MITIR #039 - You Should Read These!
Curiosity, Freedom, Biases.
Here are 3 interesting pieces of writing on human behavior!
Does curiosity always lead to its own end?
I thought of the toddler who wanted to touch the rails. He hadn’t learned to speak, walk or eat properly but he damn well wanted to touch the rails. He did not care for a classroom’s applause, or cracking a competitive exam, or the validation of his politics. An intrinsic intuition, hard-coded by evolution, drove him to examine a piece of his reality. Curiosity had preceded consciousness, reason and morality. That 3-year old was curious for curiosity’s sake. He owed no explanation to himself or to others. In a sense, he was closer to the Truth than the boy who won quizzes, or the teenager who passed a tough exam, or the adult who tried to get his politics right.
Is Success the Enemy of Freedom?
People are plenty motivated to succeed when basic needs are at stake – to put food on the table, to get laid, to pay for the mortgage. But after those needs get met, success just doesn’t look all that great and only certain sorts of delightful weirdos keep striving. The rest of us mostly just lay back and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model
Outside of applied work, the lack of a theoretical framework hampers progress of behavioral economics as a science. Primarily, it means you don’t understand what it is that you are observing. Further, many disciplines have suffered from what is now called the replication crisis, for which psychology is the poster child. If your body of knowledge is a list of unconnected phenomena rather than a theoretical framework, you lose the ability to filter experimental results by whether they are surprising and represent a departure from theory. The rational-actor model might have once provided that foundation, but the departures have become so plentiful that there is no longer any discipline to their accumulation. Rather than experiments that allow us to distinguish between competing theories, we have experiments searching for effects.
The collection of empirical phenomena can provide a building block for theory. The observed deviations from the geocentric model of the solar system supported the development of the heliocentric model. Deviations from classical mechanics when objects are near the speed of light or of subatomic size provided the foundations for relativity and quantum mechanics. It is now time for those human biases that we consider to be robust deviations to serve a similar role.