How Experts can go wrong

The New York Times has an interesting post on how even experts can get caught in groupthink and bad advice can become the “consensus” of experts. The reason this happens is as follows:

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

See full article. It argues that the whole “fatty food is bad for your heart” is a misconception that got the status of “consensus” because of an informational cascade.

Would you kill someone if your boss told you to?

“Obviously not!” is what you are thinking, if you’ve never heard of the Milgram Experiment. But if you knew about the Milgram experiment, you wouldn’t be so sure.

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” – – that they were just following orders of their superiors. In the experiment, so-called “teachers” (who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram. They were asked administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake he made during the experiment. The fictitious story given to these “teachers” was that the experiment was exploring effects of punishment (for incorrect responses) on learning behavior. The “teacher” was not aware that the “learner” in the study was actually an actor – – merely indicating discomfort as the “teacher” increased the electric shocks.

When the “teacher” asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!

source.

Read the whole wikipedia page on this topic. It is very interesting. Especially the variations on the experiments. And the effect on the subjects.

And then there is this video on YouTube (part 1, and part 2) of one session of the experiment. It is horrifying.

Milgram Experiment video – Part 1

Milgram Experiment video – Part 2

Analyzing creative “right-brainers”

 Venkat analyzes what he calls the “da Vinci mind” and a couple of books that describe the minds that will dominate the future. Although the whole article is intriguing, what I found most interesting is his section on the failings of those who have this kind of mind:

Whole New Mind is a book with which I resonated wildly, but which nevertheless made me very uncomfortable. On the one hand I felt an instant surge of resonance and recognition. I could not help but recognize myself clearly in the portrait Pink paints of this thinking style. In fact, through my meandering years through graduate school, I zeroed in on almost exactly the same set of attributes as characterizing the strengths of my thinking style. Metaphor and narrative, in particular have driven much of my work. So Pink’s book was, in a way, a source of strong validation to the point where I found myself thinking, “Dammit, if I were a better writer, I could have written this book.”

And yet, I found myself feeling uncomfortable about the uniformly “brave new world” tone of both books. My discomfort probably has to do with my fundamentally tragic outlook on life, which rests solidly on the idea that our brains (right-brained or not) are hopeless flawed and optimized for self-delusion. Had I been the one to write WNM, I suspect I’d have devoted as many chapters to the pathologies of the whole new mind as to its strengths. Wild mood swings and bipolar tendencies, bouts of deep and extended lethargy, dissipated daydreaming, sloppy amateurishness — these are all traits as characteristic of the WNM as its conceptual and creative strengths, and no amount of the sort of educational reform that Gardner and others like Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and Martin Seligman suggest, will fix these flaws.

Which does not mean necessarily that the WNM will not rule the future. But just because many influential people may be (metaphorically, in the Pink sense) right-brained in the future does not mean most right-brainers will be influential (applying a dose of left-brained necessary/sufficient logic here). Most of us will in fact fade into oblivion as blog writers or end up institutionalized believing we are Napoleon or Bill Gates. The reason is hard logic: the output of one Einstein can keep hundreds of left-brainers busy for decades. The world only has the bandwidth to realize the conceptual imaginings of a few of the most creative right-brainers. The rest who don’t make the Einstein grade will have to learn to play with their underdeveloped left brain.

On a smaller scale, this issue plays out in the tension that exists between discipline and IQ. To succeed you need a combination of both – having just high IQ is not enough.