Thursday, November 3, 2011

The flipside of overconfidence

I didn't address the flipside of overconfidence. Like the photo of the cat ready to do battle with an eagle from yesterday's post, I feel like I have frequently been the eagle happening upon unwitting cats ready to do battle against what, they don't really know. There are aspects of my personality and my appearance that can lull people into a false sense of security. I can seem very unassuming, easy to not notice in some ways because I keep my own counsel most of the time. I'm not an easy mark by any stretch, but it's not immediately apparent to most people what I'm all about and for some reason that can provoke people who are used to a little more certainty, or provoke bullies that are used to a little more deference. It reminds me of the old "Nutty Professor" movie with Jerry Lewis. He harasses a bar tender and is in turn harassed by a "barroom brawler." I love the depiction of the sudden burst of violence, even if exaggerated and unbelievable, especially given the contrast to the slow pace of the first part of the movie.



I'm in a similar situation now where someone has grossly underestimated me. I don't know what makes people want to pick fights, you know? That's what I always wonder when it happens. Sometimes I pick my own, but a lot of the time people will come to me wanting to start something. If they're planning on fighting fair, I will best them. If they are planning on fighting dirty, I will fight dirtier than them. The real problem in going up against me, though, is that it is just so hard to land a punch. I have vulnerabilities, like anyone else, but it's hard for most people to find them and they're small targets that require a precision attack, not your usual wild flailing you see from a typical thug. See, for me, I'm used to fighting your average normal person and the other typical variants of aggressors (bullies, narcissists, aspies, what have you). I have had at least a few of fights with each type and they're relatively easy to spot, so I more or less know what to expect. But it is quite unlikely that any of those people have ever gone up against someone like me, or unlikely if they had, that they would have identified that previous assailant and or identified me as being in a similar fashion to that previous assailant. Consequently, I almost always have the element of surprise to the point where some fights are just so outweighed, they're not even fun to fight. When someone picks a fight like the barroom brawler, of course, you don't really have a choice not to fight. But it is some small consolation knowing that even if they won't be memorable to you, you certainly will be memorable to them.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Overconfidence

Confidence is an amazing thing. Because appearances are essentially all that matter, especially in circumstances of information asymmetry, confidence is an incredibly important for any leader or successful individual. The hazard of confidence, as this New York Times article by famed behavioral psychologist/economist, are when the individual starts believing his own inflated stories. Here were the more poigant parts:
The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

I've mentioned several times that I believe one of the primary practical differences between a narcissist and a sociopath is that a sociopath does not believe his own lies. Sociopaths are able to lie to others and also lie to themselves, but some compartmentalized version of them will always hold on to the truth, lest they make some of these mistakes of overconfidence or underestimation that are so apparent in our brother narcissists. I fully agree with the article, though, that the only real way to avoid the perils of overconfidence is to have some touchstone that allows you to verify the validity of a particular belief. For me, I like to have people around me whose opinions I trust. If they tell me something is or not so, I have to basically take them on their word, like playing a game of mental blind man's bluff where I'm being guided by one or more participants. Luckily I learned how to trust people in my early 20's, otherwise I don't know what I would do.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Heartlessness in the news

A couple things have been paraded as absolutely heartless and cruel. First, these photos of an office party making fun of the recently foreclosed upon homeless:

And from the Los Angeles Times, a story of a niche in the used car business:
Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments.

But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan.

Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne.

Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered. Lee figured she had no choice. She put $3,000 down and drove off in a 2007 Ford Fusion, agreeing to pay $387 a month for four years. The interest rate: 20.7%, nearly triple the national average for a used-car loan.

A year and a half later, Lee fell behind on her payments and filed for bankruptcy. So she was relieved when the dealership called and offered to make her loan more affordable. The sales manager even promised to throw in a free smog check. Lee, 35, drove back to Repossess Auto on a rainy Monday evening, handed the keys to an attendant and sat down with the manager.

Moments later, she said, employees parked four cars tightly around the Ford, blocking it in.

There would be no new deal. Lee's car was being repossessed. She and her children waited in the rain until a friend could drive them home.

Lee, who described that night as “one of the worst experiences of my life,” had stumbled into the bare-knuckle world of Buy Here Pay Here used-car sales.
Does this any of this seem shocking to people here?

Monday, October 31, 2011

Regret vs. remorse

I have actually forgotten where I got this from, but I thought it was an interesting etymological explanation of what I have always intuited about regret vs. remorse.
I always think of connotation - REMORSE "1325–75; Middle English < Middle French remors < Medieval Latin remorsus, equivalent to Latin remord ( ere ) to bite again, vex, nag ( re- re- + mordere to bite) + -tus suffix of v. action, with dt > s; see mordant" Defined as a "deep and painful regret for wrongdoing; compunction." Remorse seems to follow a morally wrong decision. REGRET "1300–50; Middle English regretten (v.) < Middle French regreter, Old French, equivalent to re- re- + -greter, perhaps < Germanic ( compare greet2 )" Defined as alternatively "a sense of loss, disappointment, dissatisfaction, etc" or "a feeling of sorrow or remorse for a fault, act, loss, disappointment, etc." It is interesting that regret's second definition denotes a relationship with remorse but I have always thought that regret follows a decision that can be morally wrong but might just be a function of maturity. We have remorse for something that is unequivocally wrong and we feel regret for something that could be wrong but might just be stupid.

For me, regret means either feeling bad about something I get caught at OR a missed opportunity. Remorse is more connected to morality and is when I feel bad because I know what I have done is wrong (according to my conscience and internal compass).
I agree particularly with the last paragraph--that regret is wishing things could have gone differently, and remorse seems to be associated with a sense of guilt.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Emotional appendixes

Here is an interesting podcast on happiness economics. Starting at the 40:30 mark, there is an even more interesting discussion of evolutionary psychology. Professor Epstein explains the Darwinian insight that emotions are not insulated from evolutionary pressures. Nature does not trust the really important human behaviors to reasoning, but rather reinforces them with emotions. The prime example of this is procreation and raising children. There is a physical incentive to have sex, but the incentive to stick around and make sure that the offspring actually survive to reach the age of reproduction is emotional. Parents feel a "natural love" for their children. This natural love leads them to enjoy benefits to their children as they would enjoy benefits to themselves. That's why providing for one's children is not just a chore that we do rationally to propagate the species, but also one that we get emotional rewards from.

What does this mean for the sociopath? Well, sociopaths are not as much subject to the whims of "nature" and genetic/emotional programming as the majority of the human population. This is good because sociopaths have more freedom of thought and action. But it's bad because genetic/emotional programming was put there for a reason. Part of this reason has to do with our hunter-gatherer past, and is less important now -- sort of an emotional appendix or tail. Think about how inappropriate and disruptive our fight/flight instincts are in everyday life. On the other hand, some emotional programming is essential for our society to continue functioning as usual.

Sociopaths may be ahead of the curve when it comes to outdated emotional responses (the appendixes of the emotional spectrum), but behind the curve when it comes to good, rational, self-benefiting decisions that are reinforced in neurotypical people with emotions. Wouldn't it be nice to have rational decisions reinforced by emotion? If for no other reason, for the increase in utility and pleasure that emotional reinforcement would provide. There are obvious examples of the body rewarding necessary behavior with physical pleasure or the absence of pain: sex, eating, drinking, urinating, etc. For the empaths they also get emotional pleasure from things like cooperating, providing, and altruism. I feel a lot of satisfaction from doing things well, so I usually like to cooperate and be a contributing member of society. But wouldn't it be great if you also got intense emotional pleasure from it? If you could add pleasure to that equation, why wouldn't you?

For those of you who are interested, here is a little bit more information about evolutionary psychology and emotions from one of the comments regarding the podcast. The author of the comment is discussing the Robert Wright's book, The Moral Animal.
He is using Darwins life to describe some of the findings around sexual selection, kin selection and individual "striving" if you will (that is my words not Wrights). In one chapter he is talking about How Darwin and his wife reacted to the loss of children. He had one die soon after birth or maybe stillborn and another when (s)he was 8-10 yrs old. Well they reacted quite differently to both situations and were much more distraught in the second case. Why? It could be explained by the changes in their own lives at the time, where Darwin was in his work, the age of his wife etc etc. When you look at it simply as return on investment into genetic material passing to the future it begins to make sense. Someone you had invested more money ,time and effort into and was closer to reproductive age would be harder to lose than one lost right out of the gate. Similarly its been found that ,generally, once they are past the age of reproduction there is a dropoff in the "grief factor" following a death. This does not make us cold hearted computers driven by a DNA chip it is what makes us human. This behavior is noted in other species of animals as well. Our primate relatives "favor" the child they have invested the most in as well, and the one that has the better chance of passing on the genes.
Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.