Please watch this TED talk by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate.  In economics and other fields, people have been trying to measure happiness–how happy are various groups, how happy countries are compared to one another.  I’ve seen Economist articles about quantifying happiness, like The Joyless or the Jobless (Nov 2010).

Kahneman deconstructs this quantification by saying the issue’s more complicated: do you care about happiness in the moment or do you care about happiness remembered?

His presentation addresses people’s fundamental assumptions about who they are.  We have two sides: an experiencing self, who lives only in the moment; and a remembering self, who feasts on what we (remember we) have done in the past.  The remembering self, for almost everyone, is the dominant one–it makes the decisions about what we should do next.

Our local public radio station, WFDD, has several HD radio stations, including one that plays a lot of “xPonential Radio.”  When we lived in Raleigh I got spoiled listening to WKNC, NC State’s student-run radio station that would play lesser-known modern music; WFDD’s HD radio station #3 is the closest I get to WKNC over the air here in Winston-Salem.

Anyways, one of the songs on xPonential Radio’s playlist is “Video Games” by Lana Del Rey (see embedded video).  I really, really like how this song sounds, and as I’ve listened more I really appreciate its lyrics.  (Note: in the below analysis I’m assuming this song is about a woman and her boyfriend, but the song doesn’t explicitly say the partner is male.)

The song has an epic quality, in its orchestration and in Lana Del Rey’s voice.  In its sound and its video it echos the 1950s and 1960s.

For me, there’s a jarring effect.  Ostensibly the song’s lyrics are about a fawning woman who would do anything for the man she’s with.  The 1950s/60s theme, and Lana Del Rey’s voice, reinforce that literal reading: a totally submissive woman.

However, you can also read the song as an undercutting of that theme: that the singer understands her boyfriend doesn’t respect her or value her as a person, and understands that’s his loss not hers.  In this opposition to the primary message the singer is detached and doesn’t care about her boyfriend.

There’s possibly a third level of interpretation, too, that the singer is staying in the relationship because society believes the world is only worth living in if someone’s loving you, and her actions make him love her, although he doesn’t realize that she doesn’t love him back.

She sings about how one-sided the relationship is: he whistles for her and she comes.  He wants her to play video games with her.  (I hear this as “oh, you’re here–hey watch me play video games.”)    She wears his favorite perfume and dress and does everything that he wants.

In the second verse, when she sings about being in his arms while he’s drunk, it reminds me of My Papa’s Waltz (poem) by Theodore Roethke, a poem about an abusive father and his complex relationship with his child played out as they dance while the dad’s drunk.

I think the turning line for “Video Games,” or the line that for me reinforces this reading of the song, is

I heard you liked the bad girls, honey / Is that true? / It’s better than I even knew

She’s said, openly, that she wants to know everything he likes, and she has to find out from someone else that he likes bad girls.  This is particularly ironic because everything else in the song implies he wants a totally subservient (“good”) girlfriend.  I think “It’s better than I even knew” is her acknowledging the irony and laughing or enjoying how her boyfriend is so unaware of others that he doesn’t realize the contradiction.

For example, let’s say that Alice and Bob are in a meeting trying to make a decision about where to go to eat lunch.  Alice may tend not to think about the future, so she recommends bean burritos.  Bob is thinking about the future (specifically, the level of ventilation in their shared working area) and may recommend a lunch that’s less likely to produce side effects later.

Or, let’s say Alice and Bob are deciding whether to invest in company A or company B.  Alice may remember that five years ago company A made a really bad judgment call, and Bob may not remember (or care).

Or, let’s say Alice and Bob are deciding whether to build a lamp that’s powered by phone lines.  Alice may want to go ahead, but Bob may resist because he thinks phone lines may go away in a few years.

When we’re making decisions, or trying to communicate with other people, I think a big assumption each party makes is that we’re thinking over the same time horizons.  At work I may resist us going in a certain direction because I believe that five years from now a particular type of technology will no longer exist.  Someone else at the table may want to go forward, because they know the technology would be useful now.  The conversation is frustrating for both sides because we’re taking past one another–my point, although perhaps true, is not relevant for someone who’s more focused on today.  The other person wants to make people happy now, but four years from now we might be in a pickle.

I’d like to posit some factors that might lead to different time horizons:

• how accurate you feel your mental models are for the situation–do you feel comfortable projecting what will happen in the future?
• along those lines, how much experience do you have with this type of situation?  how much have your mental models been validated/adjusted by experience?
• how detail-oriented are you? the more details you care about, the more difficult it may be to approximate the future
• to what extent is past performance an indicator of future results?
• related to that, is the thing you’re doing today/this week/this month seem cyclical?  can you project what might happen in the future because it’s a pattern?

This immediately leads me to a couple of tentative conclusions:

• very, very few people are going to be good at retirement planning until retirement is really close, because you just don’t have the “time horizon”–few people have any idea what it looks like to be retired before they’re retired, and except in rare circumstances (like if you’re a retirement fund manager) you’re not going to get any practice by which to improve
• someone who tends to “pattern-match,” or look for similarities between things, would probably have a longer time horizon.  For example, if you work in retail and see each customer as a different person with their own unique needs, that’s great, but your job is going to seem more like past performance (past customers) are no indicator of future results (future customers).  However, if you work in retail and you see customers as more or less the same with variations, it may be easier for you to extrapolate to what next week’s business might look like
• experience could help with extending your time horizons IF you are good at building better and better mental models through that experience

Kathryn Schultz gave a TED talk recently called “Don’t regret regret” (embedded here).  She discusses the characteristics of regret, and how regret leads to growth, set against a culture that encourages us to avoid regret and to live without regrets.

When I think about regret, I think about a Zen koan that Wikpedia calls the “Wild fox koan.”  Briefly, my  limited understanding of this koan is that the head of a monastery answered a student’s question in such a way that he was reborn as a wild fox for 500 lifetimes.  (Presumably, the answer he gave was not sufficient.)  After the 500 lifetimes he asked the current head of the monastery the question he’d been stumped on, and presumably receives a sufficient answer because he is done being reincarnated.

After the koan, there is a commentary on the koan that says the former head of the monastery enjoyed 500 happy blessed lives as a fox.  The commentary is followed by a poem:

Not falling, not ignoring:

Odd and even are on one die.

Not ignoring, not falling:

Hundreds and thousands of regrets!

The “hundreds and thousands of regrets!” line has been jarring to me, because everything up until that point seems like it’s worked out for the best. But, listening to Kathryn Schultz, I think that may be part of the point of the koan: everything did work out for the best.

Update 12/12/11: restructured post, added a little context to the koan.

Although we may think we know what’s going on around us, our brain is guessing.  We don’t get much input from our senses to tell us, for example, what’s physically behind us, but we have a pretty good guess that if there was a Christmas tree behind me 5 minutes ago the Christmas tree is probably still there.

I’d like to call our brain guessing about the world our “mental models.”  I have a mental model of the room that I’m in, that helps me pretend in my brain that I know what’s going on in this room, what will go on, and what has gone on.  If I can be computer-y about it, it’s like I have a function

f_downstairslivingroom(state)

where I can guess, based on a state (e.g. night-time, no one’s at home) that I know what’s going on in the downstairs living room, or at least the boundaries around what’s going on in that room.  (In my mental model for this room there could be cats clawing our couches, or a robber, or nothing, but there’s probably not a clown dancing.)  In a similar way of guessing what’s going on, I may have a mental model for our cat Fred:

f_fredthecat(state)

where I can guess what our cat Fred might be doing based on what’s going on (e.g. how much food is left in the bowl, whether there’s a Christmas tree).

A few years ago, f_fredthecat(Christmas Tree) would have yielded in my brain “Fred is probably climbing the Christmas tree.”  He really liked climbing our Christmas trees and could climb two or three feet off the ground.  Now, though, he’s older, and f_fredthecat(Christmas Tree) tends to yield “I may find pine needles in the litterbox.”  My brain’s mental model for Fred f_fredthecat changed as a reflection of a change in Fred.

Minds tend to like guessing about what’s going on in the world, and I’d bet we each have hundreds of thousands of mental models.  For example right now I have mental models like…

• f_myhomelaptopcomputer: this laptop’s plugged in and charging, its brightness is near maximum, its hard drive has plenty of space, it’s been backed up recently by Time Machine
• f_jeans: my jeans are dry, they are comfortable
• f_kitchensink: the kitchen sink is probably dripping right now although I can’t see it or hear it
• f_weddingpotteryplate: the plate made by a family friend at our wedding is still balanced on our plate rail (I can see it), and even though it’s been there for several years I am still convinced it will fall soon
• f_highchair: the high chair’s wheels are locked in place (untested)
• f_workbuilding: Six months ago I would have thought our work building was empty.  Three months ago I went in at this time of night and saw a cadre of custodians cleaning and vacuuming, so now I’ll guess there are probably lots of people cleaning up.

All of these things are guesses–possibly very educated guesses, but they are guesses.  Although my laptop charging light is on, it is theoretically possible that power is not actually going into my computer.  (Aside: Can you tell I don’t understand how charging a battery works?)  As another example of a possibly false guess, although my jeans feel dry they could be getting wet and I haven’t noticed yet.

There are a couple of challenging things for me about mental models:

• They are not real.  I think I know all these things, and that I know what’s going on around me, due to a small number of observations and a LOT of historical experience, reading, similar things, etc..  All of these mental models are reduced/simplified versions of reality.  The kitchen sink may have stopped dripping–it’s unlikely but possible.  The high chair’s wheels may be crawling with ants.
• These models are unique to each person.  You may have a well developed mental model for how cakes bake in an oven.  Someone else, say a professional baker, may have another mental model.  These two expert models are probably very, very close to one another but they likely have small differences based in the different experiences of each person.  Yet we talk about “baking a cake” as if we all shared exactly the same mental model.
• The models improve with interactions.  The more I’ve worked with something, the more experience I have, and the better understanding/guessing I can do in my mental model for the thing.  However (see next bullet)…
• Past performance is no indicator of future results.  Just because the high chair has never exploded, does not mean it definitely will not explode.  My mental model does not account for the possibility that the high chair might explode.

The importance of first impressions

Mental models get really interesting for me when it comes to “new” things.  When I encounter something new, I search through my existing mental models to find an approximate match for the new thing.  For example, when I see a new chair, my brain searches through my mental models to find…

• f_giantofficechair

• f_uncomfortablechair

• f_paddedchair

• f_chairsthatcatssiton

• ...

In other words, all of the different types of ways that I think chairs might work.  Then, when I sit down, I narrow down the range and eventually create a new mental model for this new chair that’s a mix of all my past experiences plus what I start to perceive.  Certainly, this is all done subconsciously, and is part of why I get surprised if the chair falls apart when I sit on it.  If that happened to me all the time, it would be part of my mental model.  Instead, if a chair fell apart when I sat on it my consciousness would wake up–”what the heck just happened?!”–and also my mental models for all chairs would change to include the possibility that the chair might fall apart.

Take all that and apply it to people.  I think that first impressions when meeting people are so important because you are sizing up the new person against all your other mental models of people.  You’re asking yourself who this new person is similar to.  This new person is “30% my eighth-grade teacher, 5% my best friend, and 65% that guy that punched me in the face.”  After more experience interacting with the person, that model would be refined, and maybe those foundational models are questioned–”oh, this person isn’t like my best friend at all”–but that mental model I’ve applied to the new person is, in my mind, actually that person, and it takes a good deal of work to realize my mental model was off.

On Guessing Effectively

So although mental models have lots of faults (such as being a poor caricature of reality although people think of them as reality), mental models are certainly useful.  They are the way our brain makes sense of the world.  I would guess that our brain has a core “function,” something like:

process_observation(observation, mental_models)

where when we observe something with one of our senses, that observation is filtered through our mental models, but then might update our mental models.  For example,

process_observation("I physically feel uncomfortable", {f_bed,...})

I feel uncomfortable laying on this bed, which reinforces my mental model about our bed, that it has an old mattress and needs to be replaced.  Or,

process_observation("I heard a squeaky noise", {f_bed,...})

if I heard a squeaky noise, I might guess it’s a bed spring popping, even if something totally different squeaked.

Basically I’m trying to say that as we hear, see, smell, taste, touch, or think things, these observations go through the filter of our mental models, but then have the chance to update or change our mental models.  We could perceive things “incorrectly” if our starting mental models are bad, or we could make poor conclusions based on how good we are at making better guesses.  All this to say, you have a big advantage if you are pretty good at updating your mental models from processing observations.  And you have a huge disadvantage if your mental models are so bad that you aren’t able to see they’re wrong and invalidate them based on observations incorrectly filtered through those bad mental models.

The better you are at guessing how things work and inferring how they work from your limited observations, questioning your mental models when they don’t make sense, the better you’ll do at approximating reality.  You will be able to make more lasting inferences and “predict the future.”  Mental models are not reality, but if you have skill at developing accurate mental models quickly then you will be “ahead” of reality getting your observations confirmed rather than running into input that contradicts what you think.

I have a “systems approach” to games, which I think means that I play them to understand the game dynamics.  However, although I’ve played for a while I am not an expert–as you’ll see below, this game is designed so that you could spend months of solid effort trying to understand how the game works.  This game is a trap for systems thinkers.

KoL is a “free, comical RPG.”  You can be one of six character classes: two are muscle-types, two are mysticality-types, and two are moxie-types.  For example, one myst class is a “Sauceror” that can cast spells like “Stream of Sauce.”  You have three corresponding primary stats, Muscle, Myst, and Moxie.

There are two big signals that this game is complex:

1. It has a wiki, TheKolWiki, that currently has 8,599 wiki page entries including a chart of the best food to eat by main stat gain.  (Side note, “old school” wikis such as the original WikiWiki used StudlyCaps to indicate wiki pages.  I am guessing it is not a coincidence that TheKolWiki is written in StudlyCaps.) 
2. There exists a front-end client, KoLMafia.  KoLMafia is designed for advanced players.  It automates many parts of the game such as adventuring, crafting materials, and shopping.