My BS

I always remember vividly the witty lines at the end of 92 Dustin Hoffman movie Hero:

People are always talking to you about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is that there ain't no truth. All there is is bullshit, layers of it. One layer of bullshit layered on top of another. And what you do in life, like when you get older, is you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer, and it's your bullshit.

I guess when you start to sticking to your own BS, you are showing signs of maturity. So it might be interesting to see what my BS are.

• Evolution is the general rule, not revolution. Things don't happen overnight.
• We live in a modern society with pre-historic hunter-and-gatherer's body and mind.
• Our brain is a lot more individualistic and plastic than we think. By nature inconsistency is the norm, not the exception.
• Unfortunately our brain still works primarily in a reactionary mode and we tend to overestimate our ability to act proactively. In that sense habits trump over will power.
• Talents are made, not born. Practice makes perfect.
• We construct our own versions of reality in our brains by sensemaking retrospectively. Our values dictate our actions, but at the same time our actions shape our values. Self-fulfilling prophecy is often very powerful.
• Actions help you simplify your thought, so do more and think less.
• Goals are often discovered, not set.
• We are born to be emotional and trained to be rational.
• We are born to be selfish and brought up to be compassionate.
• In a pecking order I would rank from top to bottom as follows: liberty, utility, moral/ethics, law and authority. If everyone could act freely without stepping onto each other, that would be my utopia. Next I'd like to maximize everyone's utility if we have to put some limits on liberty. To get maximum utility for everyone, moral and ethics work better that law, which in turn better than authority.
• Economics will hep you organize your life, but it probably will not make you happier. We live by our emotions, not rationalities.

It will be more interesting to see how my BS evolves over time.

Are conservatives more optimistic?

From today's WSJ Arthur Brooks defends conservatism. Here is the argument:

Conservatives are relatively untroubled by inequality, and unsupportive of government income redistribution, because they believe the American economy provides private opportunities to succeed. Liberals are far more pessimistic than conservatives about the possibility of a better future for Americans of modest means.

And here goes the conclusion:

One thing that is clear, however, is that conservatives' lack of anxiety about income inequality -- and perhaps even their opposition to redistributive government policies -- is evidence of a light heart, not a hard one.

I am a little bit skeptical about it. I'd like to see the data on charity giving among conservatives and liberals before jumping to the conclusion.

On economists

I ran into this in the comments of one econ blog, it's about the idea of modifying monetary aggregates to revive Milton Friedman's theory.

I am back to Reagan's famous statement about economists, "An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory." The dismal science simply continues earning its name.

Inconsistency

This latest research in neuroscience shows that our brain is wired to be inconsistent when it comes to physical movement.

If you've ever wondered why your golf swings, fastballs or free throws don't quite turn out the same way each time, even after years of practice, there is now an answer: It's mostly in your head...

It's as if each time the brain tries to solve the problem of planning how to move, it does it anew... Practice and training can help the brain solve the problem more capably, but people and other primates simply aren't wired for consistency like computers or machines. Instead, people seem to be improvisers by default.

"The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again...The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you've never done before."

The value of practice and training is that they can reduce the variation in the mind's abilities, but they don't change the variable way the mind plans motion. An analogy might be to doing math problems. Someone who has studied will find it easier to solve a new problem than someone who has not prepared.

If inconsistency is the norm when it come to physical movement, it will be even more so for our consciousness: our mind is a squadron of simpletons, we have many good and bad minds, right and wrong minds, we shift in and out of different minds all the time. It's all too common that nice people could do something nasty and wicked ones show real compassion.

Yet just like practice can greatly reduce the variation of our movement, we count on 'mental practice' to help us be more consistent. By mental practice I mean that we need to habituate ourselves to something we desire: once you've made doing something a habit, you are consistent. So it's the habit, not will power, that makes us consistent, although you do need some will power to develop a habit.

Next time when you joke about that you are consistently inconsistent, you can squarely blame on this SOB(Same Old Brain).

Mockeries on Economists

Economists are easy targets. To be fair, a lot of criticism lobbed on economists are not justified: dismal science, mumble-jumble, ideological, cold-blooded, heavily mathematical and dogmatic, impractical, etc, I can go on and on.

Economists are quite defensive of their turfs as evidenced by this, and they are, in my opinion, rightly so: there are just a lot of myths about modern economics.

Here I just want cite some mockeries about economists I ran into recently, some has a little truth in it, some not. But anyways they are all quite funny.

While the knowledge in science is cumulative, that in finance(Note: finance is considered applied economics)is cyclical.

It all comes down to basic human nature. "Irrational Exuberance" is not going to be followed by a sudden bout of realistic moderation. No, extreme optimism will give way to extreme pessimism as surely as the sun gives way to the moon. Somehow this simple fact always eludes economists, which is why the majority of them are always wrong.

According to one former Harvard official, its endowment fund has done so well because it has avoided taking advice from the economics faculty.

I will keep this list alive and add more when I come across funny satires on economists.

Self-interest or Good Behavior

I've long been suspicious of the two key assumption of economics: individuals are rational and self-interested. I've blogged quite a bit on the assumed rationality, and now this article does a good job trying to challenge the other corner stone of "traditional(neoclassic?)" economics. The basic ideas here are:

1. Good behavior, rather than self-interest, is really what makes the economy work.

2. People are nicer, we're more decent, we're more moral and we're more law-abiding than we give ourselves credit for.

3. People generally believe that when someone does something nice to them, they should reciprocate.

My take on this is that what people try to maximize it's not simply utility from consumption, but the 'good feeling', which could come from consuming something, but also, very likely, come from compassion, conscienceless, and sheer altruism. It would be a vast oversimplification to assume people are greedy and we can just let the invisible hand to align them up. We might have misread Adam Smith and put our words into his mouth.

Neuroplasticity

This is hardly a new idea: the link between mind and brain is bidirectional, our brain determines what we think and feel, and what we think may change the physical structure of our brain as well. But now it starts to become the frontier of neuroscientists.

..[A]ttention can alter the layout of the brain as powerfully as a sculptor's knife can alter a slab of stone. ..[T]he discovery that neuroplasticity cannot occur without attention has important implications. If a skill becomes so routine you can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be as effective if you become able to do them without paying much attention.

...[m]onks with the most hours of meditation showed the most dramatic brain changes. That was a strong hint that mental training makes it easier for the brain to turn on circuits that underlie compassion and empathy. ..."This positive state is a skill that can be trained.."

Every Friday our Yoga teacher always ends our session with the following words: "Mentally give your thanks to everyone for being here, mentally give your thanks to the room, mentally extend your good will to everyone, everything, everywhere. Om shanti."

I will pay more attention when I say it in my heart today and onwards.

New Year Resolution

I'm a bit embarassed that I am just writing the very first blog this year, after almost three weeks into 2007. But I am not really. Part of the reason is that I have a much tighter schedule this year for my work as well as my studies, also it's kind of hard to pick up somthing again after you put it down for a while.

Quite obviously these are just excuses. If I look at beneath the veneer, I can say that it's just procrastination. But this time I want to take one step furthur to ask why I procrastinate. Well, you can say that everybody does it, it's not just me, we are all procrastinators in a one way or another. But deep inside we can see that fear is the what makes us procrastinate: we are not sure how things will play out . Will my rushed blogs make no sense at all? What if I put my foot in my mouth in a hurry? As the result we just sit there idle.

So as my new year resolution, I will tell myself that there is not much to fear in life, really. I will still try to be as good as I can get, and I will accept whatever I get in the end.