a thing may function. With some thought I realised it was much more. It was an encapsulation of the raw power of bias. The blast proof shutters that prevent you and me and everyone on Earth from being the best human beings that we can be. To be honest, it jilted me a bit.

The world needs people who know and outgrow their shortcomings in much greater ways than those bestowed admiration for the escape from poverty or the establishment of a monopoly or the chance ballsy decision that played out just right. I let my life be ruled by "Confirmation bias" and "Anchoring" and "Self-handicapping" for the preservation of ego and because doing the opposite is hard. Be better than me, spot your biases and do something about it. Be a better person, get smarter.



*It is thought that it may be because the explanation of misconceptions brings to the surface those arguments more readily than the assimilation of the information  debunking it so the placement of importance in the mind of the individual is placed disproportionately on the side of unreason. Also, please forgive my lack of citations, I was unable to find the source but if you find I have stated something wrong then please say and I will change it as fact is more important that pride. I think I was pretty accurate from memory but hey, consider this combating the "overconfidence effect"

** For the interest of context I feel I should point out that she did not believe in God. I believe partly because of the "indoctrination" of the people in communist nations and the stark parallels she said she saw between religious and political propaganda.

Your Brain is Old and Hates you.

If any of you feel bad about your intellectual ability, that it has failed you or you don't measure up to Ted in the classroom/cubicle/lab down the way then always consider the following.

"Homo sapiens sapiens" is the name of the latest, hippest model of the genus "Homo"- A genus is a group of species with common attributes and the second "sapiens" is just a fumbly way of saying "modern human" and will be omitted later because I think it looks messy. "Homo sapiens" translates from Latin to English as "wise man", so as well as being a highly presumptuous title, of which the irony will hopefully soon become clear, it is also the species that you and me and every person on Earth is a part of.

Our species came about in a recognisable form about 100,000-150,000 years ago. Our genus  came about with the species "Homo habilis" about 2.33-1.4 Ma*. That means the time between the appearance of the forerunner of our genus and modern man is effectively 2.33-1.4 million years... So, that's a long time right? WRONG! SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH AND WAIT FOR ME TO EXPLAIN THIS STUFF WHILST IT'S ONLY MILDLY DULL!

Before Homo habilis -or Homo gautengensis, discovered in 2010 and thought to predate H. habilis as a species if you want to be pedantic a scientist- there was the genus "Australopithicus". The earliest estimate of their emergence  is at about 4 Ma meaning that the time taken for them to evolve into our genus is about 2 million years. 2 million years is more than the entire duration of the Palæolithic era (early stone age) where 99% of prehistory technology was invented. That's where we did all that stuff that got us thinking we were totally awesome, such as cooking meat, killing mammoth, making fire, building weapons... probably in that reverse order, in fact.

The thing to remember betwixt all the Latin names and numbers is that the time period between Australopithecus and the end of the Palæolithic era is where the building blocks of our "intelligence" were laid. Sort of like the formative years; the childhood of an entire species if you like how meta that sounds. During that time we got good at certain things and those things were totally rad at ensuring we didn't get our hairy-ass killed and the equally hairy-ass of our women taken as trophys by competition. These physiological and neurological traits were passed on from generation to generation and though the genetic contribution from one prehistoric human to your genome today is effectively zero (unless you are from a proud line of inbreeders) you have reaped the following abilities from their millenia of hard work... Puns.

• MEMORY PERTAINING TO SPACE
  By that I mean the thing that granted us the facility to pose and answer such questions as "Where was it those tasty prey tend to hang out?" and "Where abouts is that water source I stumbled upon the other day?"  Indeed, this is very useful to us still.
  
  Our memory is ball chillingly good at spacial awareness. Think about how well you can familliarise yourself with a building that you have never been in before. I would imagine that you have no problem remembering the colours of walls and furniture, where windows and light switches are, where the food lives, what that food is etc and you do that within a pretty short amount of time. If you were to break all of those things down into some sort of memorise by rote scenario you would be dealing with a lot of information. In a spatial format your brain just gobbles it up like a deranged spatial cookie monster.
  
  Good right? Yes! It was great for our survival that we had the ability to almost topographically recall our territory. So, how useful is that now? Well, we tend to stay inside a lot and often the thing that perpetuates our aim in life is no longer food, water and shelter. Surviving is no longer enough. We now seek out merit and validation amongst our peers by excelling at things: science, music, fine art, engineering etc.
  
  -How many random digits can you memorise and retain in the amount of time it took you to memorise every step to the bathroom in a new building?
  -How many simultaneous calculations you can conduct at once?
  -How long does it take you to memorise a poem ad verbatim?
  
  Granted, you won't find a job as a memoriser of literature (in modern day society) but my point is how useful the above skill would be in the jobs we are expected to carry out today. Even in our spare time when doing taxes or budgeting or calculating interest. Our brains have not thoroughly evolved, or really had much use for those abilities until relatively recently in our history.

•  FORAGING
  Your eye is almost doubly more sensitive to the colour green than any other colour. Digital cameras work (in this simplified explanation) by putting light through a number of filters composed of a red, blue and two green filters. Each tiny coloured filter is a pixel and the saturated images that are made are then used as a guide by the camera to make a composite image that looks a lot like the actual thing. Two green filters are used in order to cater to your eye that is totes needy for greeny-yellow wavelengths of light.
  
  The main reason thought to be behind this phenomena is how much we used to goddamn love berries and plants and snozcumbers in our tummy. This colour based visual acuity was thought to have developed as it helped us in our never ending quest for delicious plant fetuses. Dogs, who are totally cool in their own way but on an evolutionary trajectory of their own, see their world in blue, white and yellow. The crossover of vision is exemplified wonderfully by this picture: http://goo.gl/k6oeK. Dogs have never really needed to find and evaluate the ripeness of fruit on account of them throwing in their lot with the carnivores.
  
  If this means that their thoughts upon eating and rolling around in grass go something like "I FUCKING LOVE WHITE!" I do not know BUT I do know that this means that when you throw your dog's red ball into the grass and laugh at him like he's an idiot when he can't find it, you're kind of a dick.**

• NOT DYING
  We have emotions because reactions such as "Bugger me, that's scary!" kept us alive when dealing with other animals  that were bigger, had sharper teeth and more muscle than ourselves. "This is good." made sure we kept eating food, pumpin-rumpy's and killing things that were different to us and, naturally, a threat.
  
  Oh hey, remember that time you saw someone with a deformation or someone of a different race or sexuality and felt a bit anxious about their presence then immediately felt bad about thinking that way? DON'T WORRY! Your secret, disgusting racism may be attributed to your brain's evolution where outsiders were seen as a threat to your tribe and sexy, bearded women.
  
  This tribal them-and-us attitude is all well and good in small communities where acquiring food was hard and competition was fierce but when you look at the military forces entrusted to humans with very similar neurological physiology to their ancestors; that programmed them to be wary of people who aren't a part of their tribe, that would have housed no more than one hundred people for a majority of our evolution, the eye that you use to survey history, all of sudden, may become sweaty and nervous... erm, yeah!
  
  Remember the cause of WWI (Spoiler alert: Nationalism. U mad historians?), the way that WW2 SS were able to be cruel in exterminating entire demo-graphs of people*** and also, the Cold War?
  
  Look to international foreign policy of modern day nations for more!

• SLEEPING AND EATING
  These are very detailed areas that I am going to gloss over and be vague at because I'm sure that by now you have gotten the point.
  
  Our brain releases a chemical called melatonin from the pituary gland when it is dark. It's how we regulate our sleep-wake cycle (circadian rhythm) and it is dependent on light. When it's dark you get tired don't you? Oh right, you have an indispensable source of light on hand you that you can, and I bet a large sum of money, do use almost as soon as it gets dark. Your laptop, lights and TV all jack up your melatonin production by tricking your pituary gland into thinking that it is daytime.
  
  Food. This video will explain it in a much more fun and comprehensive way than I can: http://goo.gl/SDGpp Ignore- or better, investigate further- him saying that Australopithecus is a member of the Homo genus. As far as I can learn, he is wrong about that and "Grandma Australopithecus" apparently isn't an actual species... He's good on the rest though!

The Point
Now, Modern society doesn't much lend itself to human brains. Grievously borrowing a way of describing this, albeit in a different context, from Christopher Hitchens: Our limbic system (where emotions are made... pretty much) is much too big and powerful and our prefrontal cortex (the thing that lets us learn how to build infrastructure and use logic and come up with new, more efficient ways, to kill the planet.) is much too small. It's this imbalance that means we can engineer exceedingly complex technology and simultaneously ignore information and facts that should overturn long-held beliefs.

We're "supposed" to be doing the things that our ancestors did because, realistically, 10,000 years from the end of the Stone Age isn't really long enough to form the most efficient brain to deal with all the things we have to deal with.

All of a sudden, in what would be roughly 2.5 hours if the time elapsed from the end of the Neolithic era to now was superimposed onto a 24 hour clock where Homo gautengensis to Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the full 24 hour period we are expected to mesh seamlessly with people that look different to us, learn science and maths, be unable to beat up dudes when our mercifully balding women are threatened and be surrounded by carb/fat/sugar stuffed food and remain sexy lookin'. I alluded to it earlier but your brain would never have to conceptualise any more than one hundred other humans, most of which you would be competing with, within your own tribe! This may not have been so bad but when exposed to the vast numbers of humans that modern day life allows you to be exposed to your brain doesn't do too good of a job rationalising these rivalries.

To summarise. It's not your fault and it's just not fair. You have a brain that is, in large parts, not suited to doing what you want to do with it. It is not rational, it is not logical and it doesn't have as much RAM as would be useful in many roles of society. It is a knife that has been turned upon a bowl of cheerios with the expectation to fulfill the job of a spoon.

You're doing a cracking job doing whatever you're doing with that piece of shit for what we imagine a brain should be as it squats on top of your neck, whispering sweet nothings of intelligence and rationality to itself/yourself; ever ensuring that you watch TV, look at more cat pictures or eat some food that's bad for you instead of doing something useful.

P.s. Couldn't find a spot for this but it's interesting nonetheless:

If you messed up as a prehistoric human you didn't just feel bad about yourself and mope about, you died.

Life expectancy in the upper palæolithic era (50,000-10,000 BCE) is hard to estimate as after the skeleton finishes developing at about age 18 estimates are made by examining wear and tear (technically referred to as "subsistence adaptation", I believe), how many parasites the deceased was currently friends with at the time and "other factors". This means estimates may be hard to make given the extremities of wear and tear ancient humans might have been exposed to but the figures range from 18-mid/late 30's. That's not long to live... assuming you even made it through birth from either perspective as the baby or mother. A neolithic (New stone age) person was most likely to die from ages 15-30 with the average lifespan being placed at about 20 years from birth.


*Two points for this asterix. Ma means "megaannum" and that means "million years ago". Sure, I could have written that but who doesn't love learning about shorthands? The second point is to explain why there is such a huge margin for the arrival of Homo habilis. This is because when consulting fossil records there is no definite leap that makes the relevant -ologist go "ah, okay, yeah that means we've just passed over into the Neanderthal period". There is a large overlap when dealing with the categorisation of different species when making said categorisations by using the fossil record.

**Your dog isn't a he? I apologise from so deep in my heart that my sorry explodes out the bottom and a little bit of poo comes out.

*** A bit of elaboration and tangent for this point. It is thought that the Nazi's ability to be cruel to the people they marginalised (Jews, indeed, but also the Slavs, Jehovah's witness', ethnic minorities and disabled) was NOT because they were evil... Right, now you think I'm a Nazi sympathiser allow me to explain. It is thought they suspended their morality, facilitated by the assurance that the people they were harming weren't really human. This dehumanisation occasionally lapsed when SS officers were required to take the hand of a little girl and all of a sudden were faced with exactly that, not the monster they were brainwashed into seeing. This suspension of morality made it possible for them to live with their actions because as far as their brain was concerned, they did nothing wrong. Just an example of "them-and-us" at its worst.

Solitude and the Allure of Insanity.

IS THIS ENTRY ABOUT MY RECENT SHRINKAGE AND OUTCAST FROM MY FAMILY THAT CAUSED ME TO FIND REFUGE UNDER A VIOLIN, ON A DISK IN THE MIDDLE OF A WHITE VOID, NEXT TO A SAD ROCK!? READ ON AND FIND OUT!

Every now and then, and by every now and then I actually mean rather regularly, I get very strong feelings of longing to be alone, way out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but my thoughts.

"Into the Wild" is one of my favourite films and I wish I could grow a beard. A month of travel around Europe with the lack of a singular home and hours of train journeys, it turns out, was right up my street. Though despite the feelings that well up in my chest, making me think my heart will explode out of my ribcage, wearing a backpack, wrestling a bear and spouting proverbs in a gravelly voice that denote wisdom beyond his years, like a true mountain man, I decided to recently spend my money on a cello instead of a yurt. Why, if part of me thinks solitude is the bomb diggity?

No matter how hard I try and use the mental image of the mature steel faced Lady Science to bring rationality to my feelings it is very hard to not be a little distracted by the more flirtatious, younger and perhaps a little bit tipsy mistress of romanticism. For me, living the life of a hermit is the same thing as serving in WWI for the glory of your nation was for dudes of my age almost 100 years ago. Instead of a boy being baptised into manhood by war, hermatism has me imagining a sage, more mature version of myself, treating silent epiphanies about the universe as sustenance and animal skins as insulation so as not to give anyone awesome-burns if they came too close... okay, so perhaps not that extreme but you get my point.

Realistically, I am embarrassed to acknowledge that I think of solitude as being the panacea to my list of obnoxious, self-diagnosed problems. Given the wide open road and no pressurising factors apart from my drive to survive and be as hedonistic as said survival will allow, surely I will overcome my laziness and my self-doubt and with the absence of social anxiety I can truly play around in my own head. These are inspired by stories of Isaac Newton going into isolation and emerging with calculus, the theory of gravitation, binomial theorem and the field of optics under his belt. (I should add that it wasn't all done in one stint.) Throughout history you see the reverence of isolation amongst scholars and academics and musicians. Perhaps a questionable example but Van Gogh is amongst their ranks along with many Greek philosophers, Renaissance artists AND MOOORE.

Yeah, so I totally forgot where I was going with this but would living out my romantic dream of being a mountain man make me happy? No. It would make me dead. Really dead. I only own shorts, I forget to eat when food is in abundance, I have the very real worry of being a bit mentally unstable in the absence of social glue (as much as that truly pains me to admit. How dare I share a trait of humanity?) and most importantly I can't grow a beard... Yet, I will not throw such romanticism out with other childish ideas such as "hard work will always result in proportional reward" and other favourites, such as "If you try you can do or be anything you want.". It's fun to imagine and pretend sometimes and anyone that feels disengaged from that statement has obviously not dressed up as a super hero lately, or built a pillow fort.

TL;DR: Be true to your inner child because who knows where it may lead to. WEAR CAPES AND MAKE INFRASTRUCTURE FROM STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL!