Intrinsic Motivation is Authentic

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Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have been coming up in my conversations lately.  The Habit Design folks will say that only intrinsic motivation works.  If that is true, it throws a wrench into the plans of sites like Beeminder that provide people extrinsic motivation to meet their goals by charging them for defection.  I am not sure which side to take there.  Extrinsic motivation can certainly work, but it may not be preferrable.

I have had projects that languished because I didn’t find them interesting and the clients didn’t pester me for status updates.  Left to my own devices, I will only work on projects that are fun or novel.  But when clients do demand project updates, I do get motivated to work on the less fun stuff.  One friend likened this to outsourcing your boss.  Why be your own boss when you can delegate that task to someone else?  But ideally I would be able to find something intrinsically motivating about every project.  If I can’t, I should just pass it along to my associates to handle.  When we say everyone should do work that they enjoy, we are really saying that they should be intrinsically motivated to do their work.  Kurzweil said that he feels that he retired at age 5 since he loves his work.

I heard an interview on the radio with psychologist Madeline Levine a few weeks ago.  She was talking about child development and she made some interesting points about letting kids fail so that they can learn and be independent.  She also talked about teaching kids intrinsic motivation.  One example she gave was asking kids how much they learned from a test at school as opposed to focusing on what the grade was.  She calls this intrinsic motivation authentic.  That’s an unusual way to define authentic, but it makes sense.  Authentic people are more intrinsically than extrinsically motivated.  Of course the line between internal and external can get a bit fuzzy.  Much of what we value is learned from others after all.  We don’t llive in a vacuum.  But I do think that we take ownership of values and goals at some point.

One fellow I was talking with tonight brought up the Buddhist idea that desire is suffering.  Just eliminate desire and they suffering goes away.  That’s sort of like James’ equation:

Self-esteem = Success / Pretensions

As you can see, simply reducing pretensions to a low enough value can give even the biggest loser an enormous sense of self-esteem.  Which is sort of how I feel about that Buddhist idea.  Why bother with life at all if you desire nothing?  But I guess they are trying to escape from some horrid endless cycle of reincarnation or something.  That’s why I like my mindfullness stripped of all that superstitious bullshit.  But introspection might perversely be a way to discover what truly motivates us.  Now I just need to write up some more specific instructions on that and I will have a self-help best seller on my hands.

Scientific leaps of faith, how much can we trust science?

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about problems with science.  These  epistemological questions come to mind:

  • What is knowledge?
  • How is knowledge acquired?
  • To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known?

So it’s a huge elephant of a field, but I will nibble at it one bite at a time.

I should point out that I make my living as a systems engineer, so I like to distinguish between  theory and practice.  I tend to think of science as being more theoretical and engineering as being practical.  Also, I am sympathetic to the constructivists, so I tend to agree with Feynman’s “If I Can’t Build it, I Don’t Understand it.”

This question of how much faith we can put in science initially came to mind when we were asking how much we can trust medicine.  A family member had cancer and we started researching the best treatment options.  The first problem we encountered was that medicine can’t keep up with science.  i.e. doctors can’t keep up with the deluge of journal articles.  But the next problem is more germane to this discussion, namely conflict of interest.

Corporate funding of research in agriculture for example has surpassed government funding since the 1990’s.  One can certainly see why corporations would want to control the research in their respective fields given the importance of science in determining public policy. Manipulation of research can be very subtle.  It spans the range of selectively funding research that supports industry interests to setting the actual scientific standard to favor industry.  (i.e. determining methodology and setting thresholds, etc.)  I would love to hear how my libertarian friends would respond to this.  Fire away, I am moving on.

Another point worth mentioning is related to Quantified Self and self-knowledge.  I had a conversation last year with a big QS guy who was pondering the relationship between self-tracking and science. In one sense, findings from this n=1 self tracking cannot be generalized to larger populations.   But in another sense you can learn things that matter to yourself which might never be extracted from the n=many findings which average out all individual differences.  (That said, huge amounts of this n=1 data is being aggregated by sites like MedHelp and used in research.)

But my main point from the previous paragraph is that there is a lot to be learned about ourselves that is currently innaccessible to science.  Meditation might be a good example.  Science can tell you the health outcomes of meditators or measure the brain wave frequencies of meditators.  But, it can’t reveal your own individual thought patterns to yourself the way mindfulness training might.  So the knowledge provided by science is in many ways incomplete.

An anti-atheist rant I saw on a friend’s Facebook page went on about how science constrains your world view to a box and included some nice Max Planck quotes:

“Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.'”
– Max Planck

It’s just nice to be reminded of that, but I don’t want to get into it too much.  I’d rather place faith in a bunch of bickering scientists than a shaman on peyote or a pedophilic priest.  But one other point that was brought up was that scientific consensus does change over time.  And this is a good point.  We should temper the confidence we have in current findings.  Entire scientific paradigms have been routinely discarded throughout history. (Some are more stable to be sure, check out Egyptian medical procedures circa 1600 BC:  examination, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.  Pretty decent.)

But then we get into some of the current problems with how research is generated today.  Publication bias is partly (wholly?) a problem where positive results are more likely to be published than negative results.  This paper even asserts:

Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.

That’s nice.  I feel so much better about science now.

Next we come to the issue of reproducibility.  Apparantly a lot of studies are never reproduced and can’t be replicated outside the author’s lab.  It might be up to the private sector to separate the wheat from the chaff.  And according to a Bayer study from last year, they are finding plenty of chaff.  It’s easy to see that no one gets ahead in academia by replicating someone else’s work, so there are some incentive problems around that.  And who would even  publish replicated results apart from PLoS? (Serious, I am asking.  Post links in the comment section.)

Now, I do want to point out that scientists are sort of aware of this problem and there is plenty of work going on to identify bad research.   However, from arguments on Prop 87 to drawing distinctions between holism and reductionism the way Monica Anderson likes to do, I’m tending to downgrade my confidence in science lately.   But then again, my initial value was probably pretty high.  It’s not like I am going to go on a vision quest the next time I need to get new knowledge about the universe.

What is Futurism anyway?

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Tonight I attended a party to celebrate the recent marriage of a friend.  I found myself being asked over and over again: “So what is Futurism anyway?”  I couldn’t resist responding that that it was an art movement in Italy around the early 1900’s.  I do actually like a lot of futurist art.  They often tried to depict this sense of motion to capture the frenetic pace of modern life.  I am not too into the violence and fascism though.

But then I had to get serious and come up with a decent answer.  And that is why it’s a good idea to hang out with people outside your scene sometimes.  It forces to you articulate ideas that you often take for granted.  So I would say things like: Futurism is thinking about the future and wondering about what will happen.  Science Fiction is futurism.  Futurist consider the idea that technology is accelerating exponentially and ask what the consequences might be.

And a lot of people responded quite positively to this.  People feel these changes around them.  The impact of automation on jobs is becoming more evident.  We talked about the importance of education in these changing times and how budget cuts and skyrocketing college costs are putting kids into indentured servitude.  We talked about how China might come to rule the world. I trotted out my standard bearish comments regarding China’s corrupt financial system and it’s lack of transparency and rule of law.

A scientist who recently drank the Kurzweillian kool-aid and had actually visited China was part of this discussion.  He mentioned that systems with different paths to accomplish similar ends were more stable.  I took this to be an endorsement of pluralism and I complained that China’s police state doesn’t allow for this.  Another guest chimed in that top down rule can’t work and bottom up societies have more ideas.  But our newly minted Singularitarian friend countered that the Chinese rulers carefully tweak the different elements of society, allowing more freedom in certain areas and restricting it in others.  I don’t understand how this system can possibly work, but it’s hard to argue with the growth numbers.  (Well the specific numbers are probably fudged but there has clearly been lots of growth.)

I talked to another fellow who was into machine learning and who had doubts about the whole Deep Learning project that Norvig was recently crowing about at the Singularity Summit.  His opinion was that Deep Learning has been around for a while and that any recent success of the algorithms might be getting conflated with the benefits conferred by big data.  He said that other algorithms should be tested against this big data to see if they perform almost as well.  He mentioned support vector machines as one alternative, but these seem to require labeled training data, which Deep Learning doesn’t require.  So arguably, Deep Learning is nicer to have when evaluating big unlabeled data sets.  Anyway, when I asked Monica Anderson, she endorsed Deep Learning as being a thing, so I remain impressed for the time being.

My Deep Learning skeptic friend was also wary of Quantified Self.  I think his point was that over-quantification was being slowly forced upon people.  This hilarious scenario of ordering a pizza in the big data future immediately came to mind.  But as much as I love the ACLU, I don’t have much faith that they can protect us against big data.  I actually think that being into QS might better prepare people to deal with big data’s oppression.  At least QS’ers become more aware that personal data can tell a story and they are exploring how some of these stories can be self-constructed.  Hopefully this will help us navigate a future where nothing is private.

A recurring theme when thinking about the future is that humans will somehow get left behind as technological progress skyrockets beyond our comprehension.  A lot of humans are already getting left behind, economically and technologically.  Someone who can’t use search is at a massive disadvantage to everyone that can.  I try to be positive sometimes and point out that mobile devices are spreading throughout the developing world or that humans can augment to keep up with change.  But while we may live in an age of declining violence, I can see why some would still complain of sociopathic corporate actors and the policies being promoted that withdraw a helping hand from those in need.

At one point in the evening, toasts were made to the newlyweds and a passage by CS Lewis celebrating love was read.  I looked around as the various couples reacted to the emotional piece and I thought of my own girlfriend.  I thought about how we had been through death and madness.  Yet we managed to stay together, supporting one another, loving each other after all these years.  I thought about how deeply lucky we are to have one another.  I felt great happiness for these newlyweds with the courage to undertake this struggle for love.  I know us futurists can be cold, almost autistic in our dispassionate rationality, but it may well be love and empathy that will serve us best in the coming future where so little is certain.