Progress Daily

The results of a 20-year research project are described in Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know?. The idea was to solicit thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then score the predictions for accuracy.

Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers.

Between 1985 and 2005, boomsters made 10-year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g., a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g., tranquility in the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.

In the same period, doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters accentuated the positive, plus several more (e.g., the disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time.

Over-claimers rarely paid penalties for being wrong. Indeed, the media showered lavish attention on over-claimers while neglecting their humbler colleagues.

Following Isaiah Berlin, we classify experts as “hedgehogs” or “foxes.” Hedgehogs are big-idea thinkers in love with grand theories: libertarianism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc.

Hedgehogs don’t know when to make concessions to other points of view. They take their theories too seriously. They make more mistakes, but they get more attention.

Foxes are better at curbing their ideological enthusiasms. They are comfortable with protracted uncertainty about who is right even in bitter debates, conceding gaps in their knowledge and granting legitimacy to opposing views. They sprinkle their conversations with linguistic qualifiers that limit the reach of their arguments: “but,” “however,” “although.”

Foxes make fewer mistakes. They will often agree with hedgehogs up to a point, before complicating things.

Foxes balance conflicting arguments and often conclude that the likeliest outcome is more of the same.

“How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?,” by Philip E. Tetlock

More than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, “How can you tell when people are lying?” The number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze.

And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn’t correlated with lying at all, studies have shown. Liars don’t shift around or touch their noses or clear their throats any more than truth tellers do.

There is no unique telltale signal for a fib.

By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars’ voices can become more tense or high-pitched. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details.

“Their stories are too good to be true,” says Bella DePaulo

On average, over hundreds of laboratory studies, participants distinguish correctly between truths and lies only about 55% of the time.

“Deception Detection,” by Carrie Lock

In 2002 Robert S. Feldman of the University of Massachusetts secretly videotaped students who were asked to talk with a stranger. He later had the students analyze their tapes and tally the number of lies they had told. 60% admitted to lying at least once during 10 minutes of conversation, and the group averaged 2.9 untruths in that time period. The transgressions ranged from intentional exaggeration to flat-out fibs. Men and women lied with equal frequency; women were more likely to lie to make the stranger feel good, whereas men lied most often to make themselves look better.

In another study a decade earlier by David Knox, 92% of college students confessed that they had lied to a current or previous sexual partner. Men are prone to lie exaggerate about the number of their sexual conquests. Recent research shows that women tend to underrepresent their degree of sexual experience. When asked to fill out questionnaires on personal sexual behavior and attitudes, women wired to a dummy polygraph machine reported having had twice as many lovers as those who were not, showing that the women who were not wired were less honest.

The Homo sapiens who are best able to lie have an edge over their counterparts in a relentless struggle for the reproductive success that drives the engine of evolution. And lying to ourselves–a talent built into our brains–helps us accept our fraudulent behavior.

The mirror orchid displays beautiful blue blossoms that are dead ringers for female wasps. The flower also manufactures a chemical cocktail that simulates the pheromones released by females to attract mates. The orchid’s fakery is built into its physical design, because over the course of history plants that had this capability were more readily able to pass on their genes than those that did not.

When approached by an erstwhile predator, the harmless hog-nosed snake flattens its head, spreads out a cobralike hood and, hissing menacingly, pretends to strike with maniacal aggression, all the while keeping its mouth discreetly closed.

Research shows that liars are often better able to get jobs and attract members of the opposite sex into relationships. Several years later Feldman demonstrated that the adolescents who are most popular in their schools are also better at fooling their peers.

“Why do we lie, and why are we so good at it? Because it works,” by David Livingstone Smith

Pick two decent options and flip a coin.

Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice documents numerous studies in which thinking too hard about multiple choices leads people to preemptively regret the options they’re going to miss out on. This triggers a stress reaction that tends to focus narrowly on random variables — producing unwise decisions and paralysis. Those who seize the first option that meets their standards (which don’t have to be low, just defined) are happier than those who insist on finding the perfect solution.

Don’t be a lawyer.

Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful. For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a common feature of the legal system).

Don’t dwell on your childhood.

Martin Seligman’s research suggests that rehashing events that enraged you long ago tends to produce depression rather than sweet closure and relief.

Ask for advice.

In multiple studies, subjects felt they’d be better able to predict their reaction to an experience by imagining it, rather than hearing somebody else’s testimony. Even regarding such seemingly straightforward activities as deciding whether to eat pretzels or potato chips, they were wrong.

Don’t have children.

Surveys of parents invariably find a clear dip in happiness after childbirth, which continues unabated for twenty years — bottoming out during adolescence — and only returns to pre-birth levels when the child finally leaves home.

Turn off the TV.

Seligman cites research indicating that children who develop hobbies and interests besides loitering and watching TV are much more likely to be satisfied later in life.

Get a steady job.

Some poor countries (China, Brazil) are happier than others, but few nations are mired in spiritually fulfilling poverty. Money, when used to feel secure about your ability to shelter and feed yourself, can, in fact, buy happiness.

Don’t work more than necessary.

The marginal life-enhancing value of each extra dollar quickly levels off; lottery winners are no more likely to be satisfied than anyone else.

Socialize within your tax bracket.

Being aware of how much less money one has acquired than one’s peers is quantifiably frustrating.

Join a church or a community group.

People who have more friends and belong to community-building groups are happier.

Do something less-bad last.

Adding a slightly less grueling epilogue to a grueling but valuable experience — like a workout or medical procedure — makes you more willing to repeat it in the future, even if it means an increase in the overall gruel endured.

Drink in moderation.

The ability to limit one’s indulgence is one of the baseline characteristics of happy people.

“Happiness: A User’s Manual” by Ben Mathis-Lilley

Smarter people aren’t any happier, but those who drink in moderation are. Attractive people are slightly happier than unattractive people. Men aren’t happier than women, though women have more highs and more lows. Older people report slightly higher levels of life satisfaction and fewer dark days than do the young.

Ed Diener determined that those on the Forbes 100 list in 1995 were only slightly happier than the American public as a whole.

According to Daniel Gilbert, every bit of data says children are an extreme source of negative affect, a mild source of negative affect, or none at all. It’s hard to find a study where there’s one net positive.

Nebraskans think that Californians are happier, but a study done by Daniel Kahneman suggests they aren’t. In a 2003 poll by the Roper organization, the Danes, the Americans, and the Australians rated themselves the happiest. Other polls have found the Swiss happiest, and the Canadians always do well. Compared with their purchasing power, Latin and South Americans are much happier than one would imagine, and the Japanese are less so. And every survey agrees on one point: That the people of Eastern European nations - Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Belarus, and Bulgaria - consistently rank themselves the least happy, with Russia coming in especially low. Yet people in the happiest countries are more likely to kill themselves.

We tend to mistake our present feelings for future ones, which is why, when we decide to marry the right person, we find it unthinkable we’ll ever be tempted to sleep with anyone else. We’re more likely to take a positive view of things we did than things we didn’t, more comfortable with decisions we can’t reverse than ones we can, and more apt to make the best of a terrible situation than a merely annoying one.

Those who are permanently injured say they’d be willing to pay far less to undo their injuries than able-bodied people say they’d pay to prevent them.

Being surrounded by friends and family is one of the most crucial determinants of our well-being.

Economists call those who seek out the best options in life “maximizers.” And maximizers, in practically every study, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do (”satisficers”).

Sheena Iyengar examined speed dating, and found that women who sat at smaller tables of potential mates were inclined to go on second dates 50% of the time, but if the group got bigger, they followed up on only a third of the candidates (though the men remained content to follow up on 50% no matter how big the sample).

Disparities in income make people miserable.

Twin studies suggest that roughly 50% of our affect is determined by genetics.

“There’s no credible evidence that dispositional optimism is changeable,” says Julie Norem. “And the research shows that it’s dispositional optimism that makes your life better.”

One of Norem’s studies involved giving anagrams to solve to both optimists and pessimists, first listening to Mozart, then listening to a dirge. The pessimists did better when they were listening to the dirge.

In one study, a group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none - the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35% of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100% helpless.

“Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness,” by Jennifer Senior

Pop culture idolizes the hit. Companies devote themselves to creating them because the cost of distribution and the limits of shelf space in physical shops mean that profitability depends on a high volume of sales. But around the beginning of this century a group of internet companies realised that with endless shelves and a national or even international audience online they could offer a huge range of products.

Expressed in the language of statistics, products down in the “long tail” of a statistical distribution, added together, can be highly profitable.

The internet helps people find their way to relatively obscure material with recommendations and reviews by other people computer programs which analyse past selections.

Television, film and music are such bewitching media in their own right that many people are happy to watch and listen to what the mainstream provides. But if individuals have the opportunity to pick better, more ideally suited entertainment from a far wider selection, they will take it. Entire populations might become happier and wiser once they have access to thousands of documentaries, independent films and sub-genres of every kind of music, instead of being subjected to lowest-common-denominator fare.

The tools of media production — computers, desktop printers, video cameras — are now so widely and cheaply available that a generation of young people are becoming amateur journalists, commentators, film-makers and musicians in their spare time. Amateurs offering their work free of charge will contribute a significant portion of the long tail, so at the very end there will be a “non-monetary economy.”

“What the long tail will do,” The Economist’s review of The Long Tail

Tim Armstrong, Google’s advertising boss in North America, says that traditionally most firms would advertise only 5% to 10% of their wares — the blockbusters — in the mass media to publicise their brand, hoping that it shines a halo on the remainder of their products. Now, however, “companies market each individual product in that big digital stream,” from the best seller to the tiniest toothbrush. This is called exploiting the economics of the “long tail.”

They do this, first, because the internet, in effect, eliminates scarcity in the medium. There are as many web pages for advertisers as there are keywords that can be typed into a search engine, situations that game players might find themselves in, and so forth. Each one comes with its own context, and almost every context suits some product. The second reason is that if you can track the success of advertising, especially if you can follow sales leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-center, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in making more profit.

In the traditional media, advertisers are always “trying to block the stream of information to the user” in order to “blast their message” to him. In American prime-time television, advertising interruptions added up to 18 minutes an hour last year, up from 13 minutes an hour in 1992, according to Parks Associates. On the internet, by contrast, advertisers have no choice but to “go with the user.”

“The ultimate marketing machine,” The Economist

There was a Fundamentalist Futurist back in the 1890s who demonstrated that New York City would be abandoned as unfit for habitation by the 1930s. His argument was based on projection forward of population trends, and he correctly estimated that population would grow from 4 million to over 7 million in 40 years. (He didn’t guess it would reach over 12 million by now.) It was then obvious, he said, that the amount of horses necessary to provide transportation for that many people would result in a public health hazard of incredible dimensions: there would be horse manure up to the third floor windows everywhere in Manhattan.

This illustrates the most frequent fallacy found in Future projections: the “elementalistic fallacy” named by Alfred Korzybski. The elementalistic fallacy as Korzybski noted, seems to be built into our very language. We can talk about Joe Smith in isolation from his (or any) environment; we can therefore think about Mr. Smith in such fictitious isolation; and in such “elementalistic fallacy” we will always draw wrong conclusions, because Mr. Smith cannot exist without some environment.

Projecting population forward without projecting other factors forward has produced numerous elementalistic fallacies similar to thinking of Joe Smith without an environment. Malthus, for instance, “proved” that population will always increase faster than resources, but this was disproven by technological history, and we now understand that “resources” only exist when identified by analysis and each new discovery in pure science shows us new resources everywhere.

One example: the Newtonian system allowed us to tap 0.001 per cent of the energy in a glass of water; 19th Century thermodynamics showed us how to tap 0.01 per cent of that energy; we can now tap 1.0 per cent. Nobody knows how much we’ll be able to tap in 50 years.

“Chaos and Beyond,” by Robert Anton Wilson

Rhesus monkeys are hierarchical status-seekers who bond in roaming, all-male packs post-puberty.

“If you knock a monkey down in status, its serotonin levels fall,” says Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. So being part of the group is part of our biological heritage. “It’s probably particularly relevant for young men between the ages of 16 and 26.”

In discussing the emotional urges of adolescence, Marc Lewis, professor of human development and applied psychology at U of T, refers to the “chemical fuel of the brain” — its neuromodulator systems. “Your goals and plans and urges get charged up,” says Lewis. “However, development of the prefrontal cortex, especially the more dorsal part, is not complete.”

What that means is that the “good sort of high-level thinking-ahead stuff” — planning, preparing, comparing different outcomes, adjusting strategies — doesn’t finish maturing until the individual reaches his early 20s. The delay in the maturation of boys puts them, “to the extent that we know,” says Lewis, about two years behind girls.

“Lost Boys,” by Jennifer Wells

Democracy doesn’t mean liberty.

For example, if it weren’t for the Turkish military, voters probably would have voted in favor of making Turkey a theocracy by now. But the generals have made it clear that they won’t abide by any reversal of Turkey’s secular state. By standing against the democratic will of the people, the Turkish military has stood with the forces of liberty.

Adam Przeworski studied every attempted transition to democracy around the globe, and found that once a country passes $6,000 in per capita income it is virtually guaranteed to succeed in its transition to democracy. States between $3,000 and $6,000 have less than a 50-50 chance of staying democracies. And countries below $3,000 are almost bound to fail.

The one great exception are nations with huge amounts of oil or other natural resources. As Fareed Zakaria notes in The Future of Freedom that these states didn’t “earn” their wealth and so they didn’t develop the liberal habits and institutions necessary to sustain a democracy.

Studies also show that foreign aid prevents the sort of development that leads to democracy, almost as much as oil wealth does.

Unfortunately, Iraq’s per capita income is only between $1,500 and $2,400, and at least some of that comes from oil wealth.

“Democracy in Iraq,” by Jonah Goldberg