The Moral Illusion

Typically, I make an effort to avoid discussing moral issues in the blog.  I try to be interesting and informative here.  Morality is a very subjective topic and I don’t think that my personal views on it are any more interesting or informed that anyone else’s.   You might actually disagree with me that morality is subjective.  I think that argument has some traction in contemporary thought.  Moral certitude has played a popular role in American politics for a while now.  Others might argue that morality originates in religious teachings, or even just common sense.  Independent of their origins,  most people stew up a personal mixture or moral beliefs to suit their cultural perspectives and life experiences.  More or less, this approach works startlingly well for almost everyone.  But here I want to examine the topic of moral perception and how it should be thought of as a separable component when considering the more common arguments for moral relativism.

I wear glasses.  That means that almost all of my visual experiences are corrected by their lenses without me noticing it.  What’s interesting, like lenses, our moral world-view also uses a corrective tool that goes unaccounted for in our moral reasoning.  Our brains.  We typically perceive our brains to be so accurate in their depiction of reality that we routinely respond to the world based on only milliseconds of unconscious consideration. We have a very human habit of trusting our own experiences. Or at least our perceptions of them.

Visually, our brains are very adept.  Our experience of the many thousands of other adept things that our brains do, makes our faithful dependency on our brains’ judgment seem to us to be normal and right.  But what’s often unnoticed, is that the human brain isn’t equally adept at all things.  For instance,  brains are not very good at moral equations.  More accurately, brains are not very good at knowing when they are being bad at moral equations.  In fact, considering how much our race depends on common sense to support moral beliefs, human brains are surprisingly bad at computing relative values of right and wrong.

For example, in our brains’ common-sense based moral calculus, physical proximity plays a strangely significant role in determining moral outcome.

Think about that one for a minute. Does it really seem right to account for our personal location in measuring the impact of right and wrong?  But to our brains, our relative location has a significant impact on the way we judge ourselves.  Let me show you what I mean in this quick example:

You are wearing a $1000 suit while taking a stroll down a lake shore.  Drowning in the water nearby is a girl.   You have the choice to jump in to save the girl and ruin your suit, or to leave the girl to drown while preserving your expensive attire.

What does your brain tell you is the wrong action to take?  Now consider the following alternate scenario.

You hear a story on the radio about a girl in Lebanon who needs a life-saving surgical procedure for $1000.  You choose not to send $1000 to the girl.  Are you equally wrong?

 

Close enough to care?

Did your brain tell you that both wrongs were exact moral equivalents?   Even though they are exactly the same, your brain probably did not see them that way.  The difference in the feelings that you had is due to the erroneous proximity value that your brain uses in calculating moral equations. Would it have made a difference to you if you were in the girl’s hospital room holding her hand?   This perceived difference  is the moral equivalent of an optical illusion.  Everybody easily understands that optical illusions are the result of our brain’s shortcomings, but we are far less apt to consider the possibility that moral illusions also exist for the same reason.

Though no one has done it, it would be interesting to perform as study to calculate whether the the brain’s weighted value of moral proximity diminishes at approximately the same rate as visual perception diminishes.   Does the brain use its understanding of the phenomenon of visual foreshortening to also calculate the rate of decline for moral significance?

The proximity effect in the moral equation has historically played a very small role in human culture.  Remember, before the age of telecommunication, we humans lived in little bubbles of moral proximity.  Today, we live in a world that is arguably without proximity.  More often now, we are being required to take action based on moral judgments that go against our feelings of common sense morality.  Think N.I.M.B.Y.  The “big picture” items that concern the world larger than our immediate proximities are the ones that are the highest risk of falling prey to our brain’s problematic expertise at resolving moral equations.    Yet our own technological capabilities have pushed us into an era that is requiring us to change that calculus to accommodate a new world-wide proximity.  Whether or not this process of adaptation succeeds might be the secret to the future success of humanity itself.  Can we expand our brains’ understanding of moral proximity as a specie?

Fortunately, as the decline of the Crocs fashion craze has taught us, the very brains that are now fooling us, are also amazingly adept at making corrections once errors are known.

The Year of Living Statistically

To choose the life of a day-trader is like choosing to be a professional Russian roulette player.  Even if you are lucky and win every day, you are still balancing those wins against the chilling  thought of that future bullet.  Even if the downside risks of day-trading aren’t quite as high as Russian roulette, there is very little real satisfaction to be found on the up-side in either activity.

For the last year, I’ve occupied myself as a self-employed day-trader.  A few months ago I slowly began to realize something important that has made me decide to stop being a short-term trader.   It was an epiphany I had about the relationship that existed in my mind between the trading “skills” that I felt I had developed, and the contribution those skills were actually making to the outcome of any particular trade I made. I began to realize that statistics (random chance)  played a much heavier role in my success than my own skills were playing.  In fact, probability played such a large role in every trade that my “skills” as a stock picker were marginalized by comparison.    Had I revealed a  little-spoken lie that lingers below surface the field of day-trading?  Retail day-trading is not a skill-based occupation, regardless of how it is perceived by the participants. In fact, the more I considered it;  the lie that trading skills play a role in success doesn’t just linger beneath the surface,  it completely supports the field of day-trading and is its premise!

It became completely clear once I realized this: If an activity is fundamentally driven by random chance, then there is no way to succeed at that activity unless that success is also random chance.  With true short-term randomness, there are no actions that a participant can take that will remediate that randomness.  This meant that any “skills” I felt like I had developed were really the result of operant conditioning, not the functional result of their success.  The most simple-to-understand examples explain why nobody practices rolling dice or Russian roulette.  It is because there is a 5:1 chance of being wrong in dice, and a 1:5 chance of being shot in the head in Russian roulette. With these sour odds people quickly realize that there are no “skills” one can master to make the odds better.  With day-trading however, luck is deceptively closer to the surface.  To begin with, in trading there is a roughly 1:1 chance of being right because there are only two directions that a price can move.  Up and down.  When gambling on a system whose odds start at 50/50, because the odds already seem so close, it is easy for a participant to believe that there are actions available for them to take that will push the odds in their favor .  Therefore the day-trader is given many randomized opportunities to experience success and failure.  This “belief” that the actions they took played more than a minor role in the successful outcomes is based on the brain’s natural response to operant conditioning, not the statistical reality of whatever skill they perceive that they are employing.  If this is true, then it means that a day-trader’s career is totally based on the trader maintaining the illusion of having a skill in his own mind; not actually having a skill.  It is superstition as a occupation.

Of course there are successful day-traders.  In fact there are only successful day-traders because all of the unsuccessful day-traders are no longer day-traders.  That’s a pretty obvious conclusion, but one that most new to the thrills of trading don’t see.  The successful ones are the literally the lucky few.  The unsuccessful ones sell the books.

So the question I then had to answer was, do I continue trading until odds turn against me, or do I stop trading and start something new?  The answer, however unhappy it makes me, is obvious.  I’ve had a great experience day-trading, but I can’t trust it as an occupation when there are many other occupations available to me that I can use my real skills at mastering.

To any of you blog readers to whom I give long-term investment advice:  My attitude toward long-term value investing has not changed.  I’m still happy to help anyone plan their nest-eggs.  BTW:  My long term portfolio has performed better than 98% of all mutual funds in the marketplace year-to-date!   As if this even has to be said at this point; past results are not indicative of future performance.

WFW’s Summertime Musical Comedy Concert Post

Don’t Get That College Degree!

Recently, my wife and I have been talking about how going to college isn’t an appropriate goal for everyone.  The college track has become too expensive and may provide too little in return for some students.  There’s really no good reason why high school students “should” go to college.  Frankly, the universal portrayal of the high-school graduate as being a less employable person than a college graduate is a lie.  There is a huge demand for tradespeople and business owners without the need for a 4 year degree.  Success stories about bootstrapping young workers skipping college to start a career are everywhere, yet still high schools across the country have focused on sending as many students as possible into college by taking away the vocational education programs they’ve offered in the past.  In our opinion, this has been a disservice to the general public.

To further our point, tonight I found this article in the NY Post about the logical fallacy of the cost benefits of a liberal arts degree when compared with a skilled trade.  Simply put, college isn’t what it used to be and going to one might be a big mistake for smart, hard-working teens who are considering a liberal arts education versus going to work after high school.

You can read the article here:

To be fair, there are plenty of caveats to our argument.  For one, we are making a distinction between going to a liberal arts college and taking up a legitimate skilled trade.  There is no argument that the college route is better in the long run than working at a convenience store, or delivering pizzas.  Also, it is important to begin investing for retirement early if you do not go to college.  Without a solid investment plan right out of high school, students who choose to not go to college are forgoing their most important strategic advantage and the argument for forgoing a degree diminishes rapidly.

Backseat with the Angels

This is a outrageous video of a backseat ride in a F-18 Hornet Blue Angel.  I’ve always wondered what this perspective would be like.  Enjoy.

Swine Flew

Toilet Funeral Marketing

Ingenuity is key to marketing success.  There are a lot of ways to market products.  The problem is that 90% of them are so boring that they can’t compete with all the other marketing noise that we see and hear every day.  If you don’t consciously realize it you can probably guess that you’ve already experienced about 300-1000 marketing messages in the last 24 hours.  Not surprisingly, you’ve likely ignored almost all of them.

I’ve found that the only time I cue in on television commercials any more is when they are describing all the horrible side effects of prescription medicines.  Last week I saw a commercial for a psoriasis drug who’s side effects included the possibility of permanent brain damage. Does that even qualify as a side-effect?!  To me that’s like advertising a hammer that’s sometimes a bomb.

The harmful side-effect of this constant marketing deluge is that we are now almost completely impervious to ad messages.  But, if an ad doesn’t stick in the mind of a consumer then a marketer is just wasting money.  It’s an unjustifiable expense.  Marketers know this, but don’t always subscribe to it.

Instead most marketers rely on repetition instead of creativity.  Its the easiest (but most expensive) solution.   Marketing is only worth the cost it if it performs two goals.  Getting into people’s heads,  and hanging around inside people’s heads.  In marketing, there are two proven ways to dig in to a customer’s brain; repetition, and ingenuity.  Bot flies might suggest that there is one more way, but their point is irrelevant here.

The McDonald’s and  Burger King marketing plans are great examples of both kinds of marketing.  McDonald’s is endlessly repetitive (therefore effective), and Burger King has become ingenious, if mildly unnerving,  on a national level in the last few years (also effective).  But there is a group at a huge disadvantage in the marketing kingdom.  These are private franchisees and small business owners.  They have so little capital to invest in their marketing message that repetition is unaffordable and blandness is just wasted effort.

Survived by the men's urinal and a wash sink.

This is where Toilet Funeral Marketing kicks in.  Cheap Ingenuity.  This week a Carl’s Jr hamburger franchisee in Utah suffered a serious loss.  One of his toilets was shot and destroyed by a patron dropping his handgun while using the facilities.  Obviously, this is an unusual occurance.  The ingenious franchisee adroitly used the odd circumstance to its fullest advantage.  He contacted the media to announce that he would be holding a toungue-in-cheek funeral for his shot toilet!  Giving away 50 bottles of Toilet Blast cleaner to the funeral’s attendees was a perfect accompaniment. It’s people like this man who make successful small businesses.  Small business owners should have only one marketing goal; be heard above the marketing din by always taking advantage of your ingenuity.  It’s your cheapest and most memorable marketing asset.   And you shouldn’t be afraid to use your dead toilet to get the word out.

Cats do not sleep

My wife and I have 3 cats.  We had an unproven suspicion that they are more restless under the cover of darkness than they would have us believe .  We’ve even discussed setting up a night-vision time-lapse camera to film their suspected shenanigans while we slept .  But now, as this film proves as clearly as if David Attenborough had proclaimed it himself,  the domestic feline is indeed an annoying little fidget.

The Long View of Aging

If you’re interested in longevity for yourself, or if you are interested in the future of longevity as a field of study, you should watch this video of Aubrey de Grey.  He discusses the intriguing concept of Longevity Escape Velocity.  LEV is the idea that continued advances in life extension therapies have already reached a pace that may allow those of us now with at least 30 years of life expectancy remaining, to benefit from moderate amounts of life extension through medical therapies. This moderate life extension may in turn then allow us to survive into an era where wholesale rejuvenation and  indefinite life spans are possible.   The question is, will Gen-X be the first to explore their 130’s?

Something that he doesn’t discuss is how life extension will effect the economy of the world.  As a result of compounding interest, these super-old Gen-Xer’s are going to be incredibly wealthy.  This isn’t neccisarily as good as it might first seem.  They will be far wealthier than any other generation has ever been and will grow exponentially richer each year they survive.  Of course wealth creation manifests inflation eventually.  What would be the ramification to the world’s economy and culture as this class imbalance between the super-old super-wealthy, and the younger poor begins to play out?

Sleeping

I’m always on the lookout for simple strategies in the medical news that have been shown to increase my likelihood of living a long an healthy life.

So far my list of things to do include:
1. Drink alcohol a little.
2. Take vitamin D if you spend your days under a roof.
3. Use olive oil
4. Eat some walnuts in the morning.
5. Eat smaller portions of food, mostly plants
6. Walk for about a half hour a day.

Science has shown that doing these things may have a significant long term benefits to your health.  Its a regimine that I follow.  None of it is particulalry difficult or unpleasant.  In fact its all pretty enjoyable.  Today I found another enjoyable addition to this list.  In fact, it’s one I already do.  Sleep more than 7 hours a night.  The new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association attributes the benefits to reduced stress hormones, and lowered blood pressure.  Good Night!