Beginnings: Toward an Open Source Map of Human Nature

UPDATE 2/27/15: Second set of links added.

What we are doing isn’t working, we’re all in this together, and we are running out of time.

Let me try to explain, as simply as possible, what is going on.

Executive Summary: Our self-inflicted societal problems arise not from having "the wrong people" in power, but from the interplay of universal, self-evident human attributes. Problems and solutions alike arise from ways in which we are all fundamentally the same, not different, and that is grounds for cautious optimism.

Four basic human attributes—habitual pattern recognition, analogical thinking, a limited attention span, and a body governed by instincts—are all that are needed to assemble a coherent, accessible explanation for all possible human behavior.

The explanation develops along three broad themes:

I. Habitual pattern recognition, analogical thinking, and limited attention (the first three attributes) make up the shared core of human intelligence, in which rationality figures prominently, but not in the way you think;

II. Intelligence meets instinct (the fourth attribute) at the hinge of identity, giving rise to the complex world of emotions;

III. Our experiences within this elegant dual architecture, while dynamic, are unavoidably constrained by our own attentional limits.

Once woven together, these themes reveal a distinctly human way of generating, experiencing, and reacting emotionally to ideas. This underlying process architecture is the shared basis of all possible human ideologies, regardless of their truth or coherence—we’re all in this together—and it can be comprehensively mapped, yielding deep insight into human affairs.

For example, the map offers a fresh look at age-old political problems. Accumulated power and its corruption lead to snowballing negative effects in any society—what we are doing isn’t working—but the map unambiguously shows both to be functions of "people" rather than of "the wrong people." The dynamics are human, not ideological, and this has potent implications.

One such implication is a categorical rejection of identity politics. Almost by definition, perennial societal problems arise from shared human attributes rather than ideological differences. If left unchecked—we are running out of time—the darker aspects of that common nature tend to wear societies down or tear them apart, regardless of who is running the show. Singling out scapegoats won’t solve long-term structural problems.

The bottom line, as incredible as it may seem, is that all of this structure—persistent societal problems and their solutions, perpetual tensions between individual and collective, the good and bad aspects of human nature, and even the motivational energy that powers the whole enterprise—all of it emerges whole from a common architecture, which in turn derives from the mappable interplay of just four self-evident human attributes.

The explanation unfolds gradually and in plain language, making it easy to follow, and each stage is summarized into convenient heuristics, or rules of thumb. This is knowledge meant for widespread use.

Application of that explanation has already proven capable of defusing long-standing ideological battles on contact. Broader application, coupled with the newfound appreciation of our common humanity it brings, could be the societal tool we need to transcend "politics as usual" in favor of durable, inclusive, open-ended solutions that can actually work.

We’re all in this together, and this may be an encouraging thought.

To be continued...

FOUR FORMS OF FAMILIARITY

A big-picture look at how to attain mastery in almost anything.

EDITED 8/30/15


INTRODUCTION

I routinely tell my cello students that mastering a particular musical concept or technical passage isn't about whether the item in question is easy or hard, it’s about whether or not it can be made familiar.

I then remind them that cello playing is roughly as complex as simultaneously rubbing your stomach and patting your head, while also jumping up and down, tap-dancing, and saying the alphabet backwards!

Nevertheless, the complex act of cello playing is also very much like walking, or driving, or running up a flight of stairs, or any of a thousand other familiar human actions, in that any of them can be familiarized over time, if you so desire.

If a compound skill is too complex to grasp at a glance (if it outstrips your real-time cognitive capacity), then common sense suggests that it should be reduced to a series of smaller, more easily solvable puzzles. Once these smaller steps have been solved, then they can be layered together into more and more complex combinations until mastery is achieved. The catch is that there are four distinct forms of familiarity, and if at any point your developing understanding should become fixed in the wrong form, then your overall performance will suffer.

In this post, I introduce the four forms of familiarity and demonstrate their relationship to one another.

ROAD MAP

Draw yourself a 2x2 table, and label the rows "negative" and "positive" and the columns "static" and "dynamic."

static

dynamic

negative	I. II.
positive	III. IV.

This gives us the four forms, one per quadrant: negative/static, negative/dynamic, positive/static, and positive/dynamic.

Let's explore each form in turn, using the alphabet game "Can you guess what letter I am thinking of?" as a recurring example.

Technical note: In our example, the domain containing the answer (hint: it's in the alphabet) is known from the start, but you must still start the game without any information from within that domain. We are using a small, bounded, discrete domain for clarity, but the same informational principles also apply across unbounded, unspecified, continuous, or uncountably large domains.

QUADRANT I: NEGATIVE/STATIC

The simplest way to begin collecting information is to try guessing a letter.

"Is it A?" "No."

Congratulations! You have obtained your first piece of negative/static information!

static

dynamic

negative	I. "NOT this." II.
positive	III. IV.

Information from the negative/static quadrant is cheap, easily collected, offers a low-resolution view of the true solution, and comes in the form "it isn't this" or "don't do that." For some situations ("Don't raise your bow shoulder"; "Thou Shalt Not..."), including those uniquely strange parental instructions given to small children ("Hey! Stop eating the cat!"), this is sufficient.

But negative/static information doesn't really tell us very much about what TO do...

Some additional information can be extracted from the negative/static quadrant by making multiple guesses ("is it B? ...Q? ...X?"), but this strategy has its limits. The cheapness of each separate piece of information comes at a collective attentional cost, and that cost grows exponentially higher as problems grow more complex. Remembering which guesses have been tried becomes harder and harder as the number of uncoordinated guesses mounts. We quickly approach our cognitive limits, winding up right back where we started!

The problem has again become too complex to grasp at a glance.

Fortunately, that complexity is easily reduced by a shift into the second quadrant:

QUADRANT II: NEGATIVE/DYNAMIC

Ordered groups of negative/static information ("Is it A? ...B? ...C? ...D? ...E?" etc.) can be efficiently collapsed into dynamic ranges ("Is it before F?" "After M?"), substantially reducing the cognitive load of the assembled information. Therein lies the value of the second quadrant! Where the negative/static quadrant can take up to 25 pieces of information to guess the letter in question and requires all 25 to specify it, the negative/dynamic quadrant can specify the letter in two and guess it in no more than seven.

static

dynamic

negative	I. "NOT this." II. "NOT those."
positive	III. IV.

Information found in the negative/dynamic quadrant ("It isn't those," or "Don't bother with that region") is also relatively cheap, provided you trust the information source. Its compact smoothness is useful in real-time situations, where conditions are often continuous rather than discrete. "Don't play that passage in the lower half of the bow" is far easier to remember than "Don't play that passage in this part of the bow, or in this part, or in this part...".

The mental shift from the first quadrant to the second is so easy as to be practically automatic, and in situations where exact answers are unnecessary the results it produces are often “good enough.” Most daily habits live in the second quadrant.

But negative/dynamic information still isn't all that precise, nor is it streamlined enough for every situation. While it is effective in simple one-axis problems such as our letter puzzle, it is far too unwieldy to handle complex problems with lots of parameters, such as residential construction, professional-level auto racing, or orchestral string playing.

Sometimes life calls for a more powerful class of solutions.

QUADRANT III: POSITIVE/STATIC

The third quadrant is where the Eureka! moment is found.

When enough negatives have been nailed down, a powerful phase change occurs. Suddenly, the collected negative information crystallizes, collapsing all at once into a single, positively defined solution:

"The letter is W!"

As this phase change occurs, clouds of no-longer-needed negative definitions dissipate like smoke. An essential clarity is revealed, and the mind frees itself from unneeded clutter. The harder the problem—the more parameters that are in play—the more satisfying the mind-clearing "Aha!" moment is when it finally arrives.

static

dynamic

negative	I. "NOT this." II. "NOT those."
positive	III. "THIS." IV.

Information from the positive/static quadrant is densely packed and can be cognitively expensive to acquire, but it is incredibly easy to use. Its compressed precision ("do it this way") makes it invaluable in real-time situations where decisive competence is needed. (“This goes here, and that goes there.”)

Many people stop once they reach this level of familiarity (“It is the way it is, we’ve figured it out, discussion over”), but this form is not the end of the story either.

Why?

Because despite human hopes to the contrary, the world never stands still under our feet. Change is ubiquitous, even when it is very slow, and the world has a way of shifting out from under our pre-assembled expectations when we least expect it. Perfect circles conceived in the abstract tend to become fuzzy approximations when drawn in real life. People act very differently in different situational contexts. Language, culture, and political parties evolve over time.

Even at the shorter time scales of daily life, many of our most engaging human activities are dynamic in nature. Conversing with other people requires that we keep up with a flow of shifting topics. Your cello bow may be perfectly placed on the string, and your posture may be completely free of tension, but you are not making any music unless your bow is moving. Driving a winding road through the mountains at high speed requires anticipating just where in your lane you need to be, in combination with just when and how hard to gun the engine into the turns. Static solutions are not always enough.

The fourth quadrant comes into play when aspects of the dynamics themselves turn out to be predictable.

QUADRANT IV: POSITIVE/DYNAMIC

If the third quadrant is the quadrant of competence, the fourth is the quadrant of mastery. The fourth quadrant is entered when a whole series of positive/static data points can be collapsed into a single elegant equation, or heuristic: the simpler, the better. Once again, any unneeded information dissipates like smoke.

If the letter game were a repeated affair (“W...” “H...” “E...” “...”) with the eventual goal of guessing an entire quotation (“W H E N I N T H E C O U R S E O F H U M A N E V E N T S...“) then the equation would call up the entire quotation as a familiar whole, thereby eliminating the need to serially discover its individual letters.

[Note: Fourth quadrant equations are continuous. That is, they apply not just at the sampled points, but at all possible points within the domain they specify, and perhaps beyond. This is hugely important.

For example, while the third quadrant can tell me that my bow is perfectly (but differently) balanced here, and here, and here, and here, the fourth quadrant collects those points into a single unifying curve, comprehensively integrating the changes in bow balance, speed, pressure, positioning, and overall posture over time and space. This newfound freedom from technical micromanagement allows me to direct my limited attention to the higher-level task of making beautiful music, which is the whole point.]

static

dynamic

negative	I. "NOT this." II. "NOT those."
positive	III. "THIS." IV. "THOSE, across THESE contexts."

Whether the fourth quadrant equation describes a rigorously formal relationship, a nonverbal sense of events, or a purely physical action is irrelevant. Its establishment confers an intuitive fluency in any domain, an easy, flexible mastery of the material that leaves the mind clear and the body relaxed. The positive/dynamic quadrant is what enables great musicians to engage in on-the-spot virtuosic improvisation, and chess masters to see many moves ahead, and you not to trip over your own feet as you run up a flight of stairs, and politicians to manipulate the emotions of their constituents. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (link goes to TED talk) refers to being engaged in this performance experience as “flow.”

Making the transition from the third quadrant to the fourth is not so much a matter of raw computing power—you gain back much more than you spend—as it is an act of imagination. You simply have to learn to look past the static logic of a local solution to imagine how it might vary (or not!) across wider domains, and then test for fit.

This is an important real-life skill to cultivate, because all too often things that work well here turn out not to work at all well over there.

Music students routinely rediscover this fact of life every week, when pieces that [they say] they can play perfectly well at home crash and burn in their lessons, or in competitions, or in recitals. Giving a speech to thousands of people feels different from practicing in front of the mirror the night before. Inexperienced travelers quickly learn that different cultures can have wildly varying standards of appropriate behavior. But, once you have latched onto an essential continuity, a stable equation that works across a whole range of possibilities, you can easily adapt to whatever circumstances are on the ground, intuitively flowing around obstacles that would stop a less fluent understanding in its tracks.

Once acquired, mastery can be deepened through layering. Our fourth quadrant equation can borrow from the second quadrant the idea of ranges, so that the curve it describes gains a margin of error. Another fourth-quadrant equation can be layered in that draws an increasing fraction of your conscious attention to the situation whenever you approach the edges of your error margin. Further higher-level dynamic equations can even be written that integrate two or more existing but previously unrelated equations, like, say, “tap-dancing” and “saying the alphabet backwards,” or the relative motions of your bow shoulder, first finger, and the small of your back. The possibilities are endless.

Not all such fourth quadrant connections will be useful. Not all of them will be meaningful. Not all of them will be true. And almost none of them will truly apply equally well across all domains in the real world (failing to recognize this sometimes leads to nasty surprises). But any time you find anyone demonstrating intuitive mastery of even a moderately complex activity, the fourth quadrant is in play.

So, go and find it!

The Illusion of Imperfection

People are flawed, right?

Maybe not.

Flaws and imperfections are measures of things that aren't there. Realizing this is an important step in problem solving.

Human brains are pretty slow. Enough so, that in most of the complex things we do in life we must rely upon anticipation.

EXAMPLE: I can run down this flight of stairs, but only because my memory continuously sifts previous similar experiences to build a moving predictive "window" of what balance adjustments I might need to make, and when I might need to make them, with enough lead time for me to do something about it.

A COUNTEREXAMPLE: Imagine the consequences of trying to consciously micro-manage each and every muscle movement, in real time, in perfect sequence, while staying purely in the moment...

Memory-driven expectations are a fact of life.

They do, however, come with a significant TRADE-OFF:

Our human talent for anticipation makes for a fantastic end run around our built-in attentional limits, which are far more stringent then most of us realize. Unfortunately, that talent also leads to certain specific pitfalls in thinking.

SOME OF THESE are obvious...

Embarrassing, stupid mistakes are common while operating on fuzzy autopilot (I left the coffee on top of the car again!), or when a change in routine hasn't finished settling in, or when the rules for a new social situation aren't quite (!) what we expect them to be.

...WHILE OTHERS are much less obvious—at least, that is, until you look right at them:

As seen in this remarkable demonstration, having a set of pre-formed expectations can actually prevent us from seeing what is right in front of our faces. And, as the video also shows, most of us will never even know that we have missed seeing something important, and will even vigorously deny that such a thing could have happened.

Think on that for a moment.

The effect is more pronounced when strong emotion is involved. You can see for yourself by carrying out the following experiment:

Find a short article written by someone whose political positions you find upsetting, and read it through as closely as you can tolerate. Then, from memory, make a rough list of the arguments the author used in the piece. If you like, write a rebuttal. After you have finished, go back through the article and check explicitly to see whether the author argued exactly what you think he or she argued.

As in the attentional blindness video, most of us will find our initial comprehension has been sharply skewed by our existing expectations.

PLEASE NOTE! I am not saying the arguments in the upsetting piece cannot be rebutted; I am only saying that their true substance is easily missed in the heat of the moment. ALSO NOTE that the emotional blindness effect is in force whether you are for or against the sentiments displayed in the piece! As a general rule, the stronger and more emotionally charged your preconceptions are, the more likely you are to have misread what the author has actually written.

This, of course, is why politicians, performers, and advertisers work so hard to establish brand loyalty.

* * * * * * * * * *

So, if we are all condemned to navigate the world through a haze of memory-driven expectations, and if many of those expectations are limited, biased, or even flat-out wrong, then how can I possibly argue that human beings are not seriously flawed?

The answer turns out to be unexpectedly simple, and it lies in the direction of the comparison.

From a cognitive standpoint, we have a tendency to evaluate the real world's imperfect performance against our expectations, rather than the other way around. This is a critical distinction.

An action, an outcome, an object, or anything else in the real world is only said to be "flawed" or "imperfect" when it fails to live up to our expectations or desires.

We measure the degree of imperfection—"nearly perfect" versus "deeply flawed"—as a function of the size of the gap between reality and expectation, not as a measure of any intrinsic qualities possessed by the item in question.

Flaws and imperfections describe things that aren't there.

Why does it matter? Because reality doesn't care, and reality always wins out. Maintaining the comfort of our expectations may be easier than measuring what is really there, but in the long run that tends to lead to trouble. We create for ourselves a dangerous cultural blind spot, and an inability to find workable solutions, when we dismiss human nature as flawed or imperfect.

On the flip side, learning to look directly at ourselves may reveal hopeful solutions that have been sitting right under our noses all along, if we could but learn to see them.

People aren't as stupid as they (we) often look. We aren't imperfect, or even unintelligent, we are just emotionally driven, incredibly myopic creatures of habit. And on that count, we're certainly all stuck in the same boat.

I find this to be an oddly encouraging thought.