Thomas Sowell on wishful thinking

"Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism."

Nietzsche on life stages

"Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

People as bad poets. Just as bad poets, in the second half of a line, look for a thought to fit their rhyme, so people in the second half of their lives, having become more anxious, look for the actions, attitudes, relationships that suit those of their earlier life, so that everything will harmonize outwardly. But then they no longer have any powerful thought to rule their life and determine it anew; rather, in its stead, comes the intention of finding a rhyme."

From Human, All Too Human, Part I, # 609-10.

Animal minds and meat

Recent studies have found that people are more likely to deny or minimize animal minds when they think of the animals as food, or when they expect to eat meat soon:

[M]eat eaters were asked to think about cows and sheep. Some of them thought about these animals living an idyllic life on a farm. Others thought specifically about these animals growing up on a farm and then being killed for food. Later, they also rated the mental abilities of the animals. When people thought about the animals as food, their ratings of the mental abilities of the animals were lower than when they thought about the animals living on a farm.

It isn't just thinking about animals being used for food, though. In one final study, all of the participants had to write about the process of raising and butchering animals for food. All of the participants thought they were going to do a food sampling task after writing the essay. Half of the participants were told they would be eating fruit during the food sampling, while others were told they would be eating beef and lamb. Finally, participants rated the mental abilities of cows and sheep. The group that was about to eat meat gave much lower ratings of the mental abilities of cows and sheep than the group that was about to eat fruit.

This abstract of the studies theorizes that we deny animal minds in order to reduce our own cognitive dissonance. The dissonance can result from simultaneously wanting to eat meat, yet not wanting to harm beings that have minds.

Are misconceptions worse if they're about facts or concepts?

In a post on Marginal Revolution called "Economic Misconceptions," Alex Tabarrok says:

Students typically come to an economics class with many misconceptions, not just random errors but systematic biases.

He gives several examples from a 2009 study by a macroeconomics professor who surveyed his students. For instance:

When asked about profits as a percentage of sales the median student guessed 30% (actual rate, closer to 4%).

In each example, the "misconception" is a guess about a specific fact, which is always in the form of a percentage. But I wonder if this is such a good way to tell whether someone has "misconceptions" about economics. The implication is that we should be good at estimating percentages on the spot.

But why would you think the human mind was well-equipped to do that? Maybe economics professors have some misconceptions about how people think or how they should think.

I notice that for each question asked of the students (at least the ones given in the blog post), the right answer is either a tiny or huge percentage. For instance, in the example I quoted, the answer is tiny — 4%. For another question, the answer is a huge 248% (the increase in American incomes since 1950).

By contrast, the median wrong answers the students gave were 35%, 30%, 11%, and 25%. The students might not have had any fundamental misconceptions about how the world works — maybe people are just bad at guessing percentages. So they gravitate toward mid-range ones like 25%, 30%, 35% because they feel like these are relatively safe guesses. They really have no idea, but they don't want to be too far off.

I've also seen polls asking what percentage of Americans are Jewish. I can't find these now, but I remember the answers being around 25%. The correct answer is between 1% and 2%.

But again, does this represent a serious problem that should be corrected? Anyone who needs to know the actual statistic can easily look it up. Beyond that, is it so bad if people intuitively imagine a given minority group as making up a much larger chunk of the population than it actually does?

I'm more convinced by this New York Times column by Robert H. Frank, which focuses not on people's success or failure at guessing statistics but on their understanding or misunderstanding of basic concepts. And Frank targeted not just economics students but economics professors:

Consider, for example, the cost-benefit principle, which says that an action should be taken only if its benefit is at least as great as its cost. Although this principle sounds disarmingly simple, many people fail to apply it correctly because they do not understand what constitutes a relevant cost. For instance, the true economic cost of attending a concert -- its ''opportunity cost'' -- includes not just the explicit cost of the ticket but also the implicit value of other opportunities that must be forgone to attend the concert.

Virtually all economists consider opportunity cost a central concept. Yet a recent study by Paul J. Ferraro and Laura O. Taylor of Georgia State University suggests that most professional economists may not really understand it. At the 2005 annual meetings of the American Economic Association, the researchers asked almost 200 professional economists to answer this question:

''You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton? (a) $0, (b) $10, (c) $40, or (d) $50.''

The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert -- namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert. That value is $10 -- the difference between the $50 that seeing his concert would be worth to you and the $40 you would have to pay for a ticket. So the unambiguously correct answer to the question is $10. Yet only 21.6 percent of the professional economists surveyed chose that answer, a smaller percentage than if they had chosen randomly.

Some economists who answered incorrectly complained that if people could apply the cost-benefit principle, it did not really matter if they knew the precise definition of opportunity cost. So the researchers asked another group of economists to answer an alternative version of the question in which the last sentence was revised to read this way: ''What is the smallest amount that seeing Clapton would have to be worth to you to make his concert the better choice?'' Again, the correct answer is $10, and although this time a larger percentage got it right, a solid majority still chose incorrectly.

When they posed their original question to a large group of college students, the researchers found that exposure to introductory economics instruction was strikingly counterproductive. Among those who had taken a course in economics, only 7.4 percent answered correctly, compared with 17.2 percent of those who had never taken one.

Teaching students how to weigh costs and benefits intelligently should be one of the most important goals of introductory economics courses. The opportunity cost of trying to teach our students an encyclopedic list of technical topics, it seems, has been failure to achieve that goal.

How to use "What would I regret the most?" to make life decisions

"Regrets of the Dying" is a bittersweetly inspiring piece by Bronnie Ware on her blog, Inspiration and Chai (via <— via).

Ware used to work in palliative care for "patients . . . who had gone home to die . . . for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives." She had the chance to hear them answer the question what they regretted most, and her blog post lists "the most common five" (she doesn't say if these are in order of how common they are, or just ordered for the sake of having a list):

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. . . .

2. I wish I didn't work so hard. . . .

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. . . .

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. . . .

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

She notes that #2 especially affects men. I wonder if #3 does too.

Instapundit emphasizes the striking observation Ware gives in explaining #5:

“Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.”

Althouse adds:

Why are you doing what you are doing? Do you need death staring you in the face to take that question seriously?

I don't know about that, but what seems clear is that death staring people in the face changes people's answers about what they regret the most. An article in the New York Times in March 2009 — back when the recession felt more dire — said:

Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards, we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse.

The victims won’t evoke much sympathy — don’t expect any telethons — but their condition is real enough to merit a new label. Consumer psychologists call it hyperopia, the medical term for farsightedness and the opposite of myopia, nearsightedness, because it’s the result of people looking too far ahead. They’re so obsessed with preparing for the future that they can’t enjoy the present, and they end up looking back sadly on all their lost opportunities for fun. . . .

Splurging on a vacation or a pair of shoes or a plasma television can produce an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but that feeling isn’t permanent, according to Ran Kivetz of Columbia University and Anat Keinan of Harvard. In one study, these consumer psychologists asked college students how they felt about the balance of work and play on their winter breaks.

Immediately after the break, the students’ chief regrets were over not doing enough studying, working and saving money. But when they contemplated their winter break a year afterward, they were more likely to regret not having enough fun, not traveling and not spending money. And when alumni returned for their 40th reunion, they had even stronger regrets about too much work and not enough play on their collegiate breaks.

“People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates,” said Dr. Kivetz, a professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School. “At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.”

He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday.

The people who were asked to imagine how they would feel the following week about their purchases proceeded to shop thriftily for basic necessities, like underwear and socks. But people who were asked to imagine how they’d feel about their purchases in the distant future responded by spending more money and concentrating on indulgences like jewelry and designer jeans [sic — the NYT uses no period at the end of this paragraph]

“When I look back at my life,” one of these high rollers explained, “I like remembering myself happy. So if it makes me happy, it’s worth it.”

Back when I was in school, right after I had turned in a paper, I used to relish the feeling: "That's it! I'm free. I can't redo it. No matter how good or bad a job I did, whether I put in too much work or not enough work, it's not my problem anymore."

Now, that feeling of mine was, in a sense, irrational and unrealistic. It actually still mattered how well I did on those papers I had turned in, because there were going to be other papers in the future that I'd also need to do a good job on. If you still care about the assignments you've already turned in, this can help you take your work in the future more seriously. Even if you're turning your last paper before your graduate, your concern for the work you've already finished is going to carry over into your work ethic in a job or a job interview.

But someone at the end of their whole life has no need for any such concern. If you're in hospice care, you have little motivation to analyze how various specific tradeoffs you made throughout your life actually affected how enjoyable and fulfilling your life was from day to day. If you know you have almost no future and one of your most important remaining goals is to minimize your pain, it makes a lot of sense to adopt a hedonistic perspective on your life. Though these sentiments may be some of the patients' last words, they are not the last word in how we should live our lives.

Back to that New York Times article — I found it from an excellent blog about psychology and statistics called The Mentaculus. The blogger, Andy McKenzie, has a "working assumption that every human tendency is on a spectrum." He describes how he used the idea of regret to channel his decision making before reading the Times piece:

I've used the regret heuristic in the past with mostly positive but somewhat mixed success. I've probably actively thought "Will I regret this?" around 15 times in the past year and about 10 of those decisions I would now characterize as positive. But there's something missing from that simple approach.

After reading the Times article, he concluded that the way someone applies the "regret heuristic"

will vary based on what time scale he/she chooses. Perhaps the best strategy is to estimate whether you will regret something in 5 days and also whether you will regret it in 5 years. Then, use both estimates in making your decision.

McKenzie's "regret heuristic" on a "spectrum" would seem to be a more sophisticated tool for making life decisions — if only you could keep in mind such an elaborate formula and apply it effectively. Whether you could actually manage to run your decisions through this heuristic, full of unknown variables, is another question. The goals expressed by Ware's patients — "happiness," being "true to yourself" — might seem more idealistic and hedonistic. But they're also more accessible and simple, which could make them more efficient decision-making tools.

IN THE COMMENTS: McKenzie responds.