Very interesting! Maybe this hypothetical inability to truly connect the dots when it comes to the hedonic treadmill is why I find Kahneman's quote about the focusing illusion so beautiful. It's almost like a zen riddle, you sense that it's true, maybe even trivial, but you can also feel it slip away from your mind the moment you no longer focus (hah) on it.
Maybe it is all about dopamine, the body's reward drug for acheivement. You win, you get a dose. If you have already won, then you are just content - no dose! Therefore true happiness is found in the struggle to fulfill aspirations, biologicaly.
A question is why we fail to anticipate that the goalposts will keep moving. The solution suggested here is that we fail to do so because if we were to think about future habituation, it could dull our motivation to improve our circumstances.
An answer to the question raised may be that some of us do, and others don't, anticipate goalpost movement. I know people well past their retirement age who will likely never stop working, until they can't. I know younger people who can hardly get off the couch, or off Social Media to notice that there are any goalposts out there at all. Personaly, I welcome 'change' like a faithful old friend, and I know others who are dead scared of it. But I do get the point you have made. The question might then be 'How can we teach others to recognise, and navigate, goalpost change?' Anyways, I have been enjoying your thread, please keep it up.
There may be individual differences indeed. To explain people unmotivated to do anything, one possibility is unrealistic reference points which is a possible explanation for depression. It is the topic of my next post.
"For habituation to be effective, however, Alice must remain unaware of it"
I am quite upset that despite knowing your posts are going to rob me of this blissful ignorance, I keep reading them. Maybe some remedies in the coming posts?
Very interesting article - this ties together some important evolutionary psychology and philosophy concepts very aptly. To me the focussing illusion has always remained one of life's greatest enigmas. There is something a little disconcerting about the buddhist philosophy which is captured in the quotes at the end, however. For me, relinquishing desire in order to feel happier means we will always fall short of our potential as human beings. I don't think abandoning desire is the right approach - I think a mere appreciation of our evolutionary circuitry is enough to comfort us when we don't feel as good as we thought we would about achieving success.
I heard a great quote this morning actually: “Success is not a goal or end-destination; it is a horizon. As you take one step towards it, it moves one step further away”.
And so, in this sense, the journey is ultimately the most important. Success is an elusive concept which never truly arrives.
"relinquishing desire in order to feel happier means we will always fall short of our potential as human beings" you identify here a key issue about our hedonic system. Abandoning desires would be a possible path to happiness/contentment, but our hedonic system is designed for us to achieve our highest potential and this fact conflicts with the idea that we can easily abandon our desires. This other post addresses that exact question: https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/if-you-can-you-must-why-we-set-ever
My problem with all of this is that is very hard to distinguish between habituation and changes in expectation. A rating of happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 just says how happy you feel compared to some unstated judgement of how happy you should fee on average. If person A has lived in poverty for years, they might give a high number on a day when they got enough to eat. If person B takes adequate material living standards for granted, they might give a low number on a bad hair day. That needn't mean that A is actually happier, just that their expectations are lower.
This could all be situational plus age related plus a matter of individual disposition. In this world there are actually situations it is good to find oneself in. If having labored to get to such a place (satisfying job, loving family, etc.), the antidote to habituation is appreciation, and noting that things from your perspective do not seem more rewarding higher up, and may even imply some losses. In other words, the next success is not overestimated. I think myself such a person, now retired with no regrets.
I am bit stuck on the definition of "success" and how that relates to the culture that one is raised in. Buddhists (aim to relinquish desire) and Stoics (live in accordance to the 4 virtues) do not fit neatly in this overachieving sample of the population like Alice. But even in capitalist systems where markets are considered to be the solver of everything and measurement/ranking are key for markets to function, framing success is important. For instance, if we define success as trying/improving/doing VS achieving then, as long as we enjoy the activity we are engaged in, we are successful. You will probably argue that this mindset is not enough to maximise some fitness utility function (which in itself is tough to define but lets park that) but I would like to see this tested empirically.
It may be that we learn to become happy first (ie find joy in what we do and improve on that by simply being in that activity) which will then drive success (in an achievement terms), not the other way around. We can of course care about our achievements but as second-order effects that lead us to find more interesting challenges to get lost in.
I recall of an interesting debate a couple of years back when Giannis (NBA superstar) pushed back on the idea that he failed because he didn't manage to win the NBA title.
I became a Buddhist well into my years, and I am so much happier now, even though I make less money and I am in terrible health as well as being disabled. The Stoics and the Buddhists are not that far apart. In many ways knowing what matters and behaving in an honorable manner are far more important than silly identifiers of social rank. I grew up wealthy, tall and and pretty much had it made, but I was the most miserable SOB anyone could think of. Framing is everything. It feels so good to do a good job at my current public sector employer. I could have had that when I was younger working in finance, but instead I soiled the experience with expectations of a high remuneration, or even worse, higher remuneration than my peers.
Stoics and Buddhists lived life the right way. It feels better to live as an honorable man. Chasing status is a foolish game. Living with honor and embodying the hero architype feels so much better.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Garry. Buddhism and Stoicism can be thought of as ways to escape evolution’s injunctions to always strive for more, with promises of happiness that fail to materialise as the goalposts keep shifting.
The way I see it, the idea is to remove longing and desire such that you engage with the world with loving kindness. Much of it is not changing yourself as much as reimaging why you do what you do. The idea is to work hard towards worthy goals, not to strive for recognition or wealth.
Not that wealth and recognition are necessarily bad, but the act of of desiring them lessons both the act and the individual doing it. For me, the greatest personal transformation has been that I can choose how to feel. I had always been reactive, and when I realized that I was in control and chose how to feel, it made life so much easier. I could choose to react differently. It was liberating. For my entire life I had viewed situations through a false lens (he is making me mad; she makes me angry), when instead I was choosing to get upset when it was entirely possible for me to simply choose not to.
I still work hard. I still try to be a good man, but my motivations are different, and my happiness is no longer conditional on achievement, and honestly, achievement never really gave me happiness anyway. The mindset shift makes burdens lighter, and it makes choices clearer.
I have no doubt I could have come to the same place as a Christian. If anything, I cannot help but to see both as different analytics with the same goal in mind. Most of the "emptiness" or weird stuff comes from more mystical Mahayana traditions I have never really studied (Tibetan, Zen). My wife is from Thailand, and we are part of a Theravada school that is followed in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. This is an older, more traditional Buddhism (say Catholic vs Mormon compared to Theravada vs Mahayana). From my perspective, the Theravada Buddhist ideas I learn are really not all that different than many Christian ideas that believe in a covenant of works. I have even heard Christians use the term "loving kindness." I honestly do not think the parables used are that important, so long as we all are working towards a common good.
The term "success" only refers to what evolution, as a learning process, would have selected our hedonic system to achieve: fitness. As I indicated in a footnote, it does not mean people care about offspring per se. The hedonic system assignds positive values to intermediate states. The cues about these stages can be social in a social species like ours. So, it is reasonable to think that some triggers of positive feelings may vary across cultures.
In regard to your specific question on "trying/improving/doing VS achieving," trying and improving can have value as steps toward achieving. It is reasonable to expect subjective satisfaction associated with these aspects (across cultures). I have planned to write a post about this. However, it would be surprising if our hedonic system responded only to trying and not to achieving. One reason is that successful achievement contains an informative signal that we tried hard enough. An optimal incentive scheme should react to all signals that are informative about the quality of effort (Holmstrom's informativeness principle).
This explanation is compatible with Giannis pushing back against the framing of his achievements as a failure (he feels good about having tried hard enough). At the same time, he would likely be even happier to have won the NBA title for the same level of effort (rewarded by the outcome).
Firstly, thank you for engaging Lionel. I will make sure that I become a paid subscriber to make it worthwhile for you :) And I just bought your book to understand your framing better.
You are of course correct about Giannis/NBA. Professional sports is one of the best arenas where "trying to achieve" is almost the only thing that matters and "trying to enjoy" results into a stamp of not good enough etc. My example was the wrong one for the point I was trying to make.
I have been ruminating about "trying" as a driver of joy in itself vs as a step to "achieving" that, only if reached, brings joy. And about one of your thoughts above that one of the features of "achieving" which is a signal that we tried hard enough. I think where my discomfort lies is with regard to factors outside our control which get lumped in with trying hard enough which is in our control. In other words, we are incorrect to conclude that if we achieve something is because we tried hard enough. Depending on the context, there are a myriad of reasons why we got the result we wanted never only because we tried hard. I think the Stoics have a few good bits to say about control that go against our hedonic tendencies and I would argue, deep confusion about the causal chain leading to an outcome.
An optimal incentive system needs to associate some rewards with all signals of likely positive performance. Reaching an achievement is such a signal because an agent whose incentives are not fully aligned with the principal (in a principal-agent problem) can always choose not to try enough in areas not observed by the principal. Example: Billy does not do his homework but tells his teacher he tried hard, claiming the dog ate his notebook (the teacher cannot know for sure). Susan was procrastinating at work but tells her boss there was a bug, and she lost time rewriting parts of the report (her boss cannot know for sure).
You can translate this into the context of evolution (conceived as a principal) aiming to optimally incentivise an organism (conceived as an agent) to maximise fitness. A system that rewards only trying could lead to inefficient decisions. There are plenty of ways of "trying," and some are much more efficient than others. For instance, I could spend hours copying and pasting cells in Excel, or I could write a programme that does it in a fraction of the time. A hedonic system that only rewards effort may not discriminate well between different ways of trying. Success is an observable fact that is correlated with effective effort (even though it is not a perfect predictor). This is the meaning of the quote in the paper linked above: "the outcome can be used as a signal about the action which is not directly observed" (Hölmstrom, 1979). Hölmstrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on principal-agent theory.
So success should be rewarded, even though it will sometimes reward lucky winners and sometimes penalise losers who tried their best. You are right, though, that outcome bias often occurs in the real world. It happens whenever achievement is rewarded more than its signal value.
So the idea is that rewarding "achievement" (or "success") is the appropriate way to adjudicate between "coasting" (not trying or mindlessly trying) and "sweating" (trying hard). And this system is supported by the fact that the principal does not have access to all information on the agent's behaviour to judge and, even if it did, it would still be impossible to decide if its lack of will (laziness etc) or lack of ability (intellect, experience etc). Hence, we need a proxy that's visible to the principal and that proxy is the agent's achievement. I am using principal to be equivalent with nature & agent to be a equivalent to a person. Did I summarise it correctly?
If yes, I continue to have issues with it:
1.The system does not concern itself with the way of achieving (just with achieving) and as result does not control for ethical behaviour. In the same way that Billy can lie about not doing his homework but tells his teacher that he tried hard & should be rewarded, in the same way Billy can ask his parents to write the homework and lie to the teacher that he wrote it himself & should be rewarded. In the same way that Susan was slacking but lied about the software bug, she plagiarise it from the internet and file the report under her name. You are in the world of "Fake it till you make it" / "End justify the means" which is quite prevalent from where I am sitting and not desirable for my liking.
2.Also, the system does not concern itself with the drivers of achieving and as result, among others, does not control for luck. I think luck is a key driver in everything we do, not only sometimes. This has significant implications morally in that luck is misconstrued as skill which further leads to individual moral desert for the Ayn Rand book carrying types. You can argue that the current discontent with the elites is partly driven by this illusion - that success is their own doing & the poor man's failure is also their doing.
3.You define success = maximisation of fitness = propensity of successfully rearing children = a bucket of proxies for that like health, sex-appeal, money, status, relationships etc. I think this definition is suitable in hunter gatherer times but we been attempting to reframe it post Enlightenment through moral progress. Not every KPI advancement is progress & not every advancement should be rewarded with a dopamine hit. It appears that we have evolved our technological prowess faster than we evolved biologically and as a result we have to overcome our urges through reason (in the same way that we don't eat junk food everyday despite significant & largely successful attempts of junk food makers to hijack our biology)
I continue to propose that living a successful life has to be anchored in a system of values that reframes and at times constrains our hedonic impulses with, among others, commitment to truth and ethical behaviour, concerns for nature, group inequality and second/third order effects of our technological progress etc.
Watched your LSE talk as well and am in the middle of reading Optimally Irrational. Very thoughtful. I appreciate your work & while I have nuances of disagreement, it helps clarify my own thoughts.
Very interesting piece. It is not unreasonable but reflects many of the conflicting intuitions we have about happiness, how it works, and why it is mysteriously elusive. At the same time, the ideas in the piece align well with the image of the blind men and the elephant that I included in my post "The Truth About Happiness." The actual principles underlying happiness are ignored, and hence the discussion mixes a lot of elements and makes assertions that seem intuitive but are questionable or would make more sense within the framework I describe. I'll write a few more posts on the topic of happiness that will clarify how the adaptive explanation of happiness I describe relates to the ideas in that article.
- The hedonic system "does not control for ethical behaviour." That is correct. However, note that the theory is not normative but merely positive (descriptive). Therefore, we should be cautious not to judge it based on ethical criteria. It is either factually correct or incorrect. It cannot be wrong factually just because it conflicts with a normative theory we have about ethics.
- "The system does not concern itself with the drivers of achieving and, as a result, does not control for luck." There was no mention of luck in my posts, but the model I present suggests that the hedonic system should indeed be concerned with whether success is due to luck or not, and it should reward, in expectation, achievements that result from decisions rather than luck. Intuitively, if something very bad happens to you but there is nothing you can do about it (e.g., an earthquake destroys your house), you may be upset about it, but not as much as if that same outcome happened because of your action (e.g., you left a candle on and it burned down your house).
- "You define success as the maximisation of fitness... this definition was suitable in hunter-gatherer times... I continue to propose that living a successful life must be anchored in a system of values that reframes and at times constrains our hedonic impulses with, among others, commitment to truth and ethical behaviour, concerns for nature, group inequality, and second/third-order effects of our technological progress, etc." The description of the hedonic system I provide merely states that it was designed to induce us to maximise fitness in an ancestral environment. It lacks normative content. It does not prescribe how people should behave or whether they should pursue pleasures or sacrifice pleasures for ethical values. This question is outside the scope of the theory I describe.
Thanks Lionel. I think your clarification that the theory is simply describing how our hedonic system has been evolved to function is helpful (VS make any claims about how it should function). The nuance I was trying to highlight is that people are not simple slaves of their biological desires (eat the junk food because you crave it) but rather operate in a value system that short circuits the biology with ideas (such as I shouldn't eat the junk food) which have causal effect on behaviour in the same way that the feeling of craving does. And hence any theory of happiness or joy or well-being would have to be sensitive to what that value system says. Or in other words, we can learn to be happy in the same way that we learnt everything else that goes against our biology.
In any case, I will look forward to your other posts on the topic.
Consider two populations. First with individuals having strong focussing illusion, and the second having weak focussing illusion.
The first population can be expected to be more successful in evolutionary competition. Individuals in this group will be more inclined attempt risky ventures and expend effort. Some of these ventures will succeed improving the group's aggregate fit function compared to the second group due to higher adaptivity and better risk tolerance.
It is similar to the idea of positive convexity of investment portfolios. Because of how the math works here, it's about populations rather than individuals.
Hi Michael, I am not too sure about your suggestion. The explanation of the focusing illusion here does not rely on decisions between risky gambles. It relies just on making as few errors as possible between the options chosen (and the fact that you make fewer mistakes when your utility gradient is steeper in the range of outcomes considered).
If you were to consider choices between risky gambles, evolution would favour risk neutrality (when there is not a significant risk of death). A propensity to prefer high expected value gambles (in spite of a higher variance) would then be selected for. This can explain another behavioural phenomenon: overweighting of small probabilities. It is an argument made here for instance:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825622001774
Your intuition seems to fit more with some justifications for overconfidence which can motivate us to take risk when we overestimate our chances of success. Whether overconfidence would actually be selected for this reason is not clear. I think not because there is a cost to it (I have some work on this which I'll write about in a later post).
My point was that in both populations, individuals act **independently** without any form of coordination. The focusing illusion, much like overconfidence, could lead individuals to attempt more risky ventures or dedicate greater effort toward specific goals. While many of these attempts will fail, the independent actions of a few successful individuals can result in significant gains for the population as a whole.
With positive convexity an investment portfolio benefits from high-reward outliers despite many losses. Similarly, the evolutionary advantage here arises at the population level rather than the individual level. The independent, uncoordinated actions of individuals collectively lead to a higher likelihood of adaptive breakthroughs.
Very interesting! Maybe this hypothetical inability to truly connect the dots when it comes to the hedonic treadmill is why I find Kahneman's quote about the focusing illusion so beautiful. It's almost like a zen riddle, you sense that it's true, maybe even trivial, but you can also feel it slip away from your mind the moment you no longer focus (hah) on it.
Beautifully said!
Maybe it is all about dopamine, the body's reward drug for acheivement. You win, you get a dose. If you have already won, then you are just content - no dose! Therefore true happiness is found in the struggle to fulfill aspirations, biologicaly.
A question is why we fail to anticipate that the goalposts will keep moving. The solution suggested here is that we fail to do so because if we were to think about future habituation, it could dull our motivation to improve our circumstances.
An answer to the question raised may be that some of us do, and others don't, anticipate goalpost movement. I know people well past their retirement age who will likely never stop working, until they can't. I know younger people who can hardly get off the couch, or off Social Media to notice that there are any goalposts out there at all. Personaly, I welcome 'change' like a faithful old friend, and I know others who are dead scared of it. But I do get the point you have made. The question might then be 'How can we teach others to recognise, and navigate, goalpost change?' Anyways, I have been enjoying your thread, please keep it up.
There may be individual differences indeed. To explain people unmotivated to do anything, one possibility is unrealistic reference points which is a possible explanation for depression. It is the topic of my next post.
"For habituation to be effective, however, Alice must remain unaware of it"
I am quite upset that despite knowing your posts are going to rob me of this blissful ignorance, I keep reading them. Maybe some remedies in the coming posts?
That’s a good one. No blue pill, I am afraid!
Very interesting article - this ties together some important evolutionary psychology and philosophy concepts very aptly. To me the focussing illusion has always remained one of life's greatest enigmas. There is something a little disconcerting about the buddhist philosophy which is captured in the quotes at the end, however. For me, relinquishing desire in order to feel happier means we will always fall short of our potential as human beings. I don't think abandoning desire is the right approach - I think a mere appreciation of our evolutionary circuitry is enough to comfort us when we don't feel as good as we thought we would about achieving success.
I heard a great quote this morning actually: “Success is not a goal or end-destination; it is a horizon. As you take one step towards it, it moves one step further away”.
And so, in this sense, the journey is ultimately the most important. Success is an elusive concept which never truly arrives.
"relinquishing desire in order to feel happier means we will always fall short of our potential as human beings" you identify here a key issue about our hedonic system. Abandoning desires would be a possible path to happiness/contentment, but our hedonic system is designed for us to achieve our highest potential and this fact conflicts with the idea that we can easily abandon our desires. This other post addresses that exact question: https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/if-you-can-you-must-why-we-set-ever
Thanks for sharing!
My problem with all of this is that is very hard to distinguish between habituation and changes in expectation. A rating of happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 just says how happy you feel compared to some unstated judgement of how happy you should fee on average. If person A has lived in poverty for years, they might give a high number on a day when they got enough to eat. If person B takes adequate material living standards for granted, they might give a low number on a bad hair day. That needn't mean that A is actually happier, just that their expectations are lower.
This could all be situational plus age related plus a matter of individual disposition. In this world there are actually situations it is good to find oneself in. If having labored to get to such a place (satisfying job, loving family, etc.), the antidote to habituation is appreciation, and noting that things from your perspective do not seem more rewarding higher up, and may even imply some losses. In other words, the next success is not overestimated. I think myself such a person, now retired with no regrets.
I am bit stuck on the definition of "success" and how that relates to the culture that one is raised in. Buddhists (aim to relinquish desire) and Stoics (live in accordance to the 4 virtues) do not fit neatly in this overachieving sample of the population like Alice. But even in capitalist systems where markets are considered to be the solver of everything and measurement/ranking are key for markets to function, framing success is important. For instance, if we define success as trying/improving/doing VS achieving then, as long as we enjoy the activity we are engaged in, we are successful. You will probably argue that this mindset is not enough to maximise some fitness utility function (which in itself is tough to define but lets park that) but I would like to see this tested empirically.
It may be that we learn to become happy first (ie find joy in what we do and improve on that by simply being in that activity) which will then drive success (in an achievement terms), not the other way around. We can of course care about our achievements but as second-order effects that lead us to find more interesting challenges to get lost in.
I recall of an interesting debate a couple of years back when Giannis (NBA superstar) pushed back on the idea that he failed because he didn't manage to win the NBA title.
I became a Buddhist well into my years, and I am so much happier now, even though I make less money and I am in terrible health as well as being disabled. The Stoics and the Buddhists are not that far apart. In many ways knowing what matters and behaving in an honorable manner are far more important than silly identifiers of social rank. I grew up wealthy, tall and and pretty much had it made, but I was the most miserable SOB anyone could think of. Framing is everything. It feels so good to do a good job at my current public sector employer. I could have had that when I was younger working in finance, but instead I soiled the experience with expectations of a high remuneration, or even worse, higher remuneration than my peers.
Stoics and Buddhists lived life the right way. It feels better to live as an honorable man. Chasing status is a foolish game. Living with honor and embodying the hero architype feels so much better.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Garry. Buddhism and Stoicism can be thought of as ways to escape evolution’s injunctions to always strive for more, with promises of happiness that fail to materialise as the goalposts keep shifting.
The way I see it, the idea is to remove longing and desire such that you engage with the world with loving kindness. Much of it is not changing yourself as much as reimaging why you do what you do. The idea is to work hard towards worthy goals, not to strive for recognition or wealth.
Not that wealth and recognition are necessarily bad, but the act of of desiring them lessons both the act and the individual doing it. For me, the greatest personal transformation has been that I can choose how to feel. I had always been reactive, and when I realized that I was in control and chose how to feel, it made life so much easier. I could choose to react differently. It was liberating. For my entire life I had viewed situations through a false lens (he is making me mad; she makes me angry), when instead I was choosing to get upset when it was entirely possible for me to simply choose not to.
I still work hard. I still try to be a good man, but my motivations are different, and my happiness is no longer conditional on achievement, and honestly, achievement never really gave me happiness anyway. The mindset shift makes burdens lighter, and it makes choices clearer.
I have no doubt I could have come to the same place as a Christian. If anything, I cannot help but to see both as different analytics with the same goal in mind. Most of the "emptiness" or weird stuff comes from more mystical Mahayana traditions I have never really studied (Tibetan, Zen). My wife is from Thailand, and we are part of a Theravada school that is followed in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. This is an older, more traditional Buddhism (say Catholic vs Mormon compared to Theravada vs Mahayana). From my perspective, the Theravada Buddhist ideas I learn are really not all that different than many Christian ideas that believe in a covenant of works. I have even heard Christians use the term "loving kindness." I honestly do not think the parables used are that important, so long as we all are working towards a common good.
Hi Cip,
The term "success" only refers to what evolution, as a learning process, would have selected our hedonic system to achieve: fitness. As I indicated in a footnote, it does not mean people care about offspring per se. The hedonic system assignds positive values to intermediate states. The cues about these stages can be social in a social species like ours. So, it is reasonable to think that some triggers of positive feelings may vary across cultures.
In regard to your specific question on "trying/improving/doing VS achieving," trying and improving can have value as steps toward achieving. It is reasonable to expect subjective satisfaction associated with these aspects (across cultures). I have planned to write a post about this. However, it would be surprising if our hedonic system responded only to trying and not to achieving. One reason is that successful achievement contains an informative signal that we tried hard enough. An optimal incentive scheme should react to all signals that are informative about the quality of effort (Holmstrom's informativeness principle).
This explanation is compatible with Giannis pushing back against the framing of his achievements as a failure (he feels good about having tried hard enough). At the same time, he would likely be even happier to have won the NBA title for the same level of effort (rewarded by the outcome).
Firstly, thank you for engaging Lionel. I will make sure that I become a paid subscriber to make it worthwhile for you :) And I just bought your book to understand your framing better.
You are of course correct about Giannis/NBA. Professional sports is one of the best arenas where "trying to achieve" is almost the only thing that matters and "trying to enjoy" results into a stamp of not good enough etc. My example was the wrong one for the point I was trying to make.
I have been ruminating about "trying" as a driver of joy in itself vs as a step to "achieving" that, only if reached, brings joy. And about one of your thoughts above that one of the features of "achieving" which is a signal that we tried hard enough. I think where my discomfort lies is with regard to factors outside our control which get lumped in with trying hard enough which is in our control. In other words, we are incorrect to conclude that if we achieve something is because we tried hard enough. Depending on the context, there are a myriad of reasons why we got the result we wanted never only because we tried hard. I think the Stoics have a few good bits to say about control that go against our hedonic tendencies and I would argue, deep confusion about the causal chain leading to an outcome.
Thanks a lot for subscribing, Cip—much appreciated!
You said, "we are incorrect to conclude that if we achieve something, it is because we tried hard enough." That is totally right, and doing so is labelled "outcome bias." I have a paper on this. The published version is gated, but an older working paper is online. The short introduction talks about the informativeness principle and how it can be violated: https://web.archive.org/web/20190428233213id_/http://external-apps.qut.edu.au/business/documents/QuBEWorkingPapers/2017/Fooled%20by%20randomness.pdf.
An optimal incentive system needs to associate some rewards with all signals of likely positive performance. Reaching an achievement is such a signal because an agent whose incentives are not fully aligned with the principal (in a principal-agent problem) can always choose not to try enough in areas not observed by the principal. Example: Billy does not do his homework but tells his teacher he tried hard, claiming the dog ate his notebook (the teacher cannot know for sure). Susan was procrastinating at work but tells her boss there was a bug, and she lost time rewriting parts of the report (her boss cannot know for sure).
You can translate this into the context of evolution (conceived as a principal) aiming to optimally incentivise an organism (conceived as an agent) to maximise fitness. A system that rewards only trying could lead to inefficient decisions. There are plenty of ways of "trying," and some are much more efficient than others. For instance, I could spend hours copying and pasting cells in Excel, or I could write a programme that does it in a fraction of the time. A hedonic system that only rewards effort may not discriminate well between different ways of trying. Success is an observable fact that is correlated with effective effort (even though it is not a perfect predictor). This is the meaning of the quote in the paper linked above: "the outcome can be used as a signal about the action which is not directly observed" (Hölmstrom, 1979). Hölmstrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on principal-agent theory.
So success should be rewarded, even though it will sometimes reward lucky winners and sometimes penalise losers who tried their best. You are right, though, that outcome bias often occurs in the real world. It happens whenever achievement is rewarded more than its signal value.
So the idea is that rewarding "achievement" (or "success") is the appropriate way to adjudicate between "coasting" (not trying or mindlessly trying) and "sweating" (trying hard). And this system is supported by the fact that the principal does not have access to all information on the agent's behaviour to judge and, even if it did, it would still be impossible to decide if its lack of will (laziness etc) or lack of ability (intellect, experience etc). Hence, we need a proxy that's visible to the principal and that proxy is the agent's achievement. I am using principal to be equivalent with nature & agent to be a equivalent to a person. Did I summarise it correctly?
If yes, I continue to have issues with it:
1.The system does not concern itself with the way of achieving (just with achieving) and as result does not control for ethical behaviour. In the same way that Billy can lie about not doing his homework but tells his teacher that he tried hard & should be rewarded, in the same way Billy can ask his parents to write the homework and lie to the teacher that he wrote it himself & should be rewarded. In the same way that Susan was slacking but lied about the software bug, she plagiarise it from the internet and file the report under her name. You are in the world of "Fake it till you make it" / "End justify the means" which is quite prevalent from where I am sitting and not desirable for my liking.
2.Also, the system does not concern itself with the drivers of achieving and as result, among others, does not control for luck. I think luck is a key driver in everything we do, not only sometimes. This has significant implications morally in that luck is misconstrued as skill which further leads to individual moral desert for the Ayn Rand book carrying types. You can argue that the current discontent with the elites is partly driven by this illusion - that success is their own doing & the poor man's failure is also their doing.
3.You define success = maximisation of fitness = propensity of successfully rearing children = a bucket of proxies for that like health, sex-appeal, money, status, relationships etc. I think this definition is suitable in hunter gatherer times but we been attempting to reframe it post Enlightenment through moral progress. Not every KPI advancement is progress & not every advancement should be rewarded with a dopamine hit. It appears that we have evolved our technological prowess faster than we evolved biologically and as a result we have to overcome our urges through reason (in the same way that we don't eat junk food everyday despite significant & largely successful attempts of junk food makers to hijack our biology)
I continue to propose that living a successful life has to be anchored in a system of values that reframes and at times constrains our hedonic impulses with, among others, commitment to truth and ethical behaviour, concerns for nature, group inequality and second/third order effects of our technological progress etc.
Coincidently I got this from Templeton. In tune with what I am trying to describe above.
https://www.templeton.org/news/finishing-first-what-it-really-means-to-win
Watched your LSE talk as well and am in the middle of reading Optimally Irrational. Very thoughtful. I appreciate your work & while I have nuances of disagreement, it helps clarify my own thoughts.
Very interesting piece. It is not unreasonable but reflects many of the conflicting intuitions we have about happiness, how it works, and why it is mysteriously elusive. At the same time, the ideas in the piece align well with the image of the blind men and the elephant that I included in my post "The Truth About Happiness." The actual principles underlying happiness are ignored, and hence the discussion mixes a lot of elements and makes assertions that seem intuitive but are questionable or would make more sense within the framework I describe. I'll write a few more posts on the topic of happiness that will clarify how the adaptive explanation of happiness I describe relates to the ideas in that article.
Hi Cip,
You mentioned:
- The hedonic system "does not control for ethical behaviour." That is correct. However, note that the theory is not normative but merely positive (descriptive). Therefore, we should be cautious not to judge it based on ethical criteria. It is either factually correct or incorrect. It cannot be wrong factually just because it conflicts with a normative theory we have about ethics.
- "The system does not concern itself with the drivers of achieving and, as a result, does not control for luck." There was no mention of luck in my posts, but the model I present suggests that the hedonic system should indeed be concerned with whether success is due to luck or not, and it should reward, in expectation, achievements that result from decisions rather than luck. Intuitively, if something very bad happens to you but there is nothing you can do about it (e.g., an earthquake destroys your house), you may be upset about it, but not as much as if that same outcome happened because of your action (e.g., you left a candle on and it burned down your house).
- "You define success as the maximisation of fitness... this definition was suitable in hunter-gatherer times... I continue to propose that living a successful life must be anchored in a system of values that reframes and at times constrains our hedonic impulses with, among others, commitment to truth and ethical behaviour, concerns for nature, group inequality, and second/third-order effects of our technological progress, etc." The description of the hedonic system I provide merely states that it was designed to induce us to maximise fitness in an ancestral environment. It lacks normative content. It does not prescribe how people should behave or whether they should pursue pleasures or sacrifice pleasures for ethical values. This question is outside the scope of the theory I describe.
Thanks Lionel. I think your clarification that the theory is simply describing how our hedonic system has been evolved to function is helpful (VS make any claims about how it should function). The nuance I was trying to highlight is that people are not simple slaves of their biological desires (eat the junk food because you crave it) but rather operate in a value system that short circuits the biology with ideas (such as I shouldn't eat the junk food) which have causal effect on behaviour in the same way that the feeling of craving does. And hence any theory of happiness or joy or well-being would have to be sensitive to what that value system says. Or in other words, we can learn to be happy in the same way that we learnt everything else that goes against our biology.
In any case, I will look forward to your other posts on the topic.
May be there is something else at play.
Consider two populations. First with individuals having strong focussing illusion, and the second having weak focussing illusion.
The first population can be expected to be more successful in evolutionary competition. Individuals in this group will be more inclined attempt risky ventures and expend effort. Some of these ventures will succeed improving the group's aggregate fit function compared to the second group due to higher adaptivity and better risk tolerance.
It is similar to the idea of positive convexity of investment portfolios. Because of how the math works here, it's about populations rather than individuals.
Hi Michael, I am not too sure about your suggestion. The explanation of the focusing illusion here does not rely on decisions between risky gambles. It relies just on making as few errors as possible between the options chosen (and the fact that you make fewer mistakes when your utility gradient is steeper in the range of outcomes considered).
If you were to consider choices between risky gambles, evolution would favour risk neutrality (when there is not a significant risk of death). A propensity to prefer high expected value gambles (in spite of a higher variance) would then be selected for. This can explain another behavioural phenomenon: overweighting of small probabilities. It is an argument made here for instance:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825622001774
Your intuition seems to fit more with some justifications for overconfidence which can motivate us to take risk when we overestimate our chances of success. Whether overconfidence would actually be selected for this reason is not clear. I think not because there is a cost to it (I have some work on this which I'll write about in a later post).
My point was that in both populations, individuals act **independently** without any form of coordination. The focusing illusion, much like overconfidence, could lead individuals to attempt more risky ventures or dedicate greater effort toward specific goals. While many of these attempts will fail, the independent actions of a few successful individuals can result in significant gains for the population as a whole.
With positive convexity an investment portfolio benefits from high-reward outliers despite many losses. Similarly, the evolutionary advantage here arises at the population level rather than the individual level. The independent, uncoordinated actions of individuals collectively lead to a higher likelihood of adaptive breakthroughs.