How to Read a Mind

There are two types of discussions: useful and useless. Useless ones are also known as arguments. And you can't win an argument.

But the distinction can be subtle. How do you know which is which?

Simple: Is the other party trying to understand your thought before refuting it?

Thoughts are complicated. If they weren't, there would be no need to discuss them. So you probably need some back and forth before the other party truly grasps the idea. This can take the form of questions, summarization, or other some other type of clarification.

If, however, the other party doesn't pursue that understanding but jumps directly into a rebuttal, you are now in a useless discussion. Congratulations!

But why is it useless? Your points make sense, right? In an argument, the other party has already made up their mind. Everything you say can and will be used against you.

In other words, this technique can tell you what is in the other party's mind. It can thus help you avoid wasting your time. You can't win an argument.

Of course, it goes both ways. If you find yourself refuting something without first pursing an understanding of it, you can tell that your mind is already made up.

Having Opinions Considered Harmful

A rational person would like to have the most accurate worldview possible. And, by that, I mean having the most objective, informed stance on issues. I think it's safe to say we all want that.

But we are not as rational as we may like to think.

The problem is: we have egos. We don't like to be wrong.

Another problem is: we have all sorts of cognitive biases. Our own brain is often working against us.

When you combine these two problems, you get a society in which people generally do not have the most accurate worldview possible.

For example, a currently controversial issue is genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Proponents of GMOs say they will dramatically increase crop yields and reduce world hunger. Opponents say that they are unnatural and make the food chain more fragile.

Other such issues could be abortion, vaccinations, or global warming.

So, what's your opinion?

Did you feel that? Did you feel that emotional response to simply the mention of the topic?

That is what is working against us.

If we have an opinion on an issue, protecting it becomes more important than having the most accurate stance. We would hate to admit that we were wrong about something. So we use confirmation bias to trick ourselves into thinking that the best available information supports our opinion.

It gets even worse when we have stated our opinion publicly, such as in a research paper or newspaper article. Now we are much more vested in protecting our public image.

It gets even worse when our livelihood is based on our opinion. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

Of course, it's unrealistic to expect that people will just stop having opinions. I still have them, despite knowing all of this.

But I really enjoy when I can say "I don't know" or "I don't have an opinion on that." It's a very freeing experience. I can feel that I am more open to new information when I'm in that mode of thinking.

(And yes, I appreciate the irony that this blog post is my opinion.)

The Endowment Effect (Or: Why Nobody Cares About Your Baby Pictures)

Experiment participants were shown a mug. They were asked how much they would be willing to pay for that mug. Let's say they said $5.

Then they were given the mug (for free).

Then they were offered the chance to sell it.

How much do you think they asked for when they had the chance to sell their mug?

$10.

Another experiment showed a similar result: participants won basketball tickets. They were only willing to sell them for 14 times more than the price they were willing to pay for the same tickets.

Another experiment showed that employees worked harder to maintain a bonus they already had than they did to acquire a new bonus.

Interestingly, this same behavior is observed in children, apes, and monkeys.

This is the endowment effect. It is "the hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them."

This is why people share baby pictures on Facebook. They think those pictures are the greatest things in the world. They ascribe more value to them because it's their own child.

Of course, the rest of the world doesn't see them the same way.

Medicine Is from the Stone Age

When I was in grade school, I went on a field trip to a pharmaceutical company. We toured the plant and learned how new drugs are discovered.

To me, the process was very surprising. They basically just try random chemical compounds and see what they do. Seriously. They find a new compound, check if it will kill you, and if not, see if it has any useful function.

This reminds me of watching movies about cavemen. They would stumble upon something in their environment and see if it could be useful for some task. For example, when hunting a wildebeest, maybe they would find a rock on the ground and use it to attack their prey.

One might say that a turning point in human history was the transition from stumbling upon tools to crafting them.

It probably started with hammers and knives. Then there were farming tools. Then engines. Now we can access the world's information from a $30 tool in our pocket.

So here's what I'm getting at: our current state of drug discovery is from the stone age. Finding a new medicine is like finding a - well, stone - that happens to be helpful.

Now compare a rock to your smartphone. What kind of chasm exists between the two? That's the kind of leap we can expect when drug discovery moves out if the stone age.

But can that happen? Can we actually design drugs the way we design tools?

We can craft tools because we understand the relevant laws of physics and have the manufacturing processes to fabricate the tools. Given the exponential rate of technology growth (discussed last time) we will soon have both the biological understanding and fabrication methods to actually craft medicine.

Then what we will be capable of crafting will make penicillin and ibuprofen look like rocks by comparison.

Compounding Technology

If you invested one cent in the year 1 AD, earning two percent interest annually, how much money would you have today?

Millions? Billions?

Nope.

You would have over 1.5 quadrillion dollars. That's 1.5 million billions.

What if you received ten percent interest? Well, then you would have more dollars than there are atoms in the known universe.

The math is straightforward. But I was shocked when I first heard it.

Why the disconnect between the math and our mental estimate? Our natural inclination is to think linearly. Most physical things that we have interacted with over the ages behave linearly. If I turn the faucet in my sink, I expect a linearly corresponding amount of water to come out. If I want my cookies to be a little more well-done, I will leave them in the oven a linearly corresponding amount of time.

But compounding interest does not behave linearly. The reason makes sense: each year's compounding means that next year you have more to fuel the process. It's something of a positive feedback loop. Compounding interest thus behave exponentially - and the math shows that.

Technology exhibits this same compounding effect.* Think about the latest darling in technology: the smartphone. That was built upon technologies that came before: cellular transmission and the internet. Those technologies were, in turn, built on prior tech: radio/tv broadcast and computers. We could trace further back to semiconductors, then to metal refineries, and so forth.

Each new innovation doesn't just move us forward, it accelerates us forward. Moore's Law seeks to quantify this effect. It states that computational processing power doubles every 18 months. If that were your bank account, that would mean that you would earn about 60% annual interest.

So what does that mean for us, right now? Well, think about all of the technological progress we have made in the past 30 years. In the next 30 years, we can expect an increase of about one hundred million percent. What does one hundred million percent of our current technology look like?

I certainly don't know. But it sure will be fun to watch it unfold.



*If you read my blog often, you'll notice that I often write about what I'm currently reading. This post was inspired by Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. It will likely inspire several more posts.