Notes from Howard Rachlin’s “Science of Self-Control” (2000)

Notes from Introduction

Humans have the ability to perceive a pattern of facts as a single, abstract entity. Self-control, therefore, simply involves allocating a pattern of behavior to the delivery of a later, larger reinforcer, as opposed to a sooner, smaller reinforcer. (p. 3)

The pattern of saving nuts emerges in the behavior of the squirrel from every instinctual instance where it has to hide nuts. In the same vein, the pattern of alcoholism emerges in the choice to drink at every instance the opportunity is presented. Just like the squirrel who doesn’t choose to be a saver; the alcoholic does not choose to be one (p. 4).

Notes from Chapter 1: Habit and Willpower

Teleological behaviorism (Rachlin’s paradigm) does not distinguish inner life from life. Rather, all of life is acted out as overt behavior. (p. 19). That said, I cannot agree that there is no difference between private and public events. The skin does make a difference!

Mental life is simply patterns of behavior extending into the past and the future (p. 19). Mental events are perceptible patterns of overt behavior just like a movement within a symphony or ballet (p. 19). Within some time range, interobserver agreement can be obtained for the history of an observable behavior. Future behavioral patterns may be predicted, but not perceived by external observers until it happens. If mental life comprises of private events extending into the past and the future, then it has a dimension not present in observable behavior – time in mental life is at least bidirectional. This sounds like LaMettrie’s materialist monism. 

Notes from Chapter 2: Simple Ambivalence

None publicly posted.

Notes from Chapter 3: Complex Ambivalence

Simple ambivalence involves a choice between two clearly defined alternatives, while complex ambivalence involves a choice between one clearly defined alternative (usually the temptation, e.g., drinking or using drugs now) and a vaguely defined, abstract state (e.g., the state of wellbeing or sobriety) (p. 58)

In teleological behaviorism, the best predictor of future patterns of behavior is not through introspection, but in the observation of patterns of past behavior. (p. 66). Friends, relatives and other people in one’s social circle are the best mirrors for identifying patterns of past behavior. As a consequence, they are able to understand the behavioral context of an individual engaged in a particular activity. (p. 66). This is similar to my concept of Adullam Ring or cognitive science’s conception of cognition as embodied in the environment, social environment in this case. Outsight is better than Insight because extended patterns of behavior over time are no longer discrete and well-defined for the individual.

People prefer to be rewarded, rather than merely escape punishment. As a result, people are motivated to exchange negative reinforcement (e.g., continual drinking by the alcoholic) for positive reinforcement (e.g., engaged in non-drinking activities). This explains why alcoholics might want to quit after entering the alcoholism stable state. In this state, alcoholism becomes the abstract, temporally extended state, while “not drinking” becomes the discrete, well-defined event where positive reinforcement can occur. However, with time, the individual gets to the sobriety stable state where every instance of “not drinking” becomes negatively reinforcing, i.e., merely avoiding pain. As a result, the individual engages in the well-defined event of “drinking” where positive reinforcement can occur. Then the journey down the primrose path starts again. (p. 78-79)

Negative reinforcement: Removal of aversive stimulus to increase the emission of behavior. E.g., drug addict who takes drugs to drown out pain or loneliness.

Positive reinforcement: Presentation of stimulus (reinforcers) to increase the emission of behavior. E.g., engaged in social activities

Notes from Chapter 4: The Lonely Addict

Expected Utility Theory assumes that the consumer’s time horizon is infinite and the consequences of all choices in the present and future are considered before a choice is made. However, based on psychological realism, reinforcers and punishers are both discounted by time/delay (p. 82-83).

Consumption of addictive goods can have harmful effects on future consumption. In addition, consumption of addictive goods reduces the net utility of a fixed amount of that good. This necessitates the consumption of an increased amount of the good to attain the same level of utility (p. 85).

Tolerance is the negative effect of a person’s stock of an addictive substance on utility Stock = body and environment’s memories of consumption. Stock increases with consumption and decreases with time. If addictive and nonaddictive activities are seen as alternatives, increase in one activity will increase its stock and decrease the stock of the other activity (p. 85-87).

Negative effect of present consumption on future local utility is price habituation (p. 87).

Consumption of some activities, e.g., learning skills or social skills, increases future local utility (p. 87).

Positive effect of present consumption on future local utility is price sensitization (p. 88).

It appears that social interaction is price sensitized, i.e., the more it is performed, the cheaper it gets; the less it is performed, the more expensive it gets. (p. 100). Addictive behavior, e.g., smoking or alcohol consumption, is price habituated, i.e., the more it is performed, the more expensive it gets (you need more quantities to attain the same level of utility/satisfaction) (p. 101). Sometimes, an addictive activity becomes instrumental for obtaining social support, i.e., the individual drinks in order to reduce the cost of social support (p. 102).

Notes from Chapter 5: Soft Commitment

The initiation of a gestalt of behavior whose interruption is costly is also a commitment to its completion. This is called soft commitment because there is a way out. (p. 109). Credit card companies understand this with attaching penalties to when payments are defaulted.

Initial components of a gestalt of behavior patterns are not sunk costs, but rather, investment in the individual’s stock (Stock = body and environment’s memories of consumption [p. 85]). In other words, components of a gestalt of behavior are economic complements (p. 116). This is a good conceptualization introduced by Rachlin. Rather than limiting complements to different reinforcers that must be consumed together to obtain utility from them, Rachlin treats each allocation of behavior to the same reinforcers across time as complements.

In teleological behaviorism, there is no delineation between cognition and motivation. True knowledge is more than the repetition/verbalization of rules (as evidenced in the two experiments). To know a rule is to act in a way that is consistent with it (p. 125).

By committing to a behavioral pattern leading to a larger, later reward (LLR), the individual is reducing future options and potential variability of future behavior (p. 125). The pattern of behaviors that constitute self-monitoring introduces a wider temporal context. This overwhelms the discrete, narrow time associated with smaller, sooner reward (SSRs).

Experimental example with smokers asked to limit the variability in the number of cigarettes they smoked. By trying to reduce variability, the smokers reduced the amount of cigarettes they smoked. This is due to restructuring, where attention shifted from the few minutes smoking takes, to the larger behavioral context of self-monitoring for a week (p. 126-127).

Notes from Chapter 6: Rules and Probability

Desires are situational, i.e., cravings are not in the individual, but dependent on where the individual is. Discriminative stimulus is a situation or stimulus that signals the operation of a certain contingency of reinforcement (p. 130).

Just as organisms tend to prefer SSRs to LLRs, they also prefer small certain reinforcers to larger probabilistic ones. (p. 153). This is the essence of Prospect Theory’s subjective evaluation of value depending on their probabilities.

Notes from Chapter 7: Self-control and Social Cooperation

Social cooperation is to social defection what individual self-control is to individual impulsiveness (p. 168).

Cooperation is not dependent on either absolute probability or subjective probability. Rather, it is dependent on relative/conditional probability, i.e., what is the probability of others (or future “me”) cooperating, given that I cooperate. (p. 178 – 179).

For an individual struggling with addictive activities, a lifetime of relapse has reduced the probability of his current self cooperating with his future self. As a result, the future self defects too and will not be able to cooperate with the current self (p. 179).

A single person in successive moments in time, ranging from past to present, is like a person in a group of other people (Fig 7.7). The different persons have the same skin, thus, they have a common interest. Good habits and LLRs benefit the individual over time, even though there might be some sacrifice in the present (t = 0) (p. 187). Rachlin introduces this prisoner dilemma game ongoing between the person in the present time and the future time. Goal of self-control is to encourage cooperation between self in the present and self in the future.

In Richard Price’s novel, Clockers (1992), ghetto environments have short-term social interactions dominating long term ones. SSRs overwhelm LLRs and everyone’s self-concept is narrow in time; controlled by the clock, rather than the calendar.

Calling Evil Good

In his book, “Beyond good and evil”, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “The great epochs of our lives come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us”.

Now, I’ll admit that I’ve never read any of Nietzsche’s work in its entirety (and I’m not even sure I ever will). As a consequence, however, it is difficult for me to know exactly what that quote means outside its context.

On one hand, it could mean that people should be willing to reconstruct their moralities such that the traditional notions of “right” and “wrong” are rendered obsolete. The logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is the rejection of universal truth since, in the course of my reconstruction, what is “good” for me may not necessarily be “good” for you, and vice versa. Isaiah 5: 20 warns us of the dangers of towing this path:

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

An alternative interpretation of Nietzsche’s quote which is more agreeable to my system of beliefs is the idea that that we should be open to changing or updating what we accept as “good” or “evil” in a given situation and time.

An example that comes to mind is from the Biblical story of Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers who had sold him into slavery years before. In Genesis 50:20, Joseph’s conclusion from the whole ordeal is simple: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Joseph chose to interpret his terrible experiences as God’s good plan for him, his family and the nation. In other words, he called evil good.

What is a practical way this may work out in contemporary times?

Think about the person who is terrified of public speaking. He will physiologically and psychologically present the flight-or-fight response. This happens because the individual has lumped public speaking and other sources of fear in his life under the category called “Evil”. Real change happens when the person has the courage to label public speaking as “Good”. Done long enough, the person becomes comfortable speaking in public such that it appears to be second-nature.

Disclaimer: The “Notes/Ideas Lab” category on my website will contain ideas and thoughts that I have not fully developed. I may eventually get round to fleshing them out into a full essay. I also reserve the right not to do so…

Resolving Intra-Psychic Conflicts

Behavior-based Artificial Intelligence is a branch of AI which approaches intelligence from the standpoint of multiple, simple decision makers whose combined action leads to the expression of more complicated behavior. This approach to AI is modeled after a paradigm for considering the complexities of the human mind and behavior. At the most basic level of this worldview, the human mind appears to be made up of several intrapsychic subsystems. So, rather than seeing the individual as being moody and gloomy in one moment, impulsive and gluttony the next, calculative and rational the moment after that, the idea of the person is considered to be a bundle of all these different inclinations.

Intrapsychic subsystems are always in conflict because they are competing for the right to be expressed in behavior. This makes sense when one considers the fact that the different inclinations of the individual have goals which do not necessarily overlap. For instance, the goal of the moody and gloomy inclination might be to just lie in bed sulking, while the calculative and rational inclination has the goal of paying the bills – which won’t happen unless one goes to work.

The conflict between the different intrapsychic subsystems is over who will be in control of overt behavior and this conflict is resolved by bringing them under the control of a personality.

There are 4 different ways this may play out.

Winner Takes All: In this approach, the intrapsychic subsystems are simply left to the whims of time and chance. Eventually, one of the intrapsychic subsytems will emerge as the dominant personality that governs all expressed behavior. We all know of spoiled children who grew into lazy, miserable and unmotivated adults. A lifetime of indiscipline led them down the path of least resistance. For obvious reasons, this is the least desirable means of developing a personality.

Cultural Education: The conflict between intrapsychic subsystems is compounded by the potential for interpersonal conflict when people come together to live as a group. To resolve this, the incentives for pursuing group goals have to be stronger than those for pursing individual goals. That is, the goals of the group have to be compelling enough, such that the individuals who make up the group are willing to subject their warring subsystems to the dictates of the group. In other words, a personality is developed through culture norms. In fact, we say an individual is “cultured” to the extent to which he embodies cultural norms and expresses them in action. For the most part, harmony within the group can be maintained when personality is developed in this manner. Problems arise when in-group members come in contact with out-group members.

Mentors and Role Models: The personality that resolves intrapsychic conflict can be resolved by simply imitating one’s role model or mentor. When my baby brother was very little, he watched numerous episodes of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. At the end of each episode, he would tie a blanket round his neck and wear his underwear outside his trousers. He’d walk around the house confidently with his chest puffed out. My little brother had embodied the spirit of Superman and nothing was going to stop him. In those precious moments, his behavior as expressed in overt action was simplified by asking, “What would Superman do?” . The downside to this method is that we do not spend all our waking hours shadowing our models. As a consequence, the part of the mentor which we have access to and are trying model our lives after is only a small subset of what makes them who they are. We’ve all heard stories of people who lost respect for their role models when they got to see them up, close and personal. The mystique around their personality was gone and only the mundane was left.

The Holy Spirit: As a Christian, I’ve come to understand the Holy Spirit also gives believers a personality that resolves the conflict between the different intrapsychic subsystems. Life is complex, and no matter how many times you read through the Bible, you’re not going to get direct answers to personalized questions like whether you should marry Jane or Juliet, or whether you should relocate to a warmer climate or stay put in your current location. In fact, if you merely restrict yourself to the letters of the Bible, it could kill you (2 Corinthians 3:6). A truly rich and abundant life only comes when you partner with the Holy Spirit, develop the personality He endows upon you, and allow Him to unfold for you the unforced, rhythms of grace as you journey through life.

Disclaimer: The “Notes/Ideas Lab” category on my website will contain ideas and thoughts that I have not fully developed. I may eventually get round to fleshing them out into a full essay. I also reserve the right not to do so…

Increasing Shannon’s Entropy in Relationships

Under normal circumstances, entropy signifies the amount of disorderliness in a system. For instance, a highly disorganized room can be said to be in a state of entropy.

In information theory, however, entropy is given a slightly different treatment. This form of entropy is called Shannon’s entropy and it deals with the amount of surprise that is embedded in a message. The higher the entropy, the more informative the message is.

Think about the last time you heard a baby babble. In this instance, the amount of information you can extract from the baby’s vocalizations is small. There’s really nothing inherently novel or interesting about hearing a baby say “baa-da, baa-da…” over and over again. The Shannon’s entropy of the baby’s message is low.

On the other hand, say, you’re listening to a subject matter expert talking about a topic you’re very interested in. In this case, the Shannon’s entropy of the speaker’s message is high. Why? Because the words encoding his message can open new frontiers in your mind once you are able to decode them!

Generalizing to interpersonal relationships today, many relationships have the Shannon’s entropy of a baby’s babble!

There are at least two heuristics for detecting an interpersonal relationship with a low Shannon’s entropy: (1) Recurring conflicts on the same issues, which could eventually lead to (2) Cold indifference, where one party is simply apathetic to the other.

So, how can you increase Shannon’s entropy in your interpersonal relationships?

First, listen to truly understand what the other person is saying. Merely mouthing ‘I understand you’ does not cut it. To understand the other person means embodying the spirit of empathy. That is, trying as much as possible to enter the same emotional and psychological space as the other party. Doing this will increase the amount of information you can extract from the other person’s message, thus increasing the Shannon’s entropy of the other party’s message to you. This may be crucial in taking your interpersonal relationships to the next level!

Second, understand that winning the person is sometimes more important than winning the argument. In a scientific study investigating the dynamics of social interactions among rats, a typically dominant rat engaging in playful rough and tumble with another rat will usually let the other rat win 30% of the time. That is, even stronger rats instinctively appreciate the idea that winning the individual is sometimes more important than winning the fight. You can imagine how much more the Shannon’s entropy in your interpersonal relationship will be increased if you took a hint from a rat!

Disclaimer: The “Notes/Ideas Lab” category on my website will contain ideas and thoughts that I have not fully developed. I may eventually get round to fleshing them out into a full essay. I also reserve the right not to do so…

Waste is Key

Waste is one key to unlocking exponential development in any sector or industry.

Until you can afford to waste a resource, you will not be able to break through the iron ceiling of potential.

I have 4 examples to prove my point:

The first is biological systems.

A tree produces tons of seed-containing fruits in the course of its life, even though, there are probably billions of seeds out there that will never get planted, not to talk of become trees. Yet, trees are in no danger of getting extinct anytime soon. Similarly, you only need one sperm cell and one ovum to make a baby. Millions of sperm cells are “wasted” in the process of conception, yet the world population is currently at 7 billion and counting.

My second example is from the food industry.

The American fast food industry only really took off after the country had figured out how to “afford” wasting farm produce. This happened through the mechanization of farm processes. The result? Increased efficiency in the use of land and exponential production of farm produce. At such levels of production, supply outweighs need, and when people are no longer hungry, innovation is never far away. Of course, one of such innovations turned out to be the fast food industry itself!

The third example is paper, which I won’t describe in detail here because I have written about this before. I’d say this, though: Once people could afford to waste paper, groundbreaking ideas could be disseminated far and wide.

The final example is data.

I remember seeing a picture of early computer innovators using a truck to move a 1 MB hard drive.

Yes, you read that right – one megabyte!

Data was expensive to produce, to store and to move around. Since so much effort went into it, no one was willing to waste it.

Fast forward to the present day where data is so ubiquitous and almost everyone spends their active waking hours literally wasting data without giving so much as a thought to it.

But think about how much the quality of our lives have improved because we can all waste data. Think about the software, web apps, and online marketplaces that were only possible after man could figure out how to afford to waste data.

There is a benefit that comes with being able to waste. It allows more room to experiment with different uses of a resource, and like in the archetypal Darwinian struggle, the fittest use(s) for that resource will thrive, while others go extinct. If you’re unable to waste, how can you even be sure that the current use of the resource is the optimal way to get the best out of it?

Innovation and technological development in any industry is constrained by its willingness and capability to waste.

Disclaimer: The “Notes/Ideas Lab” category on my website will contain ideas and thoughts that I have not fully developed. I may eventually get round to fleshing them out into a full essay. I also reserve the right not to do so…

The Kanisza Triangle: Why There’s Much Food in the Tillage of the Poor

Look at the featured image above.

What do you see?

If you’re like most people,  you’d see two triangles planted on top of three circles.

And like most people, you’d be wrong.

As it turns out, there are no circles or triangles in the shape above.

What is perceived as circles are actually three black shapes oriented at different angles.

What is seen as the dark triangle is simply a series of Vs arranged in different ways.

And of course, there is no white triangle at all. You totally made that up on your own!

So, what does this teach us?

People find it easy to remain blind to the obvious.

People looking at the Kanisza Triangle easily see the white triangle that is not even in the picture, yet they miss the Vs that are staring at them.

In the same vein, people look at their environments and only see chaos.

They look at their circumstances and conclude that there’s nothing good that can come out of it.

Yet, right there in the midst of the chaos are opportunities begging to be crystallized.

Little wonder Proverbs 13:23 says, “Much food is in the tillage of the poor…”

The mind hates gaps and when faced with them, will subconsciously create fillers

In the image above, the triangles and circles you saw were not there.

They were creations of your imagination.

In the same way, people have a tendency to make up assumptions about how the world works.

To counter this, you must be humble enough to acknowledge that there will be times when you are working with faulty or incomplete assumptions.

In instances like this, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for wisdom.

James 1:7 says, ‘If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.’

Conclusion

Order is the inherent nature of the world God created, and there are still obscured patterns waiting to be uncovered.

Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.”

To see these things, however, you must take a step away from crowd-think and hone your skills of perception.

Things We Do Because of the Difficulty of Thought

Thinking is hard.

As a result, we try to make use of mental shortcuts to make decisions faster.

These shortcuts are called heuristics, and while they are useful, many times, they lead us down rabbit holes.

The other day, I sat close to a dude in a meeting.

As we got talking, I found that he had relatives from the Middle East.

I concluded that he was a foreigner and a student.

Well, it turns out that I was wrong on both counts.

The dude was neither a student, nor a foreigner, and heuristics lost yet another battle.

The one that amuses me the most is the media’s use of statistics.

You hear stuff like, “70% of people who eat ABC will have XYZ in ten years”

What they don’t tell you is the number of people they are basing that statistic on.

70% of 100000 is 70000 and if that’s the case, maybe ABC has the effect they claim it has.

However, 70% of 10 is 7 people!!!

I’m not saying 7 people are not important, but any effects observed in them is likely due to causes other than eating ABC.

But here’s the interesting thing: Researchers almost always tell you all the numbers involved in arriving at their conclusions.

Yet, the media likes to conveniently ignore the details, while focusing on sensationalism.

And because of heuristics, we gobble up anything they place before us – hook, line, and sinker.

So, what’s my point in all these?

Jesus said, ‘…be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves’ (Matthew 10:16).

A good way towards manifesting that wisdom is knowing when you are misperceiving the truth because of an ‘over-reliance’ on heuristics.

I’m not asking you to be over-analytical and critical in every situation.

All I’m telling you to do is to be aware.

It can change your life!

My Reaction to Trevor Noah’s “Why Is the Alt-Right So Angry?”

I’ll be the first to tell you this: I love Trevor Noah and his team.

That said, I still have 3 problems with the video below, which seemed to suggest that the behavior of the alt-right was related to their unwillingness to consume porn.

Confirmation Bias

There are tons of empirical evidence that pornography coupled with masturbation is not healthy. Nowadays, people in their teens and twenties are suffering from premature ejaculation and other forms of erectile dysfunction. To put that into context, before the proliferation of porn on the internet, these kinds of ailments typically happened to men over 40 years. Confirmation bias sets in when you ignore the myriads of evidence against pornography consumption and look for that one person theorizing about how porn is causing the alt-right to be angry. I had the choice to simply watch the video and move on, but I feel there are thousands of people here who are miseducated on the real harm that porn causes in society.

Anybody Can Do Armchair Theorizing

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Dr. David Ley was only providing a theory of how he thought masturbation influenced the behavior of a certain group of people. I do not have any problem with that. I think every good scientist has the right to theorize about anything. That is the way of science. However, science does not start and stop at theorizing. You start with a hypothesis, and you test that hypothesis by experimentation. This does not even have to be a true experiment with real people in a lab. You can go to aggregated data from national surveys such as the BRFSS and many others, and simply compare the reported happiness of people who watch porn and masturbate, versus people who do not. All I am saying is that it is irresponsible to push such a theory without empirical evidence of any form. This is one of the reasons I feel psychology continues to get a bad rep among the hard sciences. You do not see physicists, chemists or biologists theorize and end there. They follow-through by providing empirical evidence that supports or disproves their hypotheses.

Correlation is NOT Causation

One of the first things you learn in grad school is that correlation is not causation. The fact that two events happen concurrently does not mean that one caused the other. You cannot simply say that the alt-right is always angry because they do not watch porn. That’s simply lazy science. As an example, I typically wake up when the sun rises. But I won’t go on to say that sunrise caused me to wakeup. Neither would I say that my waking up caused the sun to rise. There are more factors that directly impact when I get up, such as the time when I slept, or how much I slept the previous night, or how tired I was the previous day. Similarly, there are myriads of factors that directly translate into anger in the alt-right, just in the same way that there are myriads of factors that translate into anger in other people groups.

Conclusion…

Now, I understand this is satire (i.e., Trevor Noah and similar satirists should not be taken very seriously). However, the problem with satire is that you see what you want to see depending on your stand. People on the right would watch this video and laugh at how dumb liberals are to believe that not watching porn can cause anger. People on the left would watch the same video and laugh at how dumb conservatives are to not watch porn. And that’s why I have taken the time to write this long essay, so that irrespective of your leaning, you learn to see through the lenses of objectivity.