Meteuphoric

I’m back! And to celebrate being back, I shall discuss celebrating. I actually have not much idea why people celebrate things the way they do, but the practice has many interesting features.

Stylized facts about celebrating stuff:

1. It generally happens at the beginnings and ends of differentiated periods of time (e.g. a year, time living in a particular area, time on a particular project, a lifetime), and on annual anniversaries of those.
2. It usually requires most of one’s time, for between a couple of hours and a day.
3. If it is repeated, it tends to be ritualistic and traditional, containing roughly the same activities every time, but different ones for different celebrations.
4. The activities tend to be enjoyable, social, ones. They tend not to have other obvious purposes, besides eating.
5. Celebrating seems to generally express the importance of a subject. Celebrating a thing indicates approval for it.
6. Celebrations tend to involve more symbolism than your usual activity.
7. Many celebrations are shared by large numbers of people. Of all the social activities people engage in, most of the largest scale coordinated ones seem to be celebrations.
8. Celebrating seems normatively expected to be social. Celebrating a thing alone is often considered a sad sign.
9. Celebrations are more often associated with a religion than the average activity is, though many are not.
10. Celebrated entities are often humans, or significant human events. But there are also celebrations of beer and dance and so on. I’m unsure what unifying feature these things have. Perhaps just they are popular enough in some group to get general approval for expressing support for them. But it seems something like idealization or identity comes in – many mundane things are popular yet largely uncelebrated. e.g. double glazed windows.
11. Not celebrating stuff that others are celebrating is seen as somewhat antisocial, serious, and passionless. Yet not a terrible sin.

Why would you have an activity like this? One where periodically large numbers of people – often many perfect strangers – stop what they are doing and enjoy themselves socially in repetitive and symbolic ways that are understood to express approval regarding a particular thing?

The large scale coordination in expressing approval for a thing seems potentially useful for strengthening social norms around that thing. That everyone affirms the value of X every year in public lets you know that X has widespread support, and also makes this support salient. This probably makes dedication to X seem more important. But exactly what force would bring about things that are useful for strengthening social support for random things? And how true could this be of e.g. birthdays? It doesn’t seem obvious that people have birthday parties to encourage everyone to publicly reaffirm their support of the birthday haver.

If this kind of thing is the purpose though, it would make sense that celebrations are generally enjoyable. If you want a group of people to publicly affirm their support for a thing, an easy way to increase the number of people who will do it is to buy them off with cake. If the cake comes with a story about eating cake for ineffable reasons of great spiritual importance, all the better. And so you eventually end up with elaborate celebrations where many participants aren’t quite sure what the point was, and everyone slightly suspects that the others are there for the cake. Then at some point it becomes common knowledge that everyone is there for the cake, at which point the whole thing becomes embarrassing to continue and you go home.

Note that this need not be intentional – just those celebrations that are enjoyable tend to grow. Also note that the norms being supported need not be exactly the things celebrated. Celebrating features of a certain culture – e.g. beer – might strengthen embracement of that culture in general.

This would also explain the mystery of why there are as many celebrations as there are, and not more. Given that people seem to like the ones they have, and don’t seem to suffer much waning interest for extra excuses to party, it’s not immediately clear why we don’t just have some more celebrations. The explanation would be that the bottleneck is widespread belief in the virtue of celebrating a particular thing, which is hard to manufacture, rather than enthusiasm for a day off.

As for the repetitiveness, symbolism, and tradition, these things seem to be roughly how humans always behave when they feel particularly superstitious. Which they seem to do when things seem important, and they don’t understand them. At least that’s my tentative guess.

More theories?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Maybe this is old advice, or so obvious that everyone figures it out. But handy tip for if you are strange, and you want others to not think you are strange: hang out with foreigners.

To foreigners, everyone from your culture is strange. It could easily take them years to realize that some of your peculiarities are actually your peculiarities, not quaint oddities of your backward culture.

They don’t need to be actually foreign in the national sense for this, but they do need to be at least fairly unfamiliar with your culture. People from a distant generation or social set should also work.

I have tried out this advice a bit when house-sharing. Usually I find sharing houses somewhat uncomfortable. One reason is that I have fairly obsessive-compulsive kitchen-use tendencies. When I first moved to Pittsburgh I lived with two of my Chinese colleagues. Amongst the mutually alien methods of cooking, and alien foods, and alien eating arrangements, and alien hygiene protocols in general, who bats an eyelid if you happen to wash things a couple of times more than the usual American? This made things more comfortable, modulo the fact that some foreign cooking habits don’t mix well with OCD.

Of course, the foreigners you hang out with are unusually likely to be following the same strategy. If you rudely want to avoid hanging out with strange foreigners while gaining the benefits of hiding your own strangeness, you should hang out with more foreigners. That way you can compare foreigners against one another and distinguish individual strangeness from cultural strangeness. Relatedly, you should avoid hanging out with more locals at the same time.

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Suppose nobody has ever told you that they like you. Suppose you are relatively uncertain about how often people like other people, and also about how often they will disclose it when they do. Suppose you are confident that these facts about your ignorance and social inexperience do not bear on whether other people like you. So as it stands you are fairly uncertain about your popularity. Suppose also that you have a deep and insatiable need for people to like you, and your pleasure is roughly linear in the number of people who like you.

Suppose one day a person tells you that they like you. If you are given to expressing emotions or making inferences, one thing you might wonder is whether this should be cause for happiness.

This is not as obvious as it first seems. A person telling you that they like you is more probable if:

1. This specific person likes you.
2. People like you in general
3. People are given to expressing their liking for other people

The first two are promising. The third makes the fact that nobody else has ever said they like you a bit more damning. Just how much more damning depends on your probability distribution over different possible states of affairs. For an extreme example, suppose you had even odds on two extreme cases – people always saying they like people who they like, and people never doing so – and that many people have had a chance by now to tell you if they like you. Then you should be extremely sad if anyone tells you that they like you. The apparent update in favor of people liking you in general will be completely overwhelmed by the reverse update from flatly ruling out the possibility that all those people you have already met like you.

In general, seeing an instance of X can make X less likely, by indicating that X tends to be visible:

• Hearing your neighbors have loud sex might lower your estimate of how often they have sex.
• Finding a maggot in your dinner might reassure you that maggots in dinners are relatively visible (this is just a hypothetical example – in fact they are not, especially if your dinner is rice)

Conversely, failing to see X can make X more likely, by increasing the probability that it is invisible:

• If you have never observed a person lying, it might be more likely that they are an excellent and prolific liar than it would be if you had seen them lie awkwardly once. Though not once all the excellent liars realize this and stumble sheepishly over a white lie once in a while.
• Failing to observe phone calls  from friends for too long will often cause you to suspect they have in fact been calling you, and there is rather something wrong with your phone.

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

I asked how it could be that experimenting in my own life could be worthwhile, given that if such things were worthwhile other people should have already figured them all out. My suggested explanations:

1. I am strange: nerdy, recent, young
2. Innovation: there are constantly new things to experiment with
3. Findings are not spread: or so much noise is also spread that the information is lost
4. Context-specificity: your findings don’t apply to me, because people are unique or situations are complicated
5. I am wrong: it’s easy to underestimate nebulous costs, to overstate fleeting or illusory benefits, to want to be the kind of person who tries new things, or to be too hopeful that life can improve fast

It seems to me that 3 is the biggest: results are collected so badly as to be often worthless and are aggregated poorly. It’s not clear to what extent this is because of 4: other people’s findings are just not so useful. Personal experimentation seems worth it even without good aggregation, but probably only if you avoid the same errors of measurement yourself. It could be worth it even with purely placebo gains, if you enjoy the placebo gains enough. But in this scenario, the gains are much smaller than you imagine, so you are probably over-investing a lot. There also seems to me a real risk that everything is so context specific that what you learn will be worthless as soon as you change many other things (4).

Explanations that involve others finding experimentation a lot less worthwhile (e.g. 1) seem unlikely to help much because it looks like others often find experimentation worthwhile. The problem seems to be somewhere between others making such efforts, and me having useful information as a result. Innovation (2) seems a bad explanation because it doesn’t explain the lack of information about age-old lifestyle questions. It seems likely that I have overestimated gains relative to losses in the past (5), but gains still seem larger than losses (it’s hard to disentangle causes, but my lifestyle has obviously improved substantially over the last  year or more, some of which seems directly attributable to purposeful experimentation and the rest of which seems at least not terribly damaged by it).

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

When I was a teenager, I think I engaged in a lot of motivated cognition. At least in an absolute sense; I don’t know how much is common. Much was regarding trees. Before I thought about this in detail, I assumed that how motivated cognition mostly works is this: I wanted to believe X, and so believed X regardless of the evidence. I looked for reasons to justify my fixed beliefs, while turning a blind eye to this dubious behavior.

On closer in(tro)spection, this is what I think really happened. I felt strongly that X was true because many good and smart adults had told me so. I also explicitly believed I should believe whatever my reasoning told me. I was inclined to change my beliefs when the information changed. However I knew that I did this, I feared that my reasoning was fallible, and I was terrified that I would come to believe not-X even though X was the truth. Then the truth would come out, or more evidence at least (and obviously the truth would be X), then all the good people who knew X would consider me evil, which was equivalent to being evil. They would also consider me stupid, for not seeing the proper counterarguments. So it was sickening to not be able to come up with a counterargument, because such a failure would immediately turn me into an evil and stupid person. Needless to say, I was quite an expert, especially on counterarguments.

So unlike in my usual model of motivated cognition, my arguments were directed at persuading myself of things I feared doubting, rather than justifying fixed beliefs to others. How often is this really what’s going on?