Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Try Not to laugh....
The latest out of the Glenn Beck channel discussing "inflation" and "money printing" with a fellow libertarian guest:
This is a textbook example of what Ignacio commented here recently about how interesting it can be to watch these people go thru all sorts of mental contortions to still be seen to comply with their cognitive biases.
They even admit that it has been 6 years now that we have been "money printing" and still no "inflation"; which is to anyone with half a brain, empirical evidence that their theory is false. But yet they still are able to come up with some words in support of their crack-pot theories to wind it up.
Below is Mike in one of my favorite videos of him on the Glenn Beck channel from back a while where Mike, who possess no such cognitive biases, tries to explain our Federal government's fiscal authorities to some people from the same channel.
Mike to the Reagan guy: "Well get the plugs out of your ears!" LOL!
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We are on a global race to avoid deflation in a lot of nations and these guys talking about rising inflation and "money printing".
They just don't get it, the huge amount of private sector liabilities in the system is a gigantic deflationary elephant in the room. Aggregate incomes (including govt 'injections' in all forms and shapes) are not even funding the ability to leverage any more.
Not to say that QE is basically deflationary because it's suppressing interest rate income channel, the only thing it is inflating right now is the stock market with increasing margin debt.
Ignacio,
do you know of any research out there that has investigated these biases from a brain studies or 'consciousness' perspective?
like how are these biases 'burned in'?
In electronics, amplifiers are 'biased' also....
Has anybody ever hooked up a libertarian to some brain electrodes and taken in some data?
Seems like we could see some correlations in brain waves with these people...
rsp,
See George Lakoff, The Political Mind, and Drew Westen, The Political Brain, for the neuroscience behind political differences. Both are written from a liberal perspective.
Candance B. Pert's Molecules of Emotion doesn't relate directly to politics but it is interesting for the biochemistry behind consciousness, mind and body.
We are getting more insight into the correlation between mental states, behavior and the circuitry. Much of it confirms what we already know — prior exposure and experience influences present and future experience an behavior. There are the beginnings of explanation in terms of physics and chemistry. But those explanations are only in the initial exploratory stages, and it is too soon to conclude too much from them about many key issues.
We can now be confident that differences in reported experience and observed behavior do have psychophysiological correlates. Habit structure is "burned into" the brain through use of neural pathways, for example. So now we see why "practice makes perfect" and breaking habits is accomplished by changing behaviors, that is, disuse of accustomed neural pathways, resulting in the former pathway becoming "overgrown."
Pert's narrative is autobiographical and it is a fascinating detective story. She explains how addiction is difficult to overcome is that the normal biochemistry changes resulting in different information processing in the receptors. There are "endogenous" chemical molecules and receptors in the body (recall Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and its "bad chemicals"). There are also exogenous substances introduced from (the environment outside the body that affect bioprocesses in ways that influence experience and behavior similarly. They even use the familiar terms "exogenous" and "endogenous".
The political connection is that people that fit into different political categories respond differently to different stimuli based on difference in the "programming" of their receptors. Politics is inherently moral and moral correlates with how one responds emotionally to different stimuli and this happens by the body sending signals biochemically, for example. A lot of conservative intensity is explained by their feeling disgust where liberals are not bothered, resulting in liberals thinking that conservatives are bigoted, crazy, etc., and liberals get really upset about things that leave conservatives cold emotionally. Different "chemicals."
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continuation
It is emerging that upbringing and early education are decisive in the way a brain develops, so the great gains in education are to be made by influencing development early on.
This creates a dilemma for a liberal society, since choices by people other than the individual determine development practically from conception, e.g., through exposure to nutrients and poisons during gestation. How much should the public be involved wrt to a child's upbringing and exposure relative to the private, i.e., the family? The intersection of science, morality, and politics promises to result in come collisions.
There's a huge amount of literature on this now in many disciplines. I am just suggesting these three books as good places to start. Cognitive scientist Lakoff and psychologist Westen look specifically at politics. Pert, discoverer of the opiate receptor, is interesting for the gripping way her narrative unfolds, making a technical subject an easy read. Others might recommend different ones though.
The upshot is that we are coming to see the universe as a huge information processing system (unit) in which consciousness, mind, body and environment are not separate, as they appear. It's not even correct to say that everything is interconnected. What is, is a system and its dynamics that produces patterned modulation. As we drill down we find an energy field rising and falling in waves like an "ocean without shores." and at the heart of that field information.
Energy is that which produces change, and information ("intelligence" in the sense of the ancients) directs change wrt to variance invariance. Each of us is a product of THAT. All of us are the same in some respects and akin to everything that seems different for us, and also unique in other respects. This is the result of what we call "information."
At this point in time we humans are getting a scientific handle on this, but the realization of it was expressed poetically from prehistorical times. What we are coming to know rationally and account for scientifically, others have known non-rationally and expressed symbolically.
"information" is "knowledge communicated" so we can have knowledge BUT, if it is not communicated, then there is no "information"....
Tom,
"respond differently to different stimuli based on difference in the "programming" of their receptors."
Tom, the "stimuli"... I'm getting the idea that the "stimuli" are actually "words" somehow...
So there is this basic stream (of consciousness?) that is "modulated" in effect by words...
maybe the consciousness stream is the "carrier" and the words somehow perform the "mod/demod" functions....
rsp,
"prior exposure and experience influences present and future experience an behavior. "
Tom, Mike has always said that he was a card-carrying member of the debt doomsday crowd (so he was once exhibiting a "bias" in this regard) but he was able to get around it somehow...
so it seems like it would be possible to operate (at some level) against these biases...
rsp,
Off topic: I was recently introduced to series of short films that can be found the following site:
http://www.wetheeconomy.com/
A MMT take on some of these would be appreciated.
The new funny money dilution ("inflation") since 2008 has artificially inflated the unsustainable stock market bubble and re-inflated much of the housing bubble. Both are bound to collapse. The Austrian theory of the 1929 depression is based upon an artificially inflated and unsustainable stock market with little or no CPI type inflation at the retail level.
You do not understand Austrian theory (not that Glenn Beck does either).
Matt, humans think of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, which is why metaphor and analogy are basic. We model what we want to know based on what we already knew and the system of gaining knowledge is self-augmenting.
In thinking about this speculatively, the ancients noticed that while everything is always changing, some aspects remain constant. That is to say, then wondered about the relationship of the variant and invariance and attempted to account for it. We are still trying to account for it.
The ancients noticed that everything is, that is, existence is not a property but rather a category that enables distinction of possibility-actuality, time series, and change of properties with the category remaining the same.
That called the invariance "intelligibility". The universe has intelligibility as a category along with existence, whether that intelligibility is known consciously by humans or not. For knowledge intelligence is required along with intelligibility.
Now we look at this formally and rigorously in terms of information theory but the issues are perennial. Presently, machines are a dominant aspect of experience, so many modern analogies are based on machines, and increasingly electronic circuitry.
That there are analogies that seem to fit, the question becomes why so? There are two answers. The first is that this is not actually an analogy, but the universe is a big information-processing "device." The other is sees this as an illicit jump in logical (reductionism) and that the understanding is based on analogous expression rather than univocal.
According to the former, the problem of consciousness, mind, and body are solved if the brain is described as an information-processing device like a computer. According to the latter, this is additive knowledge but it does not explain what needs to be explained, which is consciousness, life, and mind, which are not explained by correlating them to bodily processes.
A problem is explaining emergence from increasing complexity, for instance. There is no indication that humans are at all close to grasping the fundamentals of emergence, if that is even possible. However, there is a lot that can be accounted for even with the initial understanding that has been developed.
So we can account for political differences in terms of psychophysiology but we don't yet know how these differences arise, or how they can be changed by changing the "chemicals" or "rewiring" the brain, but we know from military and intelligence studies that there is a lot more correlation than most people realize and that mind manipulation is not only possible but has been practiced with some degree of effectiveness. Of course, propagandists have known this for ages, and it's the advertising industry's bread and butter. But now we are talking some seriously intrusive stuff wrt to social engineering and human engineering.
Liberals argue with much justification that a liberal education is a prerequisite for a truly liberal society. Conservatives see that as social engineering and human programming, designed to undermine "traditional values," also with good justification.
So we are left with clashing worldviews based not only on cognitive-volitional-affective differences but also correlated psychophysiological differences, some of which may be pretty well "hardwired" by the time a person becomes a voting adult. Of course, to the degree disposition is genetic, it's hardwired, too. Humans come in different varieties.
This new understanding and the technology that is arising as a result also create issues with the possibility of achieving a truly liberal society free from such manipulation. There's definitely a dark side to this. Tin foil hats for all.
Off topic: I was recently introduced to series of short films that can be found the following site:
http://www.wetheeconomy.com/
A MMT take on some of these would be appreciated.
I watched the "What is Money" clip. It's useless. Really wrong from the MMT POV.
Bob R we were under the gold back then in 1929 or whatever ... it matters... rsp,
Interesting Paper here:
http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~xinl/library/papers/comp/vdM_correlation.pdf
Matt Franko said...
"prior exposure and experience influences present and future experience an behavior. "
Tom, Mike has always said that he was a card-carrying member of the debt doomsday crowd (so he was once exhibiting a "bias" in this regard) but he was able to get around it somehow...
so it seems like it would be possible to operate (at some level) against these biases...
That's what learning is about. However, strong biases inhibit learning and some biases are so strong that those holding them cannot get beyond them no matter how costly it is to them. In this case, the bias functions as a norm. It becomes a criterion in evaluation.
It’s interesting to speculate, but I think, in the end, we need to experience. Just the fact that we cannot explain the seat of consciousness should immediately focus attention. Even the cavemen looked up at the stars at night and wondered who they were and what they were doing on this planet. And even today, as a race of beings, we do not know. We have cell phones and quantum theory, but we do not know. I believe (among many) we do not know because we ignore the obvious. Words can point this out but words are never enough.
Within the human heart there is a feeling. The human heart - not the mind. Let mind be still. By following this feeling inside one discovers there is also a universe within. Kabir described this feeling as a rope, which he climbed – what he found at the top was Life, Being; a universal Energy – the Self in every being. Naught exists other than the Self. Even the atoms and the molecules have at their core the Self; all lives are aggregations, everything Lives.
Consciousness (awareness) I would describe as a mirror in which the higher and lower are reflected. I would not be surprised to find Science agree with the ancient wisdom one day, to finally discover the human consciousness as a different entity to the human persona (vehicle). The soul (Arjuna) dwells within the living chariot: the horses pulling the chariot are the senses, the reins the mind; besides Arjuna stands the Master (Krishna, the SELF); the battle ground is this world, the friends and relatives that Krishna is telling Arjuna to slay are his concepts – in order to gird Arjuna, Krishna reveals himself and finally Arjuna understands. The obvious!
For me, consciousness is identity, standing before the Self, aware of the spark within and persona below. But consciousness does not need the persona to exist. Words I know …..
In the world, the wise look to the heart. It has never ever betrayed you, and has always stood by you, your best friend - every moment of your life.
Matt, while not my area of expertise, most studies trying to map brain activity patterns to certain cognitive biases are done on a pathological context (Imaging attentional and attributional bias: an fMRI approach to the paranoid delusion (1) link below).
On a "normal" individual, on idle state, the brain activity probably already has built-in those biases. Is the normal way of human brains operating, so there ain't much you can compare those to as there is no apparent 'diference', those diferences happen in pathological cases because in those cases (as it happens with most psychopathologies) are an exacerbation of a normal mechanism, an extreme case.
In fact, there is an hypothesis that certain categories of cognitive biases can be simply the by-product of noise while processing information (Toward a Synthesis of Cognitive Biases:
How Noisy Information Processing Can Bias Human Decision Making, wonkish, (2) link below). While other categories of cognitive biases are probably just a by-product of heuristic mechanisms which have evolved to deal with two issues: 1) decision making under uncertainty; 2) doing so in an agile/rapid way with the most cost-efficient procedure.
As for overcoming those biases: there is nothing written in stone, it's perfectly possible under enough information overflow which is opposite to previous information to change cognition and, indirectly, behaviour. The "only" problem is one of energy use: our brains like those of any other mammals and other species too, have evolved to be efficient on the use of energy.
The brain is the organ which requires more energy to operate, increasing activity requires a lot of extra energy by the organism, cognition substitution is as much, if not more, expensive as creating new cognitions, which is probably the most expensive process the brain can do. Given that certain 'belief-systems' are an intricate network of complex cognitions you can imagine how expensive is to 'rewire' (so to speak) those mappings. All this is highly speculative but there is certain evidence that points it works that way.
Individual differences make the rest: certain individuals may have an easier time doing those 'rewires' than others, for some people it may be close to impossible. And you can add a lot of other unknown variables, for example neuronal plasticity is not the same at all ages (it certainly is harder to 'rewire' your brain the older you are, but at the same time you have access to a wider network of cognitions, in case your memory recovery systems are still working fine). All very complex, and we don't know that much about it yet, hardly solid established science, but the evidence we have seems to point it works out along those lines.
An other thing to take in mind is, that those biases are there for a reason: to protect your belief-system for the well being of your own self. Imagine an extreme case: you operate according to certain beliefs, if those beliefs crumble and no longer are perceived by yourself as true, then it would mean you have operated and acted a long time according to some false belief: mind blown ("I have wasted my entire life doing X"). This is why under extreme circumstances and events the organism can have some very strong psychological reactions (ie. PTSD) and manifest certain disorders and pathologies, because a big part of your belief system crumbles.
The trait of having relatively low overhead when remapping cognitions it's a desirable trait in our complex civilizations, and it may be very well a present trait in certain personality profiles. But unfortunately does not seem to be the most common case.
1) http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=53911&fileId=S0033291799002421
2) http://www.martinhilbert.net/HilbertPsychBull.pdf
From an economic standpoint, transaction cost is substantial and organisms develop develop heuristics to deal with uncertain as efficiently and effectively as possible, assuming cet. par., that is that the future will resemble the recent past of experience. These heuristics become individual, institutional, subcultural, and cultural biases. Ordinarily this is a pragmatic assumption that pays off. However, at turning points it doesn't and that can turn out to be extremely expensive.
A major heuristic is adopting a worldview to structure experience in terms of anchors such as norms and criteria. This is the basic bias that everyone operates under. However, worldviews differ and so do individual, institutional, and subcultural and cultural biases. This provides a basis for agreement, disagreement, and conflict.
Humans face two major challenges. The first is ontological uncertainty. We do not know the future and we also know that surprises occur fairly often. The second is epistemic uncertainty. A great deal lies beyond humans' ability to know based on our limitations as a species. A significant source of limitation is cognitive-volitional-affective bias.
Even though heuristics allow humans to reduce transaction cost, they cannot eliminate them. Moreover, the element of surprise is significant enough for humans to invest heavily in developing more rigorous methods of dealing with this eventuality in order to anticipate likelihood and to provide alternatives for dealing with the unexpected and immeasurable, such as redundancy, contingency planning, emergency services, reserve funding and the like.
All this is something that underlies human life and it is adds a significant cost to life over what life would be like in a certain world. But no matter how much time, energy and resources are committed, risk cannot be entirely reduced and radical uncertainty cannot be removed.
Different individuals and groups assess needs differently, plan differently, and come to different cost-benefit conclusions, as well as distribute time, energy and resources differently wrt to relying on heuristic and employing rigorous methodology.
These are matters that economics deals with regarding a certain sector of life, but risk and uncertainty affect many other areas that economics doesn't ordinarily address and perhaps is not suited to addressing, so other methods are required.
Whatever, there is no getting around the costs in terms of time, energy and resources, whether or not they can be measured monetarily as economics does. Progress can be viewed in part as the way that humans develop means to address these challenges, the most significant of which are emergent and cannot be predicted based on past experience. Those successful in meeting these challenges survive, prosper and proliferate, and those that don't get selected out.
Some people in a coma are fully conscious inside their comatosed body, the brain (transponder) showing little activity; sometimes they are aware of the outside world too, but unable to communicate as the 'experts' discuss whether or not to switch off the life-support. I think I fully understand what that would be like.
One stage of 'samadhi' has the same description: fully conscious while the body is 'asleep'. Always, it comes to experience. People on the outside interpret; people on the inside experience - knowledge on the inside is a state of being, a state of knowing; intelligence IS being - mind is a consequence.
The Dali Lama told a story of western researchers wanting to wire up monks in meditation, to monitor their brain waves: - the monks rolled on the floor laughing!
This is the first state of going inside, from where the ascent above or through the barrier of the personality consciousness is made. It is only when this barrier is transcended, does the human being see himself as he is. Below the barrier it is all done through feeling (the first 'inner sense' to evolve). Therefore 'peace'is the most important. Peace takes a human being from the outside to the inside. Peace sets the aspirant on the road to discovery. A human being is not just the sum of everything you do and think - we are so much more than that. From the inside, what goes on in the world is a play (a very dangerous and unconscious play)! Just as man evolved from the animal world, the soul must evolve from man - there is naught else happening other than distraction. This little thread is woven through all of the patterns of the world stage.
Patanjali (> 5000 years ago) was more of a psychologist and neuroscientist than the present discipline all rolled together imho ....! :-)
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