Author: Naveen

I recently watched the episode ‘Diamonds Aren’t Forever’ of Bad Billionaires: India on Netflix. This statement from James Crabtree stood out for me.

There’s a very clear double standard in the way that we view corruption in the world. People look at countries like India and say, “these countries are corrupt”, but, actually, much of the worst corruption would not be possible without seemingly respectable international finance. Somebody like Nirav Modi needed international banks in order to funnel his money abroad. He needed international lawyers. He needed tax havens in order to host his shell companies. And so, the corruption, the grand corruption you see in countries like India works hand in glove with a different and much more anonymous form of corruption, which is entirely created in rich countries like Britain or Switzerland and America.

It’s also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What’s your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There’s no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

On Parenthood

A wonderful article for all the new parents and the ones who are on the fence about becoming a parent.

As we sit here over six months after the initial lockdown provoked by COVID-19, the United States has moved out of a brief period of national unity into distressingly predictable and bitter partisan division. The return to this state of affairs has been fuelled by a cognitive trait that divides us and that our culture serves to magnify. Certainly many commentators have ascribed some part of the divide to what they term our “post-truth” society, but this is not an apt description of the particular defect that has played a central role in our divided society. The cause of our division is not that people deny the existence of truth. It is that people are selective in displaying their post-truth tendencies.

What our society is really suffering from is myside bias: People evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. That we are facing a myside bias problem and not a calamitous societal abandonment of the concept of truth is perhaps good news in one sense, because the phenomenon of myside bias has been extensively studied in cognitive science. The bad news, however, is that what we know is not necessarily encouraging.

The Bias that Divides Us

A fascinating article by Keith E. Stanovich on what myside bias is. Highly relevant in these divided times and may help in understanding other person’s perspective. A bit more succinct explanation later in the article.

…people evaluate the same virtuous act more favourably if committed by a member of their own group and evaluate a negative act less unfavourably if committed by a member of their own group; they evaluate an identical experiment more favourably if the results support their prior beliefs than if the results contradict their prior beliefs; and when searching for information, people select information sources that are likely to support their own position. Even the interpretation of a purely numerical display of outcome data is tipped in the direction of the subject’s prior belief. Likewise, judgments of logical validity are skewed by people’s prior beliefs.

The Bias that Divides Us

That’s it. That’s what I learned today.

Parachute is an iconic brand. And it’s safe to say most people have heard about Parachute coconut oil. But the interesting bit is that the product oil isn’t sold or marketed as hair oil. Instead, Marico classifies them as edible oil. The reason is quite simple. Edible oil carries a low tax rate. Cosmetic hair oil is taxed at a higher rate.

When Sachin wasn’t a cricketer (Don’t get misled by heading of the article)

I did a double take when I read this and had to rush to see my Parachute hair oil bottle to confirm this.

Consider two very large prehuman populations, the Geniuses and the Butterflies. Suppose the Geniuses will devise an invention once in 10 lifetimes. The Butterflies are much dumber, only devising the same invention once in 1000 lifetimes. So, this means that the Geniuses are 100 times smarter than the Butterflies. However, the Geniuses are not very social and have only 1 friend they can learn from. The Butterflies have 10 friends, making them 10 times more social.

Now, everyone in both populations tries to obtain an invention, both by figuring it out for themselves and by learning from friends. Suppose learning from friends is difficult: if a friend has it, a learner only learns it half the time. After everyone has done their own individual learning and tried to learn from their friends, do you think the innovation will be more common among the Geniuses or the Butterflies?

Well, among the Geniuses a bit fewer than 1 out of 5 individuals (18%) will end up with the invention. Half of those Geniuses will have figured it out all by themselves. Meanwhile, 99.9% of Butterflies will have the innovation, but only 0.1% will have figured it out by themselves.

Being Smart is Not Enough (The quote is from the book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter)

The author goes on to illustrate why you need both Geniuses and Butterflies in your team.

TL;DR

The bigger and powerful get money first, and the small and weak get money last.

Now coming to the long version.

His basic theory was that who benefits when the state prints a bunch of money is based on the institutional setup of that state. In the 18th century, this meant that the closer you were to the king and the wealthy, the more you benefitted, and the further away you were, the more you were harmed.

Money, in other words, is not neutral. This general observation, that money printing has distributional consequences that operate through the price system, is known as the “Cantillon Effect.”

…

This theory doesn’t imply that money creation is always biased towards the powerful, only that how money travels matter. There is no inherent money neutrality; such neutrality must be constructed by institutional arrangements.

The Cantillon Effect: Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don’t

And the dumbed-down version for people like me.

A fun article on Wait But Why explaining the big and small by making it small and big, respectively. Fun fact – our Milky Way is in Virgo Supercluster.

A wonderful analysis on why good people do bad things.

Tenbrunsel told us about a recent experiment that illustrates the problem. She got together two groups of people and told one to think about a business decision. The other group was instructed to think about an ethical decision. Those asked to consider a business decision generated one mental checklist; those asked to think of an ethical decision generated a different mental checklist.

Tenbrunsel next had her subjects do an unrelated task to distract them. Then she presented them with an opportunity to cheat. 

Those cognitively primed to think about business behaved radically different from those who were not — no matter who they were, or what their moral upbringing had been.

“If you’re thinking about a business decision, you are significantly more likely to lie than if you were thinking from an ethical frame,” Tenbrunsel says.

According to Tenbrunsel, the business frame cognitively activates one set of goals — to be competent, to be successful; the ethics frame triggers other goals. And once you’re in, say, a business frame, you become really focused on meeting those goals, and other goals can completely fade from view.

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things

Another excellent example later in the article.

Emissions testers are supposed to test whether or not your car is too polluting to stay on the road. If it is, they’re supposed to fail you. But in many cases, emissions testers lie.

“Somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of cars that should fail are passed — are illicitly passed,” Pierce says.

Financial incentives can explain some of that cheating. But Pierce and psychologist Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School say that doesn’t fully capture it.

They collected hundreds of thousands of records and were actually able to track the patterns of individual inspectors, carefully monitoring those they approved and those they denied. And here is what they found:

If you pull up in a fancy car — say, a BMW or Ferrari — and your car is polluting the air, you are likely to fail. But pull up in a Honda Civic, and you have a much better chance of passing.

Why?

“We know from a lot of research that when we feel empathy towards others, we want to help them out,” says Gino.

Emissions testers — who make a modest salary — see a Civic and identify, they feel empathetic.

Essentially, Gino and Pierce are arguing that these testers commit fraud not because they are greedy, but because they are nice.

“And most people don’t see the harm in this,” says Pierce. “That is the problem.”

Pierce argues that cognitively, emissions testers can’t appreciate the consequences of their fraud, the costs of the decision that they are making in the moment. The cost is abstract: the global environment. They are literally being asked to weigh the costs to the global environment against the benefits of passing someone who is right there who needs help. We are not cognitively designed to do that.

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things