Fake near-misses in gambling (26 May 2010)

I wasn't a degenerate gambler by any means when I lived in Las Vegas. When I would go to the casinos I would almost always play low-stakes craps, the sort of games you could buy in for $50 and see as much action as you wanted (and never really win much). Even then I had an strong bias against slot machines and in favor of table games, which seemed somehow more legitimate -- honest gambling, as if there is such a thing. I used to watch people pump their paychecks into video-poker machines at bars and imagine they felt a sinking, synthetic feeling, wondering how they let the whole world and all its mysteries, the grand cosmic story of their own dance with fate, get condensed down to the whims of a machine. I sometimes get a similar feeling when I play arcade games for too long -- in the end you always die, and the machine decides when it happens to you, despite your accrued skill or karma. It seemed like you were always teased with the possibility of some unforeseen and inexplicable mastery, transcendence, only to have it wrenched away arbitrarily.

So I'm not surprised to learn from this post at Neurophilosophy (via Paul Kedrosky) that gaming machines are rigged to simulate near-misses and jackpot close calls.

Manufacturers of gambling games have apparently known the rewarding effects of near misses all along, and they design slot machines in such a way as to exploit the cognitive distortions of gamblers. Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves. The gambler who nearly hits the jackpot will therefore want to continue playing, because he thinks he has a good chance of winning.

That's just diabolical, a perfect example of the latent evil inherent in neuroscience and psychological studies. But gambling is essentially an activity one participates in because one seeks to indulge the fantasy of suspending the rules of probability and coaxing the universe into organizing itself around one's own good fortune. The near-misses lend support to that dream, that the gambler has a date with destiny. It's not too much of a stretch to connect that kind of mechanical manipulation of the gambler's "narrative" of their losing experience with the sort of manipulations more conventional entertainments -- films, novels, etc. -- subject us to.

Miscellaneous (11 March 2010)

Here are a few things:

1. A report on neuromarketing from Open magazine. I expected something in the Vance Packard Hidden Persuaders tradition of outrage, but it's more a "wonder of science" thing. It ends with this though: "The future of design may well lie with neuromarketing -- a future designed for the consumer, but it will also be a future where companies know the consumer’s mind better than the consumer himself does." That's wrong. The future is not designed for the "consumer"; it's designed for capital to profit. Also, people don't have a mind about most marketing issues until marketers shove those issues in their face with ubiquitous and invaive advertising. The point is not to read consumers' minds but to make them.

2. At his blog, Chris Dillow urges us to read Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital. (Here's a review/summary of the gist of it; poke around online and you'll find full pdfs are out there too, I think.) Monopoly capital theory helps explain economic stagnation in structural terms. Dillow questions whether fiscal solutions can address what may be a structural problem -- one of Arnold Kling's favorite themes.

3. Lots of people have linked to this BBC story about North Tyneside, a borough which has built fake shops in empty storefronts. The Potemkin village of consumerism, as Tyler Cowen notes. My first instinct was to think this was imaginative, but it actually shows a profound lack of imagination, the inability for a society to conceive of alternatives to shopping.

(Cognitive) Maps and Legends (23 Oct 2009)

I've always been skeptical that a person's sense of direction is an empirically measurable thing, and that someone can have a better sense of direction than someone else. I've always tended to think that those with a self-professed "bad sense of direction" were just too lazy to think about what they have decided is someone else's problem. Directions? That's for the chauffeur to worry about. Not being able to read a map seems like it's not some innate shortcoming but a product of indifference. And the ramifications of this fundamental negligence merely continue to multiply as the ability to orient oneself becomes more and more pertinent. To plead a poor sense of direction is to confess a craving for dependency.

Perhaps I'm unsympathetic to the directionally challenged because I'm never afraid to get lost. It strikes me as an inconvenience at worst and in most cases an opportunity for discovery. I usually don't hesitate to take an exit, any exit, off a freeway if the road is congested -- tangling with surface streets is all part of the fun and the only way to get to know a city. Getting to scrutinize maps is half the reason I take driving trips anywhere. I like unearthing short cuts, even when they are to places I'll never need to go. I think makes me exude some sort of palpable navigational confidence, because I tend to get asked for directions in cities I am only visiting -- even abroad in countries where I don't speak the language.

Obviously, I think GPS is unnecessary if not counterproductive. Only the willfully ignorant, I tend to believe, would choose to rely on one. And now an article (via The NYT Ideas blog) by Alex Hutchinson in the Walrus, a Canadian journal, offers me some support for my intolerance, catering to all my biases. It concludes with a paean to getting lost. (A researcher tells Hutchinson, “You know, I lived in Paris, and to me one of the most beautiful things was just getting lost sometimes in these very small streets, and having a coffee and a cigarette with strangers, and going back trying to find your way.... These days, there are very few moments you actually have the freedom to get lost.”) And there is even an obligatory anecdote about GPS-dependent morons who "accidentally" end up on railroad tracks and have their cars crushed by commuter trains.

The main gist of the article is that GPS may be compromising people's sense of direction by altering the way they think. "Our brains determine how we navigate, but our navigational efforts also shape our brains," Hutchinson notes, drawing on the research of neurological researchers Véronique Bohbot and Giuseppe Iaria into our capability to form cognitive maps. Using GPS, they suspect, may lead us to lose our habit of making such internal maps (shrinking the hippocampus, the area of the brain that governs navigation) and leave us hopelessly and perpetually lost. Hutchinson details a patient of Iaria's who had a tendency to get lost in her own neighborhood despite living there her entire life. Neurological testing suggested that her brain was not damaged, and specific exercises eventually allowed the woman to develop cognitive mapping skills. This seems to suggest that for whatever reason, she simply had never bothered to develop the cognitive mapping skill previously. Maybe her hippocampus is unusually recalcitrant. But Bohbot suspects that our entire culture may be at fault.

She fears that overreliance on GPS, which demands a hyper-pure form of stimulus-response behaviour, will result in our using the spatial capabilities of the hippocampus less, and that it will in turn get smaller. Other studies have tied atrophy of the hippocampus to increased risk of dementia. “We can only draw an inference,” Bohbot acknowledges. “But there’s a logical conclusion that people could increase their risk of atrophy if they stop paying attention to where they are and where they go.”... Bohbot sees the decline in spatial thinking as part of a broader shift toward stimulus-response, reward-linked behaviour. The demand for instant gratification, for efficiency at all costs and productivity as the only measure of value — these sound like the laments of the nostalgist in the Age of the Caudate Nucleus. But here, they’re based on neuroscience. “Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus,” she says. “In the next twenty years, I think we’re going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.”

So we have that to look forward to. This is of a piece with my oft-aired speculation on this blog that consumerism breeds an unhealthy love of convenience and an overreliance on instrumental thinking -- interesting to see that it may have a neurological basis and more severe consequences than one's being lame. (No fused participles here.)

It's at this point that some technophiles would protest that, oh, the Luddites said the same thing about calculators ruining our ability to do arithmetic. And does anybody worry about that now? And those worried about Google making us dumber -- well, it's probably making us smarter. But that's entirely missing the point of maps, which are not so much about showing us the "right answer" of how to get somewhere specific or a neutral-seeming menu of options but about revealing the beauty of geographic logic, the way things connect, along with hints at the deeper reasons for why certain spatial arrangements came about. A map helps us conjure a sense of how any given location is a palimpsest, with layers of history unevenly overlapping each other. Hutchinson has a passage that gets at this quality:

To many, the beauty of the devices is precisely that we no longer have any need to painstakingly assemble those cognitive maps. But Cornell University human-computer interaction researcher Gilly Leshed argues that knowledge of an area means more than just finding your way around. Navigation underlies the transformation of an abstract “space” to a “place” that has meaning and value to an individual. For the GPS users Leshed and her colleagues observed in an ethnographic study, the virtual world on the screens of their devices seemed to blur and sometimes take over from the real world that whizzed by outside. “Instead of experiencing physical locations, you end up with a more abstract representation of the world,” she says.

Without a cognitive map we lack not only the wherewithal to get out of our neighborhood comfortably but a sense of belonging within that neighborhood. We don't store a sense of connectedness, we don't achieve a sense of place. So we end up not belonging anywhere, or worse, belonging anywhere we are put, without a protest.

Manufacturing neuroticism (16 May 2008)

I am on the record as being against customer service. It seems to me a trick to get us overinvested in shopping as a place where we can exercise our will to power. So when Yves Smith asks, in this post about a few ideas for new consumer-service businesses, "Do we want to foster customer neurosis?" I believe the answer is yes. Of course we do. Retailing is essentially the art of making insignificant choices seem paramount, and getting people hooked on the "thrill" of making such discriminations. Total neuroticism is the art practiced at its highest form and is a state of mind marketing in general is always preparing us for, stoking our fantasies of omnipotence and our insecurities about not belonging to group of preferred customers or whatever. (That is part of the logic behind retailers' loyalty programs -- those stupid cards you have to flash to get the sale price on items, like you are part of some elite cadre of special shoppers. Though the main reason for them, I always thought, was to track what you purchased and use that to compile demographic data to sell to manufacturers and advertisers.)

Perplexed by services for helping customers get the best rooms or seats within a hotel or particular flight, Smith asks "Is this much information really empowering, or does having such fine grading merely make some people unhappy when they don't get what their little website says is the best?" It certainly supplies the illusion of power and an opportunity to discriminate. I think it allows for the pleasure of making petty judgments, becoming ersatz insiders, and scoring insignificant victories over peer shoppers on a scoreboard that the insecurity mongers conjure out of thin air. Basically, when we as customers become fussy children, the retailers become our parental authority figures, granting or withholding the love we crave, even as we foolishly believe we are in control because we are being fussed over.

In a consumer society, shopping isn't about satisfying some set of wants extrinsic to the market arena -- it is about entering the arena and having our wants stoked and then satisfied, with our competitive juices stoked and our fantasizing mind fully engaged. Shopping is itself an experiential good; anything we take happen to take home from us is often just a souvenir.

Like Vaughn at Mind Hacks, I'm generally skeptical of neuroscientific research of the brain-lights-up-therefore-it's-true variety, but for what it's worth, this WSJ piece today explains that shopping is like crack smoking:

Research shows that people often do get a high from shopping -- the brain releases chemicals such as dopamine or serotonin when a person is stimulated by discovering something new, such as a handbag. Sometimes, aspects of the shopping experience such as friendly sales clerks, eye-catching displays or aisles that are easy to navigate can trigger brain activity that brings about these "euphoric moments," says Dr. David Lewis, director of neuroscience at Mindlab International, a United Kingdom-based consultancy whose clients include athletes, retailers and advertising companies. "The brain is turned on by novelty."

The writer sums up that "For the consumer, such studies serve as an important reminder that these euphoric moments do exist but they aren't necessarily triggered by the desire to own a particular item." I'm starting to believe that we convince ourselves we want some specific thing as an alibi so that we can enjoy the shopping experience as a whole. Like when I would sit down for some "writing" because I knew that would lead to cigarette breaks.

To a larger and larger degree, the wants occur after we have already decided to go shopping; they are not the impetus. So we don't start by wishing we could be "getting a better room" but we enter the sphere of services and discover that we can and then want to. The key for marketers is to keep us in that sphere -- a mental space more than a physical space -- where we are searching for things to buy, with buying becoming how we remind ourselves of our being.

The taste of luxury (30 Jan 2008)

I'm usually skeptical of research that involves brain scans and areas lighting up when they are stimulated and that sort of thing -- it seems reductive to equate brain activity with specific kinds of thoughts -- but since this particular research into luxury effects that the Economist reported recently confirms suspicions I already had, I thought I would pass it along. The upshot of this study is this: "Dr Rangel and his colleagues found that if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they really do think it tastes nicer than a cheap one, rather than merely saying that they do." The question is whether this distinction is at all salient. It seems like evidence that people who buy into invidious display and conspicuous consumption are not merely other-directed and status conscious; their brains actually can translate the feelings of social superiority evoked by purchasing power into biochemical pleasure. They are not phonies simply pretending to like what's more expensive to justify the conspicuous consumption. In saw ways, this suggests their consciousness is even falser than previously suspected; they are not in bad faith so much as betrayed by their own biology into transmuting money into fleeting pleasure.

Conspicuous consumption and waste are an important part of social display. Deployed properly, they bring the rewards of status and better mating opportunities. For this to work, though, it helps if the displaying individual really believes that what he is buying is not only more expensive than the alternative, but better, too.

Rangel, who conducted the study, believes this effect has something to do with an evolutionary (of course) need for learning.

Rangel suspects that what he has found is a mechanism for learning quickly what has helped others in the past, and thus for allowing choices about what is nice and what is nasty to be made speedily and efficiently. In modern society, price is probably a good proxy for such collective wisdom.

The idea that price is a proxy for collective wisdom seems a bit suspect, though. Despite what Hayek may argue about knowledge and prices, the magic of markets is not that efficient in translating truth into numerical values. Cooperation and survival don't seem to be the sort of information conveyed by prices, which instead articulate scarcity and induce competition. It seems far more likely that we have a strong predisposition to want to believe our own bullshit. Just as the most gifted liars ended up persuading themselves of the truth of their own fictions, the conspicuous consumer ends up tasting the waste as nectar.

The moral part of the brain (11 May 2007)

Today's WSJ had a story about neurological research into the brain areas held to be responsible for morality.

Using neurology patients to probe moral reasoning, the researchers for the first time drew a direct link between the neuroanatomy of emotion and moral judgment.
Knock out certain brain cells with an aneurysm or a tumor, they discovered, and while everything else may appear normal, the ability to think straight about some issues of right and wrong has been permanently skewed. "It tells us there is some neurobiological basis for morality," said Harvard philosophy student Liane Young, who helped to conceive the experiment.

Further along, the deeper ramifications of this research are considered:

For Harvard neuroscientist Marc Hauser, the moral-dilemma experiment is evidence the brain may be hard-wired for morality. Most moral intuitions, he said, are unconscious, involuntary and universal. To test the idea, he gathered data from thousands of people in hundreds of countries, all of whom display a remarkable unanimity in their basic moral choices. A shared innate capacity for morality may be responsible, he concluded.

This seems to lead invariably to the notion that there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong that will eventually be decoded from our neurons -- a premise that seems fairly ominous for those accustomed to a bit more liberty in matters of conscience. Also, it seems a matter of time before traders and the like would seek to have this inhibiting moral part of the brain removed, as it may provide them with a competitive advantage.

If you are wondering how you stack up in relation to universal morality, take this handy quiz. I discovered that I was much less likely to want to punish people than other test takers. Perhaps this means I am drifting toward amorality.

How do I love thee? Let me show you my brain scan (13 Feb 2007)

The run up to Valentine's day is a good time for journalists to file stories like this one, from today's WSJ. The headline: "Is It Love or Mental Illness? They're Closer Than You Think." This is not exactly breaking news; people been describing love in terms of madness probably since the time of Sappho. But given a technological sheen, this information can seem reinvigorated, scientifically proven rather than the idle speculation of poets. The article, by WSJ's health writer Tara Parker-Pope, describes recent research into the neurochemistry of love, using brain scans to measure activity in its various parts while test subjects were shown pictures of people they love versus people they felt neutral about. "Everything that happens with romantic love has a chemical basis," explains Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and the lead researcher. (Love and chemistry? Who would have thought?) This raised methodological questions for me: How do the researchers know that the subjects are really in love with the people whose pictures they provide? Isn't there a kind of confirmation bias when you've provided a stack of photos, one of which you have said is special? Of course you are going to react to that one. It would be more interesting if there were unexpected brain activity in relation to one of the others.

Also, this invoked for me an ultimate Valentine's Day activity -- the day is already a show trial of romantic feelings through a variety of commercial rituals, so why not pay for the privilege of proving your love for your partner by having your brains scanned while you look at each other. Then your MRIs could be compared to other lovers to prove any number of things: that your love for each other is stronger that others' loves, or that one partner loves better than another, that you are still in love at all. Perhaps a business could be run in which couples prove their fidelity by having their love tested the way you might have your cholesterol measured. The brain scan could be a sophisticated lie detector; one could show a spouse pictures of various acquaintances and see just how they feel about them. The opportunities for exploiting jealous paranoia seem limitless, so there are many potential Valentine's Day marketing opportunities here. (Also, is there anything brain scans can't be alleged to show? A recent Washington Post article discussed how "brain scans and hormone fluctuations in our bloodstream show that our brains are designed to know where we fit into the pecking order, and we're uncomfortable when we're not among equals" -- not only can they provide scientific basis for romance but also for class difference.)

Parker-Pope points out that "the dramatic changes evident on the brain scans may help explain bizarre behavior that is often associated with love. It can also help explain why marital problems are such a serious health worry. Studies show that people in troubled relationships are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and high blood pressure." Then she suggests the fix:

Studies show that trying something new with a spouse can go a long way toward reigniting love. In one study, couples were assigned a weekly activity they both found new and exciting -- such as sailing or taking an art class. Another group did pleasant but familiar activities, such as dinner with friends. Based on answers to relationship tests, the couples doing new things showed far more improvement in the quality of their marriage after 10 weeks than couples who did the same things every week. The lesson is that sharing new experiences with your spouse appears to trigger changes in the brain that mimic the early days of being in love.
"We know that novelty and new experiences engage the dopamine system, and when it's associated with your partner it creates a link with the partner," says Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at New York's Stony Brook University who conducted the study. "It creates a dramatic increase in the sense of passion and romance.''

So this Valentine's Day, don't just go out to dinner. Go snorkeling or something.

Other societies, according to Lust in Translation, a book about infidelity in various cultures that Brad Plumer blogged about a few days ago, may have a different, more-straightforward solution to the novelty problem: new lovers, which spouses keep private and unobtrusive. Only in America, the book implies (at least to Plumer), is infidelity considered proof that a relationship is failing: "Now, obviously, anecdotal reporting isn't the same thing as doing extensive surveys and the like, but it was interesting that the people in France whom Druckerman interviews were mostly dumbfounded by the notion that couples should never have any secrets between them. That largely seems to be an American idea. (French people also don't appear to think that an affair is always a symptom of some horrific flaw in a relationship.) But then, looking at the statistics, French couples aren't any more prone to infidelity than American couples. It's just dealt with differently."

Americans may view it differently because of the commercial incentives to make them do so: Plumer notes how the book reveals that "an entire industry has sprouted up to help couples deal with the post-traumatic stress of an affair" -- stress created perhaps because of the way the stakes of infidelity are already raised. American counselors and Christian organizations prescribe radical truth-telling as a cure: How radical? "Many therapists believe that a wife is entitled to ask her husband for the details of every text message and encounter. The rationale is that the relationship between a husband and wife should be transparent. Some couples create a detailed chronology covering the entire period of the infidelity, even if it lasted for several years. The process stops when the wife can't take it anymore, or when she's satisfied that she's overturned every lie she's ever been told." It's easy to see where brain scans might fit into this. What better way to ground the truth of your feelings than in science, in hard data. A brain scan could be like a pee test for recovering addicts -- it could be checked to make sure a spouse isn't harboring untoward feelings for an ex-lover. It's a good way to reinforce the vision of marriage as sharing property, head space included.

But aside from the relationship industry (and its manufactured holidays like Valentine's Day), it may be that Americans register infidelity as more of a threat because other social pressures to maintain commitment are absent or weakened. I wonder whether divorce rates are lower where infidelity is regarded as less of a threat. Infidelity in such countries may be as much of an institution as marriage, with the same sorts of humdrum institutional hassles -- it may not seem all that exciting and thus may not seem to warrant an elaborate confessional. Perhaps some political science theory can shed some light here. Albert Hirschman, in Exit, Voice and Loyalty, notes the existence of "lazy monopolies" that welcome competition as a means for doing away with the troublesomeness of voice (intra-institutional complaining). Marriages in cultures where infidelity is tolerated may work similarly; that other subordinate relations can be conducted drains away the impetus to make major alterations to the dominant relation, which can lumber along quiescently, in "comfortable mediocrity" (to use Hirschman's epithet for ghetto grocers). Infidelity allows relationships "the freedom to deteriorate" without stirring up all that much stress.

Moreover, in order for couples to communicate like they must in order to maintain a relationship, the barriers for exit must be sufficiently strong. Hirschman explains that "specific institutional barriers to exit can often be justified on the ground that they serve to stimulate voice in deteriorating, yet recuperable organizations which would be prematurely destroyed through free exit." He's mainly talking about patrons of political organizations and business firms, but he remarks also that this logic rationalizes otherwise arbitrary procedural difficulties in divorce proceedings. With these barriers eroding, infidelity may seem more and more like outright exit, leading Americans to view it as a desperate spur for using an extreme version of what Hirschman calls "the voice option" -- radical truth-telling.

Adorno for pop critics (20 September 2006)

Yesterday I noticed that elsewhere at PopMatters was a review of Adorno's Philosophy of Music, which, as the author of the review, Patrick Schabe notes, has nothing to do with "new music" as anyone outside of academic music programs would understand it. Those interested in mounting an Adornoesque critique of contemporary pop music would be better served by reading "Perennial Fashion -- Jazz," from Prisms. The essay, which isn't about jazz so much as it is about whatever musical product is being manufactured and marketed for the masses, features this immortal observation:

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

I think of this whenever the need to concentrate on what I'm listening to makes me feel peevish and disgruntled. Isn't music supposed to make me relax? Then I know for sure I'm in the illustrious fraternity. When I start to write a record review and I try to conjure criteria by which to judge it, I feel a bit haunted by Adorno's words; I know nothing I will say will dispel the notion that I'm pounding out my own castrated, syncopated rhythm on my keyboard. In "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (anthologized by Routledge in The Culture Industry), Adorno suggests that with the advent of commercialized music, "the concept of taste is outmoded" because "the subject who could verify such taste has become as questionable as has the right to a freedom of choice which empirically, in any case, no one any longer exercises." Taste may survive as a necessary fiction, more necessary for those who attempt to codify subjective judgments and share them as music writers, people who won't surrender to the idea that cultural product is just product whose significance lies merely in how sellable it is. Adorno notes "the golden age of taste has dawned at the very moment in which taste no longer exists."

Adorno's often criticized for his rampant elitism, which consists mainly of insisting that collectively our ability to even hear music has regressed to the point where authentic music has become incomprehensible to our infantile ears. As Martin Jay explains it in The Dialectical Imagination, Adorno believed that one of the effects of commercialized popular music was to regress a listener to an infantile state where "like children who demand only food they have enjoyed in the past, the listener ... could only respond to a repetition of what he heard before." Such a listener's attitude toward culture is like "that of the meaningless leisure of the unemployed." Commercialized music, by destroying the link between performance and listening (you can hear it in an inferior reproduction with no apprehension of what's been lost, whenever its convenient for you the listener with no attention to the work involved in creating it) also destroys the Benjaminian aura of a musical work, which destroys its critical function, its ability to comment negatively on the culture and suggest something larger.

Adorno had none of the faith that later pop culture theorists have had in the ability of consumers to subvert culture industry brainwashing and find liberating, creative use for Justin Timberlake or episodes of Grey's Anatomy. That we mistake playing with the culture industry's toys for a kind of real freedom shows only how impotent and short-sighted we've become. As far as Adorno is concerned, popular music is never about active engagement but always about relaxation, of lulling to sleep the individual's critical awareness, of wallowing in passivity. (Is dancing a passive response to rhythmic music? Yes, in Adorno's mind. It's mimicking the martial movement of troops massed and marching past the dictator's parade stand.)

Critics try to invent standards that will insulate themselves from the consequences of music commercialization, from the reality of exchange value, which levels off all other forms of value and slowly but surely introjects itself into the populace so that top-sales lists are popularly held to be synonymous with best lists. "If one seeks to find out who 'likes' a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words." I can pretend to subjective opinions based on criteria of my own devising, but my own ability to hear has already been too compromised to make these criteria anything but postures of resistance to the market, or collaboration with it -- I can either condemn sell-outs (or laud bands for "authenticity") or hype bands and build their PR image; that is what is left to the music reviewer.

Adorno has this cutting comment for my delusion: As a pop-music critic, I am like "The couple out driving who spends their time identifying every passing car and being happy if they recognize the trademarks speeding by, the girl whose satisfaction consists solely in the fact that she and her boyfriend 'look good,' the jazz enthusiast who legitimizes himself by having knowledge about what is in any case inescapable." As for the masses? "Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or a bikini."

The general idea is that the standardization that comes with preparing a piece of music for the market makes whatever difference may exist between products superficial. Such works cease to be "autonomous" and thereby forfeit aesthetics. "An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods. He can neither escape impotence nor decide between the offerings where everything is so completely identical that preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard." In other words, we choose favorite bands the way we choose favorite sports teams, when really they all play the same game by the same rules and are ultimately exchangeable for one another. We celebrate bands or singers for the cult of personality built up around them, or because we heard the music in conjunction with certain epochs in our own lives.

This relates to what neuroscientist Daniel Levitin found -- in This Is Your Brain on Music (reviewed here) he argues that the cerebellum, the lizard part of the brain that synchronizes movement, is as involved in music listening as the frontal lobe, the cognitive part. Adorno would probably argue that now the cerebellum works at the expense of the frontal lobes, so that we have a mechanical, rhythmic response to music that is pleasurable without ever having out intellect engaged. Levitin also suggests that at times of emotional tumult -- teenage years, etc. -- our brains are more likely to tag certain pieces of music with emotion and have them serve as emotional cues for the rest of our lives. Then as our brain wiring hardens, this tagging ability diminishes, and it becomes harder to become emotionally attached to new music. We recur to the stuff that is "nostalgic" -- the only music we're wired to instinctively appreciate. If Adorno's right, and we've let our intellectual means for appreciating music atrophy, and we've instead become reliant on these emotional/instinctive methods for assimilating music, at a certain point we become frozen; without the intellectual basis upon which to enjoy music we haven't heard before, we're incapable of taking pleasure in anything new. This lost ability is serious stuff to Adorno, because real music, like all real art, when heard with the intellect, offers listeners a means by which to criticize a given reality, to synthesize alternatives. Without it, we're trapped in the status quo, and worse, self-deluded into enjoying it as plentitude.

Asymmetric paternalism (12 September 2006)

I'm generally sympathetic to the arguments of behavioral economists, who want to broaden economics in efforts to account for humankind's irrationality, defined as its failure to always maximize utility and make choices that will lead to the most bountiful outcomes. But while reading John Cassidy's New Yorker story about neuroeconomics I found myself resisting the whole rational/irrational paradigm, which suddenly seemed impoverished. Suddenly the general humility of economics seemed much more appealing than the hubris of the neuroscientists who seem on the verge of suggesting we neutralize certain lobes of our cerebral cortex to make ourselves more "rationally" profit-seeking or to snort oxytocin (a hormone which induces loving feelings toward others) to make ourselves more trusting and therefore more economically efficient in commercial contexts. Rather than respect the different kinds of decision-making processes humans have adapted, it sounds as though some of these econo-scientists would like to modify people so they fit the traditional homo economicus models more comfortably. It seems better to amend the models or limit their applicability than to force humankind to exhibit the remorseless efficiency they presume. By the end of the article Cassidy is citing economist David Laibson pitching a dualistic model that mimics the Cartesian mind-body split: "The modified theories to which Laibson referred assume that people have two warring sides: the first deliberative and forward-looking, the second impulsive and myopic. Under certain circumstances, the impulsive side prevails, and people succumb to things like drug addiction, overeating, and taking wild gambles in the stock market." If this is so, I wonder whether these sides would have a consistent, predictable influence on the other, or whether they might not work simultaneously and independently. One can overeat while plotting an extremely rational stock portfolio. And a certain amount of pleasure derives from avoiding decisions altogether, from surrendering, from refusing to calculate, from inertia or expediency -- Cassidy himself notes he made decisions that were expedient when the machine measuring his brainwaves began to make him claustrophobic. At some point it becomes rational to be irrational; irrationality is not merely a consequence of emotions inappropriately obtruding.

My somewhat paranoid concerns about forced rationalism grew strongest when Cassidy discussed "asymmetric paternalism":

Reforming 401(k) plans is an example of “asymmetric paternalism,” a new political philosophy based on the idea of saving people from the vagaries of their limbic regions. Warning labels on tobacco and potentially harmful foods are similarly intended to keep subcortical structures in check. Neuroeconomists have suggested additional policies, including warning buyers of lottery tickets that their chances of winning are practically nonexistent and imposing mandatory “cooling off” periods before people make big-ticket purchases, such as cars and boats. “Asymmetric paternalism helps those whose rationality is bounded from making a costly mistake and harms more rational folks very little,” Camerer, Loewenstein, and three colleagues wrote in a 2003 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “Such policies should appeal to everyone across the political spectrum.”

You don't have to work for the Cato Institute to find this dubious. None of these specific policy prescriptions seem problematic, but the logic behind them is worrisome. Some people can't be trusted to act in their own interest -- but who defines what that is, and by what criteria? Who gets to say what a rational person "should" do? Who gets to decide which reasons for acting are "bad" or "wrong"? Here, neuroeconomists fall back on the definition of profit/utility maximization as a defintion of rationality. You can see how this rationality, enforced by paternalistic measures, could easily become a prison, the bureaucratic nightmare Adorno evokes in his critique of Enlightenment positivism. It's like using an ad to advertise the idea that paying attention to ads is harmful -- these kind of measures are designed to bring people "back" to their senses while reinforcing the idea that the there's no need to return since common sense and rationality are already being retrofitted into the options society presents them. The underlying assumption of asymmetric paternalism is that people are sheep, with no strong reasons for doing what they do, so they may as well be encouraged/forced to do what can be deemed most beneficial socially.

Cassidy quotes Laibson on the nature of this paternalism “The practical implications of the experiment come from obtaining a better understanding of the human taste for instant gratification,” Laibson said. “If we can understand that, we will be in a much better position to design policies that mitigate what can be self-defeating behavior.” I'm not going to make the argument that "self-defeating" is a contradiction in terms, as some economists sometimes seem to imply (if every choice by definition reveals a preference, then how can you choose what doesn't suit your own wishes without being coerced?) -- but who's to say what is "self-defeating" and in what circumstances? What sort of policy could cover all the exceptions? Time has a different value to different people in different circumstances -- influencing that value is what exploiting convenience is all about. The taste for instant gratification may be impulsive or may be a matter of what an individual considers timely -- it seems foolish to, say, buy an BluRay DVD player right now, but if you derive all sorts of satisfaction from being the first on the block to have one, you can't afford to have your gratification delayed. And it seems dumb to buy lottery tickets, but they are licenses for invaluable fantasy for some. So what may seem like poor decision-making to us could just be part of the plan. There's no sure way of accounting for other people's notions of utility.

If we are going to institute some of these measures, I'd rather they be sold not as something for my own good but something that is for the social good -- you will be defaulted to save in a 401 (k) because it will help prevent sociey from having to support you when you are old and destitute, or spare society the sight of your suffering. You will be discouraged from smoking, because your smoke poisons others and because society doesn't want to bear the burden of your medical costs. And so on. Leave people with the illusions that they know what is best for themselves and encourage the notion that everyone will be making sacrifices for the common good -- this seems better, ideologically speaking, than having the state work to maximize outcomes for individuals.

A side note: I'm a bit puzzled by the ultimatum game:

A good way to illustrate Cohen’s point is to imagine that you and a stranger are sitting on a park bench, when an economist approaches and offers both of you ten dollars. He asks the stranger to suggest how the ten dollars should be divided, and he gives you the right to approve or reject the division. If you accept the stranger’s proposal, the money will be divided between you accordingly; if you refuse it, neither of you gets anything.
How would you react to this situation, which economists refer to as an “ultimatum game,” because one player effectively gives the other an ultimatum? Game theorists say that you should accept any positive offer you receive, even one as low as a dollar, or you will end up with nothing. But most people reject offers of less than three dollars, and some turn down anything less than five dollars.

It seems to me that this game sets up a reference group of you and the other person that makes invidious comparison inevitable. Thus as the other person gets richer, you get poorer by comparison. It seems perfectly rational from that point of view to demand an even split, or have neither of you gain anything. Only by imagining a fictitious reference group -- i.e. not the person you are in the game with but people you are theoretically comparable with -- can you make the game theorists' rational choice. Rationality ends up depending on a rich, healthy imagination.