Tag Archives: Social Science

What does your gut tell you?

Credit: Dilbert.com

There is polarized debate on whether instincts are worth following.  Companies are increasingly relying on quantitative metrics for new hires over subjective interviews.   Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise pitches old-school scouts against number-crunching quants to find the next baseball star.  And doctors are taught to follow the science even if it sounds counter-intuitive (such as prescribing beta-blockers, a heart slowing medicine, for patients with heart failure actually prolongs life).

But all is not lost for those relying on instincts – as your gut instinct may tell you.  Last year a New York Times article argues that big data is imperfect.  In his research, Nobel-prize winning Daniel Kahneman finds that our minds are naturally wired to think in both instincts (System 1) and data (System 2).

At the end of the day, the new age of big data and massive informatics does not preclude the need to slow down and use our own System 2 to process whether the science behind our decisions truly make sense.  Instinct is neither good nor bad; it is merely instinct.

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The self-narrating animal

“We’re sto­ry­telling crea­tures by na­ture, and we tell our­selves story after story until we come up with an ex­pla­na­tion that we like and that sounds rea­son­able enough to be­lieve. And when the story por­trays us in a more glow­ing and pos­i­tive light, so much the bet­ter.”

– Dan Ariely, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

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A fig­ment of my own yearn­ing imag­i­na­tion

A life story is a care­fully shaped nar­ra­tive that is re­plete with strate­gic for­get­ting and skill­fully spun mean­ings. Like any pub­lished mem­oir, our own life sto­ries should also come with a dis­claimer: “This story that I tell about my­self is only based on a true story. I am in large part a fig­ment of my own yearn­ing imag­i­na­tion.”

– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

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One reason is plenty, two is too many

If you have more than one reason to do something … just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

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How to mint gossip-worthy news

Word of mouth, then, is a prime tool for mak­ing a good im­pres­sion—as po­tent as that new car or Prada hand­bag. Think of it as a kind of cur­rency. So­cial cur­rency… So to get peo­ple talk­ing, com­pa­nies and or­ga­ni­za­tions need to mint so­cial cur­rency… There are three ways to do that: (1) find inner re­mark­a­bil­ity; (2) lever­age game me­chan­ics; and (3) make peo­ple feel like in­sid­ers.

– Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Great Storytellers of Our Moral Decisions

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a medical research project.  In broad terms, the researchers developed a virtual tool to evaluate the skills of doctors on a particular procedure without performing on a real patient, and they needed people at various stages of proficiency to test the training program.  Since I was a total novice, it made me an ideal subject – I was expected to stumble and burn.  In fact, I was so clueless that I had to ask the experimenter to repeat the instructions for the simulation.  Then, through either sheer luck or innate talent (ha), I scored near the top of the chart.

Shortly after the study concluded, I was notified that after discussing with the co-researchers, the research team has decided to discard my data-point because “the instructions were given twice, which gave an unfair advantage over the other participants.”  I wanted to reply, “But if a complete novice can score like this without knowing how to do the actual procedure, doesn’t that say something about the quality of the virtual evaluation?”

More interestingly, if I had scored much lower than the average novice – making the results look even better – would the research team have thrown out my data-point all the same? Continue reading

On Choices, Decisions, and Happiness

The fable of Buridan’s donkey tells of a donkey who is profoundly hungry.  When put in the exact midpoint between a two identical piles of hay, the donkey was unable to choose which one it wanted and eventually dies of hunger.  Ironically, if the donkey had only one and not two piles of hay to choose from, its life would have been easier (and longer).  Obviously, people are smarter than Buridan’s donkey – are we?   Continue reading