Don't Follow Your Dreams (Too Far)

Which professions do most people dream of? I don't have data for this, but we can assume that most of them score high on visibility, status and pay; are desired by a great number of people; and are probably very competitive. 

It follows that if you take the standard advice to 'follow your dreams', you will try to get into one of these professions, and you will likely fail. 

This injunction to follow your dreams is usually complemented by another which calls for persistence in the face of failure. This implies a negative view of failure: it is an obstacle that you must overcome, a challenge that life and other people throw at you to test what you are made of. If you persist in the face of failure, you have the moral high ground, and you will eventually succeed. But if you surrender to failure, you are a failure yourself, and you are not trying hard enough. I would like to challenge this notion. 

When you fail, it usually means that society does not want to sponsor your work. This can be framed as a case of information asymmetry. There are two explanations: either your work is valid (a "peach") and society is underestimating it, or your work is not valid (a "lemon") and you are overestimating it. 

Who is more likely to be right? Probably society: after all, selection processes incorporate the aggregated knowledge and expertise of many, while it is easier for an individual or a marginal group to be deluded about the value of their work. 

Yes, history records cases when underdogs were right and gatekeepers misjudged them, but this is the exception rather than the rule; and only exceptions make history. Most startups ideas are just bad, as are most books who end up on an editor's desk and most songs uploaded to Bandcamp. Even work which is not bad in itself (in the sense of low quality) can be excluded because it is not good enough for the market. A global and competitive market will have high barriers to entry. Some works may be excellent but lack a market. For example, even if I had the skills to write an excellent epic poem (I don't) I would not get the success that Homer or Dante had in their time, because nobody cares about epic poems today. 

In other words: "wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to failure, and there are many who go in by it." This should convince you that if you fail, you should probably take the cue and move on, instead of wasting time and resources.  

Failure is good for you. It is a feedback message telling you that society wants you to focus on something else. Moving on is a sign of reason and maturity. It allows you to negotiate your role in the world and find an activity that is rewarding for you and useful to others. 

Those who made it to the top followed their dreams and persisted in the face of failure, and they feel compelled to remind you of that whenever they get invited to a graduation speech. Young people who listen to them assume that their policy is responsible for their success. But most people who follow their dreams fail, and those who blindly persist in the face of failure are hurting themselves more often than not. 

Capitalism has a way of turning irrational confidence into societal gains. The fact that 90% of startups fail is terrible news for whoever wants to found a startup. It also means that 90% of founders are overconfident. While failing a business is a serious blow for an individual, it is a small loss for society, which is more than made up for by the 10% of businesses that succeed and go on to create a lot of value. Consequently, as a collective it is profitable for us to encourage the 'follow your dreams' ethos, even if the behavior itself is damaging for most individuals who adopt it. 

(This is somewhat analogous to how the alarm call in certain birds species works. The act of signalling a predator might endanger the individual by attracting unwanted attention, but it might still be profitable for its genes if it increases the survival chances for its kin.) 

I do not mean to say that you should not be ambitious. You should aim high in your endeavors and try your best to do something great. And you should not give up too soon. But if you are trying to break into a field where failure is the likely outcome, you should aim to fail early (to save time) and fail safe (to save other resources). And when failure happens, don't be ashamed to take the cue and move on. 

Related: ‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag. 

Build Yourself a Theory of Happiness

When planning for the future, one of the greatest challenges is that we're bad at predicting what will actually make us (un)happy. In other words, we lack a theory of happiness. 

A person from an average-sized town leaves everything behind and moves to London, only to find that they are crushed by the loneliness, high costs and stress of the big city life. Someone who achieved sudden wealth buys a big mansion in a gated community, wherein she starts to feel lonely and alienated, and finds herself missing the communal living of her student years. Another takes up an important job at a fancy firm, where the stress and long hours drive them to depression. 

In these examples, the problem is not with the choice itself. Some folks may end up happier moving to London, buying a big mansion or getting the fancy job. The problem is with the process, which is often faulty. All these choices happen to score high on prestige and monetary reward. Sometimes, being unable to identify the predictors of our happiness, we resort to the substitution principle:

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (Kahneman, p. 97)

Hence we unwittingly default to proxies which are easier to measure, such as money or prestige. The question "which job will make me happiest?" becomes "which job will give me the most money or prestige?" Many important dimensions are lost in this conversion. 

The other problem is that we are bad at simulating how our life will actually be like under the new circumstances and how we will feel about it. When we try to simulate the future, we tend to fall on the inside view: we roughly imagine what the future would look like and see what feelings these images evoke in us; then we use these feelings as a cue to our future feelings and satisfaction. This is an understandable heuristic, but it's ineffective. 

Here's a better approach. 

First, you need to test your ability at predicting your happiness. It may help to set up a diary where you try to predict your happiness at different points in time, or conditional on certain events occurring or not, and then rating yourself on the predictions. I may set up a framework for this in a future post. 

Then take a scientific approach. Gather the experiences of others and the results of previous research. Formulate hypotheses, such as 'I would be happier with job X than job Y'. Devise experiments to test them, such as getting internships for X and Y and tracking your satisfaction. Finally, use the results to update your beliefs and formulate better hypotheses. This is how you build a theory of happiness. 

It's true, we can't always afford the whole process. Experiments can be costly, difficult to implement, and ambiguous in their interpretation. For example, if you were unhappy during internship X, is it because you actually don't like the job, or is it because of contingent factors, e.g. you didn't like the company, or the project you worked on was unattractive? 

Nevertheless, I find it useful to keep this in mind as the golden standard of pursuing happiness. And to be conscious of the heuristics I use to approximate it and their limitations. 

Whenever I make plans for the future, I try to at least implement the first step: putting aside easy proxies such as money and prestige, taking the outside view and gathering objective information. This is already a long way from the standard approach of simulating outcomes in my imagination. 

More Reasons to Have Kids

In the previous post I explained what, according to me, is the best reason for why people have kids. There are more explanations of course, and they're not at odds with each other. 

I've been told that these explanations sound cynical. That was not my intention at all. I don't think any of these are intrinsically immoral. And I'm not opposed to having children (I might have them myself someday). 

Interestingly, there might be a social norm against explaining some life choices. We like to pretend that having children is something natural, a basic act that we do out of  'free will', or maybe out of love (which is one of my explanations). In short, it is a 'moral' action: moral in the sense that it has no personal motive. Just like it would be considered rude and cynical to ask someone why they are doing an act of charity (as the question seems to imply that there is an 'ulterior motive' beyond the will to do good) it might be the same with asking people why they procreate.   

I disagree with this view. Everything we do, we do for a reason. As a consequentialist, I (generally) judge actions based on outcomes, not on motives. And I don't think that an action is only moral if the agent doesn't get a payoff. For example, when it comes to charity, a dollar spent out of envy or narcissism is just as good as a dollar spent out of love or altruism or self-sacrifice.  

Anyway, here are the reasons (in no particular order): 

A genuine love and liking for children and the stuff they do.

Securing affection and admiration.

Having someone who will accept one’s love, care and affection. 

Fighting boredom and loneliness, giving meaning to one’s life or relationship. 

To acquire and exercise power. Most folks will never have as much power over another human being as they have over their children. 

To resolve psychological conflicts. Example: some people don’t like how their parents treated them, and they want a do-over.   

Conformism to peer pressure and social norms. Will be stronger in some groups and cultures. 

Rational herding. “Everyone around me is having children, so perhaps I should too, even if I don't fully understand the reasons.”

Regret aversion. “If I don’t have children now, I might regret it later." I expect this to be stronger in women.

Wanting someone to take care of you in old age.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Having children is about memetics, not genetics

Why do people have children? I’ve been wondering about this for a while. In my experience, the question is subject to something I call the ‘Hanson effect’, because Robin Hanson writes so often about it: "everyone thinks they know the answer, but all they know different answers." (source)

In the US, the cost of raising a child through age 17 is around $230,000 (no, that does not include college). And the financial cost is not even the most significant. For the mothers, there’s the physical burden of pregnancy. Children claim enormous amounts of time, energy and attention. Potentially, the years of young adulthood (roughly 25-35) are among the most productive and enjoyable in a person’s life. Yet many people in that age group will go on to have children, constraining their choices and placing considerable pressure on their material and mental resources. While you can always make more money, you will never get that time back. That despite all of this, having children is still the norm rather than the exception, is something that I find genuinely surprising. 

The site wehavekids.com lists ten reasons why people have children. One in particular struck me: “It’s human nature. The simple fact of biology is that we are hardwired to procreate and pass on our genes to the next generation. This biological imperative and drive are strong in many people, who feel the need to have and raise children.” When you ask why people want to have children, this is one of the most common answers you will get. It’s easy, intuitive, and in accord with science. It's also completely wrong. 

The folk theory of “people want children so they can spread their genes” seems to assume that reproduction, which is the objective of evolution, is working in our minds as a semi-conscious motive, through the so-called “reproductive instinct”, a mysterious inner force that leads us to desire procreation. 

But it doesn’t work that way. There is no “instinct”; there are only adaptations. When Nature designed us to procreate, we didn’t yet have a neocortex with advanced representational capabilities. Our genes could not anticipate that we would think about having children, just as they could not imagine that we would invent contraception or engage in family planning. Instead of encoding their objective function in our brains, they did something much simpler: since reproduction happens through sex, they made sex pleasurable. And since newborn children need care, they made us want to care for them. That’s pretty much all there is to it. 

If there was such a thing as a “reproductive instinct” - if evolution’s goals were explicitly encoded in our minds - it would look quite different than what people imagine. The only thing we would care about would be to spread our genes. As a result, nobody would use contraception. Folks would pay to be egg donors and sperm donors. They would sacrifice all their resources to keep making babies. Even better, they would discard babies altogether and invest in making millions of copies of their DNA and storing them in freezers, like in that SlateStarCodex story. 

If that doesn’t appeal to your intuition, then what do you think gene spreading means? (Hint: it’s not about making cute little things that call you “daddy” or “mommy”. It’s about making copies of your genes: that’s the only thing evolution cares about. Babies are just Nature’s best solution for protecting and spreading genes. That said, freezers would definitely work better.) 

The bottom line is that when people are willing and able to use contraception, the biological drives explain little to nothing about their decision to have children. 

However, there is a basic intuition at work in this explanation, which I think is true. Folks do want to perpetuate themselves in their progeny: it’s one of their main motivations for having children. But what is it that they see as themselves? 

Answer: it’s not their genes. It’s their values, attitudes, and ideas; their language, religion, and customs; their mannerisms and sense of humor, their beliefs and aspirations; their family name and family legends and heirlooms. In a word, their memes. 

This may be the single best explanation for why people have children. When we think of our identity, we think of our memes and memeplexes. Spreading our memes is a way to gain status and expand our influence. Seeing our memes replicate in others appeals to our self-love, since we see more of ourselves in the world. Finally, passing on memes can give us a sense that we are projecting our person beyond death and gaining some sort of immortality, which helps us cope with our fear of death. 

It turns out that having children is not about genetics. It’s about memetics. And meme-spreading, I believe, is an important and much overlooked motivator of human behavior. 

This theory has some interesting implications. For example, we might expect that individuals who have a strong platform for spreading their memes over the long term (e.g. actors, artists, scientists, philosophers) would be less motivated towards parenthood. But there are two caveats: first, some memes are so personal that they can only be spread within a family. Second, since these people will tend to be successful, they may not have to face a trade-off between career and parenthood. Women are interesting in this sense, because personal success does not always spare them this choice. 

Anyway, the conflict between gene-spreading and meme-spreading is not a rule. It should only apply to individuals who could achieve a lot of influence, but only at the cost of forsaking parenthood. Apart from that, meme-spreading may ironically become the unexpected savior of gene-spreading. In an age where safe sex is widely practiced, contraception is advancing, and having children is increasingly difficult and expensive, people may still be willing to go through the trouble — for the love of their memes.

Added 22/11/20. Many would-be parents show a strong preference for having natural children vs. adopting, to the point of going through difficult or expensive procedures such as IVF. This may be taken as a disproof of my theory. However, I would argue that parents are interested in the child's phenotype, not their genotype. A child who shares my genes is more likely to be phenotypically similar to me and to share my looks and behaviors. Parents are interested in their children's genetic composition indirectly, i.e. only insofar as it makes the children more similar to them. A mental experiment will clarify this. Imagine you have a gene G1 which results in the observable attribute A1. Which of these would you choose: a child with the same gene G1 that results in a different attribute A2, or a child with a different gene G2 which results in the same attribute A1? 

The Bayesian and the Miser

There are two conflicting principles at work in our cognitive design: I call them the Bayesian and the Miser. The Bayesian wants to understand the world. It seeks to integrate every piece of information, giving each its proper weight, and constantly updating its beliefs. When the posterior is significantly different from the prior, it experiences surprise; which drives the subject to pay attention, investigate and seek more evidence. 

The Miser is the Bayesian's budget manager. It aspires to drive the cost of all cognitive computations to zero. It has all sorts of tricks for doing that — heuristics, cached thoughts, stereotypes, dogmas.

Both these principles are necessary. 

 

If the Bayesian was left unchecked, we would be constantly enticed by surprising stimuli, and would have a hard time managing our attention. The smallest decisions would be painfully long and difficult. The cognitive effort required by the constant updating would soon drive us to exhaustion (some speculate a link between Bayesianism and autism). 

If the Miser dominated, we would fail to experience surprise in the presence of new information. Data which conflicted with our priors would be mostly ignored or discarded. Our calcified beliefs and cached ideas would dominate over new evidence, and we would have a hard time changing our minds.

 

Which of these scenarios seem most familiar?