Human Stupidity

Albert Einstein | Curiosity plus Failure | Factoids | Elsewhere

Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.

| Albert Einstein

Both versions of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein.

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Curiosity plus Failure

I read a fascinating article on recent research into curiosity, a topic I have returned to over and over again. In 2018, I quoted Elizabeth Gilbert, who considers curiosity almost a touchstone, an antidote to the demands of the search for passion:

Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living.

Whenever you’re told to “follow your passion,” it can be very intimidating, and it can be very confusing, because sometimes passion isn’t very clear, sometimes passions burn hot and then burn out, sometimes your passion changes, sometimes on a very sad Tuesday morning when you didn’t sleep well, the idea of passion just feels so out of reach that you can’t even imagine ever accessing it. And yet curiosity is this faithful, steadfast, friendly and accessible energy that is never far out of reach. There’s never a day where you couldn’t dredge up some tiny little fragment of interest in something in the world, no matter how modest it may seem, no matter how humble, no matter how much it might seem to be unconnected to anything else that you’re doing, no matter how random. Passion demands full commitment out of you. You’ve got to get divorced, and shave your head, and change your name, and move to Nepal and start an orphanage. And maybe you don’t need to do that this week. But curiosity doesn’t take anything from you. Curiosity just gives, and all it gives you are clues, just a beautiful thread, a tiny little clue from the scavenger hunt that you’re unique here in life.

But that sets a personal, almost besieged psychological hommage for the place of curiosity. The new piece I read, by Manu Kapur, is about the relationship between failure — in the context of answering trivia questions — and curiosity, aided by the use of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which allows researchers to track what brain regions are active:

In 2009, Min Jeong Kang, Colin Camerer, and colleagues were among the first ones to study how our brains respond to trivia questions like these, not because they liked trivia per se (they may well do), but more because they wanted to study the levels of curiosity such questions invoke, and the parts of the brain that are recruited in the process. They wanted to see what happens in our brain when we feel curious.

[…]

Kang and colleagues selected forty trivia questions on a diverse set of topics designed to make people feel either curious or not that curious at all.

Once participants were inside an fMRI machine, the forty trials began. For each trial, participants were shown a trivia question, and asked to silently guess the answer. After making a guess, they were asked to rate how curious they were about the actual answer. They were also asked to rate how confident they were about their own guesses. Then, each trivia question was shown again, followed by the correct answer so that participants could see whether their guess was correct or not. This procedure was repeated till all the forty trivia questions were exhausted. After coming out of the fMRI machine, participants were asked to recall and share their original answers to the questions.

They found that for questions for which participants had reported high curiosity, parts of the brain typically associated with anticipation of reward lit up. These areas usually light up when we are anticipating that something good or rewarding is about to happen.

And here’s when they discovered something unexpected:

When participants finally got the answers to the trivia questions, the parts of their brains that are typically associated with memory, learning and understanding language became active. Even more telling was that these areas were more strongly activated when the initial guess was incorrect than when it was correct.

if you had initially answered a trivia question wrong, areas associated with memory and learning were activated more strongly when you finally saw the correct answer than if you had answered it correctly to begin with.

There was greater learning in the brain from failure than success.

Curiosity appears to be linked to that anticipation of guessing right, but the guessing wrong leads to better retention of the correct answer. We learn more from curiosity plus failure than curiosity plus success.

The researchers found that the participants remembered the incorrect guesses’ answers more strongly than the correct guesses even after ten days.

So failure appears to be a better starting point for learning than success.

That reminds me of the oft-stated aphorism of Henry Ford, ‘The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing’.

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Factoids

Aging of America.

In 2000, there were about 27 Americans above the age of 65 for every 100 Americans of prime working age (between the ages of 20 and 49). By 2020, this number had increased to 39. By 2040, it will have risen to 54. Because these changes are driven mostly by a decline in fertility, the U.S. work force will also soon begin to grow more slowly. If immigration into the United States is reduced, as seems likely no matter who wins the election, this will only contribute to the aging problem.

| Daron Acemoglu, America Is Sleepwalking Into an Economic Storm

Both Democrats and Republicans seem committed to reducing immigration in the US, so — following the lead of other countries with aging populations, like Germany, Japan, and South Korea — the economic ‘answer’ is more automation, and higher levels of training [emphasis mine]:

Alas, this isn’t what is happening in the United States. Investment in robots has increased rapidly, but it hasn’t been accompanied by adequate investments in people. The work force remains unready for taking on new tasks, including technical and advanced precision work. It was the shortage of these types of skills that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Factory cited as a reason for delays in the opening of its first U.S.-based chip factory. If the United States doesn’t find ways to combine new machinery with better-trained, more-skilled and more-adaptable workers, the country risks more pain for manufacturing, the traditional provider of high-wage, stable jobs.

I hope that message becomes government policy in the years to come, and it better come quickly.

My son is an electrical estimator, and the company he works for is unable to hire electricians for good paying jobs because there are simply not enough electricians being produced.

Acemoglu recently received the Nobel in economic science. Maybe they’ll listen to him.

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That’s a lot of immigration.

Some quarter of a billion people live in countries other than those they were born in.

| Carlos Lozada

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I’ll blow, I’ll blow, I’ll blow your house down.

Across the United States, there are 1.3 million mobile homes built before 1976, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute, and they are generally considered unsafe in a disaster. In the North Carolina counties hit by Helene, there were 19,000 of these aging mobile homes. In the Tampa area, there were about 50,000.

| Hilary Howard, Christopher Flavelle, Caitlin Ochs, How Climate Disasters and a Housing Crisis Are Shattering Lives

And those built after 1976, called manufactured homes, make up about 6% of the nation’s housing, and manufactured homes account for approximately one in 10 new single-family homes in the United States. Generally safer than older mobile homes, but both varieties are more likely to be located in flood zones than conventional housing.

But the proportions were much higher in several areas hard-hit by Milton and Helene. In western North Carolina, 14 percent of homes were mobile or manufactured. Around Tampa Bay, Fla., the share was 11 percent. South of Tampa, in Manatee County, 14 percent of homes were mobile or manufactured.

At any rate, a predictable crisis.

As Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow and expert on the issue at the Urban Institute put it,

Manufactured housing shows how the affordable housing and climate crises collide. Our most affordable housing supply is the most vulnerable to climate disasters and often falls through the cracks during recovery.

I can read the tea leaves: more predictable crises to come. At the same time: factory-built homes -- for modular conventional homes -- is an idea whose time may have finally come.

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How much rain? How much?

When Milton hit Tampa it was 'a thousand-year rain event, with more rainfall in a single hour than the city had ever recorded in any single month before'.

| David Wallace-Wells, The Latest Hurricanes Are Creating as Much Delusion as Damage

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West Nile virus is here.

West Nile virus infection is by far the most common mosquito-borne disease in the United States: Since 1999, about 60,000 cases have been reported.

| Anthony Fauci, who recently suffered a harrowing bout of the disease, and worries about its spread. There is no vaccine.

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Elsewhere

Regrets, I’ve had a few.

In I Signed Up for Email in 1995. I Still Regret It., the writer Ann Patchet threads together her personal aversion to modernity in the form of cell phones, and her paradoxically deep acceptance of email. Although she — at the same time — regrets getting involved with email, how it seems to discinnect her from her community.

This presented against a backdrop defined by a novel, This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, a novel that pivots on 'the arrival of electricity in the small Irish village of Faha in 1958, an event that splits the lives of the citizens into the periods of before and after'.

Patchett understands email represents another dividing line, a transition from the time before, in the case of Faha, before electricity:

Beneath the pinholed heaven, the night was God-dimensioned and monumental before electric light.” I know what he means, and I miss that darkness, the feeling of a wide expanse of empty time in which to wander, and so for a moment I close my computer, close my eyes and do my best to remember the world that came before.

I have a hard time remembering a world before email, in the before time.