Posts Tagged ‘critical thinking’
Chess and Motivation
To paraphrase the Great Oz, “I’m a good man, but a very bad chess player.” I can beat almost any non-serious player in a casual game, but I’m in the lower half of those of us who pay to play on the Internet Chess Server.
And yet, even though I lose a lot more than I’d like to, I enjoy the game immensely. In some sense, I like the idea of being a chess player…there’s a certain nerdy caché to the game that fits my personality. I also enjoy my occasional successes (I wouldn’t call them brilliancies) where I’ve seen just a bit farther or evaluated a position more accurately than my opponent.
My rating, the number that indicates my relative strength as compared to my fellow competitors, swings up and down within a range that runs from kind of impressive to “maybe I should go back to Candyland.” Sometimes I feel strong, like I’m concentrating well and see the outcomes of move sequences, while at other times I make the first move I see and hope I get lucky. I’m not sure why my concentration varies so much, but it’s an interesting phenomenon.
So why, if I’m not a very good serious (or even semi-serious) player, do I keep playing? What are the psychic benefits I get from banging my head against 32 pieces and 64 squares? Sure, the game’s fun in and of itself, but what specifically keeps me coming back?
I’ll address these questions in more detail in my forthcoming series of posts, but I’ll start out with a note on what my motivation is not. A friend once said, when I was furious at myself for a series of embarrassing losses, “It would be a shame for you to give up the game after you’ve put so much into it.”
She was right in a way, but her statement is an example of the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy says that the investment (of money, or time, or whatever) you’ve made in an endeavor should affect future decisions. In fact, if you have no way of reclaiming the money or time you’ve invested in something, those “expenses” should in no way affect your future decisions. All you should care about is whether future investments are worth the cost.
I keep playing, so I obviously must think it’s worth my effort to continue. Chess is a rich game, after all, one that rewards its players for their efforts beyond rating points or games won. I look forward to examining it more closely.
Performers, Releases, and Misrepresentation
I straddle two professional worlds — technology and performance. Those fields overlap in more ways than you might expect, especially when it comes to the types of contracts we’re asked to sign.
Note: I am not a lawyer. The following statements are not legal advice. If you have any legal questions about a contract or its terms, consult an attorney who is licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.
Contracts are put in place to codify an agreement between two or more parties. Almost all contracts have an “entire agreement” clause, which states that the written document is the sole representation of the agreement between the parties. That means that any side conversations, verbal agreements, or even written statements not included in the contract are non-binding and unenforceable. They don’t count. What matters is the signed document.
Because contracts matter so much, each party is motivated to negotiate an agreement that is most favorable to them. Reality television show contracts, created by the production company and to be signed by the individuals appearing on the show, are some of the most one-sided contracts available. Terms include the right of the production company to misrepresent a person’s statements, actions, or motivations for the sake of drama. I probably don’t have to tell you that this provision is slightly weighted in favor of the producers.
Recently, Maker Studios’ Polaris unit started taping footage for GAME_JAM, a reality show intended to run on YouTube. The show was set up as a team competition (like Top Chef or The Amazing Race), so there was some tension to the scenario. Polaris offered one-sided contracts to potential participants, with mixed results: some people signed them, some negotiated better deals, and some refused to sign but were allowed to participate anyway. That last consideration is telling…would the show have gone forward without their participation? Were not enough qualified programmers interested?
The GAME_JAM project came to a crashing halt when a production company employee attempted to create controversy by asking if teams with female programmers were at a disadvantage. After one day, the individuals who were not under contract walked away from the project, forcing it to shut down.
The lesson for employees, independent contractors, and performers is obvious. You can decide which projects to take on and under what circumstances. If you’re offered a contract, have a lawyer or (if you’re a performer) an agent look it over and get their advice on how to make it better. Yes, you have to pay for their services, but it’s often worth it. If you don’t have an agent when you’re offered a role, don’t worry. If you approach an agent with a contract offer in hand, you are giving them a shot at 15% (or the rate you negotiate) of a relatively sure thing. Even if it’s just for that single deal, having an experienced attorney or agent on your side gives you leverage and removes you from the negotiations, allowing you to concentrate on your performance.
And you can always walk away.
Law and Magic: Revealing the Links
I had the very good fortune to speak at the Law and Magic: Revealing the Links conference, co-hosted by the Law and Humanities Institute and the Thomas Jefferson School of Law last Friday in beautiful San Diego. The conference was organized by Professors Christine Corcos of the LSU Law Center and Julie Cromer Young of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Licensed attendees could earn up to 6.5 hours of CLE credit.
As the conference’s name implies, the day’s presentations were about how the art and practice of the law intersects and interacts with the art and practice of magic and what Professor Corcos called the “crafty sciences.” I had the good fortune to perform a 30-minute show over lunch. Later in the afternoon, my presentation Rhetorical Mathematics examined how performers and lawyers can use and abuse math to further their arguments. Practitioners of both arts have a wide range of confusion-inducing techniques from which to choose: misstating probabilities, relying on unspoken assumptions, pulling numbers out of thin air, and many others.
I think my paper went over pretty well. I covered probability calculations that went beyond simple liability calculations such as the Hand Rule articulated in United States vs. Carroll Towing, so there was some head scratching at times. The most fun for me was when I presented the Monty Hall Paradox, which describes the math behind the game played at the end of Monty’s show Let’s Make a Deal. The idea of the game is that Monty displays three doors, two of which hide a losing choice, such as a goat, and the third a prize such as a new car. You start the game by choosing one of the doors. Once you do, Monty (who knows where the car is) opens a losing door. You can then either stay with your original choice or switch.
The question for you: does it matter whether you switch or stay? If so, what are your chances of winning for either strategy?
Use a Premortem to Anticipate Problems
Any time you advocate change, you should expect to encounter resistance. There are, after all, vested interests in maintaining the status quo. That’s as true for improv groups as it is for any other type of organization. One way you can reduce the disruption caused by these objections is to anticipate them and prepare responses.
To anticipate these problems, you can do a premortem where you probe a plan for every possible point of weakness. This is where you can release your negativity: Think of every possible way someone could object to your plan, how things could go wrong, whether your assumptions could be called into question, and whether the projected benefits are realistic.
There are two benefits to this exercise. The first, as I mentioned, is that you anticipate potential problems and can develop responses. If you can’t develop a good answer to an objection, perhaps you should put off your presentation. The second benefit is that it helps detach team members from the proposal on an emotional level. Once you think of all the ways something could go wrong, you are much less likely to see it as a perfect plan. Doing so lets you receive criticism objectively, and answer without your emotions taking hold.
Remember that decision-makers prefer to operate on an analytical level, even when they are selling products or political candidates to their target demographic on pure emotion. If you present your analysis and let your persuasive techniques season what you say, you’ll be that much closer to making your plan a reality.
Spend a Five or Break a Twenty? The Denomination Effect
I’m sure many of us understand the denomination effect on a visceral level. If you’ve ever been in a store, saw something you wanted, but hesitated to buy it because you’d have to pull out a big bill, you’ve experienced this effect. Why did you hesitate? Because you knew that breaking that $20, $50 or $100 bill made it that much easier to spend your change.
Perhaps that’s why prices near a dollar amount, particularly $4.99, $9.99, $19.99, and $99.99 are so attractive to the consumer’s eye. You’re trading one physical item (a printed piece of paper) for another (perhaps a flash drive) and getting a tiny bit of money back. I wonder how much of the attractiveness of prices just below a currency denomination depends on the fact that you’re getting some change back as opposed to the first number being one less (e.g., $19.99 versus $20.00). I bet the two phenomena are intertwined in some interesting psychological ways.
You also see the denomination effect at work in gambling, but the effect works differently there depending on the game and situation. Knowledgeable poker players experience the reverse effect, becoming less likely to get involved in hands when they have fewer chips in their stack. They hesitate to invest in a hand because, when you are low on funds, the relative value of each chip goes up. Other players can use this hesitancy to their advantage and bet big to drive the small stacks out of a pot, but the small stacks can make a modest bet to induce a bluff raise from a big stack, but the big stacks can raise and hope the small stacks will think they’ve fallen into their trap, but…
You get the idea. Poker’s fun, but bring aspirin.
Test what you know, but avoid congruence bias
A few posts ago I discussed confirmation bias, where individuals interpret everything they experience as reinforcing their existing beliefs. It’s not surprising that humans fall prey to this trap. We have to make sense of our surroundings, so we develop mental models to do so. They’re our models, based on our mental, so it’s no surprise we think highly of them.
No model of the world can capture all of its complexity. We can model industrial processes at a certain level, but we can’t get all the way down to the interactions of individual atoms. Fortunately, we don’t have to to generate accurate depictions of reality. As statistician George E. P. Box noted, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Many humans realize they will move through life more effectively by testing and updating their mental models, but you need to test your model correctly. If you test your mental models and other hypotheses through direct testing, rather than testing possible alternative models, you are experiencing congruence bias. You’re testing your model, which is great, but you’re not entertaining other ways of approaching the problem, which is not so great. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that scientists work within a paradigm, which is the dominant framework for creating, testing, and determining hypotheses at a given time. When experimental results aren’t as expected, scientists can either work to shore up the existing paradigm or create a new one.
My wife, Virginia Belt, is a director and formerly taught acting at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She emphasizes the need for actors to try different tactics to get what they want. Think of the young child who tries everything he can think of to have you buy him a treat at the grocery store or the cat that really, really (really) wants a piece of sausage from your pizza. You can take the same approach to life. If you find your model isn’t working well any more, such as after a promotion at work, joining a new improv group or entering into a new relationship, try different tactics to see what does work. Ginny always exhorts her students to make positive choices, to focus on what they want rather than what they don’t want. If you call Domino’s and say you don’t want anchovies, you’ll either get no pizza because you haven’t given them enough information or get a pizza that costs $50 because it has every other available topping on it.
As anyone who has ever tried anything new well knows, individuals who break away from the pack meet a lot of resistance. Having the strength to break out of congruence bias at a personal level is tough — having the strength to do it in the face of a tenure board is even tougher. Let’s leave the paradigmatic fights for the professionals and focus on our own world views for a while. We’ll be better off in the end.
When You’re “Due” — The Gambler’s Fallacy
I travel to Las Vegas once or twice a year, both to play poker (where I convince myself I have an advantage) and to dabble in other games (where I definitely don’t). Since 1993, when I started playing while on the East Coast, I’ve seen thousands of players succumb to the insidious gambler’s fallacy.
Let’s say you’re playing roulette and notice, as posted on the so very helpful display by the wheel, that five red numbers have come up in a row. Is black due? What about green (0/00)? The answer is neither. Roulette wheels are well-balanced and the little obstacles spread around the wheel, called canoes in casino parlance, make outcomes random enough to be considered independent trials. If red numbers come up five times in a row, the next number will be red 18/38 of the time, black 18/38 of the time, and green 2/38 of the time. Ironically, it’s our human urge to discover patterns that makes the gambler’s fallacy work. The wheel has no memory, but we do.
The bottom line is that when you play roulette, the proportion of red, black, and green numbers will tend toward the target ratios over millions of spins and the weighted payoffs will ensure the house earns its profit over the long run. But what about games like poker? Poker is a skill game with a healthy dose of luck thrown in, so trials aren’t truly independent. Inferior players beat better players over the short term, but only because of luck. But what happens when equal players face off?
It’s hard to find players of the same skill level at a poker table, but I tested the theory by replicating an experiment described by poker author Lou Krieger. Like Lou, I set up ten identical players in Wilson Software’s Turbo Texas Hold’em simulation mode and let them play hundreds of millions of hands against each other. Six of the ten players were just above or below breaking even, but there were two big winners and two big losers. Remember that each player followed an identical strategy — the only factor controlling their fate was the luck of the draw.
As human beings trying to extract a living from an indifferent universe, we must realize that the odds are not always in our favor and that we will go through bad streaks we can’t seem to reverse. At these times it pays to strengthen your base by learning new skills or practicing old ones, reinforcing friendships, reaching out to others for help, and offering assistance where you can. Doing these things doesn’t constitute “good karma” or “putting things out into the universe”, both dubious concepts. What you are doing is improving the chances you’ll be ready to take advantage of opportunities that you and your contacts discover.
Improspectives 
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