The Freakonomics of Altruism : Are we selfish?

I recently read SuperFreakonomics, the 'sequel' to the bestselling book Freakonomics. The book does not really have a coherent overarching point to make, rather it is a collage of various concepts and experiments used by economists to understand human behavior, particularly economic behavior. It is actually quite an interesting read. The titles of the chapters are obviously only meant to be obscenely eye catching which has a tendency to disappoint when the rationale for the title is explained in the chapter later, but that a minor detail. 

There is a chapter where the authors discuss global warming and the concept of human altruism. Are humans intrinsically altruistic? Or are they primarily selfish creatures? The book explores this through the famous Dictator Game. Subject A is given x amount of money and given the option to share it with another anonymous person Subject B. There is no obligation on A to share, he is also free to choose the amount he wants to share, if at all. When the experiment was done the results indicated that a majority of subject chose to share the money, with the average share being around 20-25%. Children tend to donate even more... close to 50%. So humans are definitely altruistic by nature, right?

Apparently there is an actual dictator card game. Is this a trump card game? People murdered 4 million CLASH!!

You can't run an experiment like this and expect a physicist to listen and appreciate. This experiment obviously has dozens of massive sources of error and bias. Thankfully the book points them out and goes on to redeem economists. 

First of all, the subjects were all volunteers. We would obviously expect  that the people who would volunteer for studies do not represent the average population. In fact you would expect people who volunteer to be decidedly more altruistic than the average population. Secondly the subjects knew they were part of an experiment. Obviously their psychological responses will be modified by that knowledge. Who wants to appear cheap and selfish when specifically part of a psychological experiment?  Therefore the responses given by a biased subject in an academic environment clearly will far from the natural behavior of the average subject.

More importantly, even if the subjects were truly random and were observed secretly, the experiment itself is designed so poorly. To illustrate this, an alternate version of the Dictator experiment was run, but this time A and B were given an equal amount of money. Once again A had the choice to do whatever he wanted, he could share some of his money with B, but more importantly, A could also take whatever amount from B he wanted. This time, it was seen, that on an average people chose to take money from B, around 20-25%, rather than give or do nothing. 

This completely deflates the altruism result from the first version. It can be explained though from the simple observation that people like to do something rather than nothing. Given the choice to either give or do nothing, people would give. But the choice to give take or do nothing, which is a far more realistic choice, completely flips the result. The experiment is still extremely limited in what it can tell us about the true psychological nature of its subjects, but at least its better than the first version. 

A more accurate view, in my opinion and mentioned in the book as well, is that it is possible to design experiments in such a way that you could get whatever result you wanted to get. You could easily show humans as angels as in the Dictator game, of you could show humans as monsters capable of heinous acts, such as in the Stanford prison guard experiment. 

The 1971 Stanford psychological experiment, you should definitely visit the site and wiki it, I have nothing to add.

So is man utterly selfish? Or is he fundamentally altruistic?

The question relates to a deeper question, is there such a thing as good or bad in the absolute sense, intrinsic to our nature? Or is all of morality just rules that we have made up for our societal construct?

I will write about that in the next post since this one is too long already :P

Does Death make us Human?

Last time I wondered if free will is what makes us human. That was too serious a post, so I will lighten it upa bit with Death. Does death make us quintessentially human?

Well, obviously not, in its most literal meaning. After all, plants die, animals die. In some sense, even stars and galaxies die. But we all know human death is not quite like any of these, right? Right?

Most animals have no cognizance of death as a concept. Sure, they run from danger to avoid death, and mothers may protect their young from predators. But when a member of the pack dies, animals, even biologically related ones, seem not to understand. They continue to prod the dead as if expecting them to suddenly wake up from the slumber, and when it becomes apparent that the condition is irreversible, simply drop the issue and go about their own business. There may be occasional cases of animals, most likely chimps or some dogs, who experience some 'emotional' responses that seem to be pseudo-human. But at best, they express grief and anger at the death of a close companion, something they might even express had the companion just gone away rather than died.

Chimps seemingly mourning a fallen relative, Cameroon

But humans, and their ancestors, have been consecrating death for millennia. We do not understand death, and hence we fear it, and hence we worship it. Rituals of death are probably mankind's oldest surviving symbolic activity. The cornerstone of practically every religion is what happens after death. Reincarnation, heaven-hell, purgatory... all largely imaginative constructs meant to ease our mind on earth so we do not fear the 'afterlife' much. Incredible human feats of engineering and creativity have been temples of the dead... the Egyptian pyramids, Taj Mahal, the catacombs... and countless others.

Most unique is the nature of the fear of death. Animals fear death, but it is mostly a self preservative instinct intrinsic to all life. But humans have another, seemingly far greater, fear. We seem to fear that our work on earth would get cut short by death. As if we had any greater purpose to our existence, than mere existence. One of the greatest forces driving human evolution is the need for humans to somehow make an impact on the future. "To make such an end, as to be worthy of remembrance" as Theoden, son of Thengel would say. Why is that? Is this what makes us human? No animals have this need for sure. No animal has ever expressed a desire to leave behind something that will leave its indelible individuality on the canvas of history.

Death Note - anime series about a schoolkid who finds a notebook that kills the person whose name is written in it, recommended watch.

I do believe however that this uniquely human feature is an extension of the same basic instinct, that of self preservation. Just think about it!

Humans have long superceded the system of incentives and constraints imposed by the biological vagaries of our bodies and our ecosystem. 

Once upon a time natural selection was in control, the strongest survived and procreated and the weak executed. But man subverted evolution; the weak found a way to survive by finding favor with the strong. Compassion is a virtue; at best the strong find more success, if that, and the weak are to be nurtured into strength, not culled. 

Once upon a time, nature was in control and man was subject to the elements. The earth was flat and infinite, the skies were filled with vengeful gods and the five elements were fickle beasts. But man subverted nature; nothing on this earth has escaped our leash... plants animals earth water wind fire and the sky. Even the vast silent darkness of space does not petrify us anymore. 

And so it was that once upon a time man feared death just like the animals because he did not want to die. He wanted to live. But soon he learnt that death can be defeated, or at least delayed. 

It seems natural that the value of a man's life and its worth is not measured in its how many genes he could pass on but what he accomplished during his lifetime. Therefore the death should also be defined not in biological but intellectual terms.  And in that sense, the desire to impact future generations, leaving a legacy is simply the desire to live longer, as long as possible. 

Archimedes, Aryabhatta and Albert Einstein are all still 'alive' today in every sense of the word except biological. They probably have more impact on your life than your neighbor; and you probably know more about their life than your neighbor's as well. Sure biologically we may not be alive much longer (even though life expectancy is tripled in a few centuries), but through our actions we could be remembered centuries, even millennia in the future. 

After all, who doesn't want to live forever...

Earth's core might flip and Robots might make rotis!

I report
The SWARM (a network of connected satellites that orbit the Earth) detected an increase in the rate of decrease of Earth's magnetic field. No one knows why this is happening, but the purported conjecture is that the Earth magnetic field may be ready to flip. It has happened every million years or so in the past, and that it might happen now is pretty cool. But it will not happen in your lifetime as such a flip would probably take a few hundred years to happen.

The magnetic field  deflects the solar wind from reaching Earth. No mass extinctions in the past have been connected to such magnetic flips so hopefully handling solar wind is a breeze

I comment
But if true, we might see appreciable change within our lifetime. Seeing the evidence of a mutable, evolving Earth within a human lifetime... that's awesome.

We are lucky its happening at a time in human existence when we can understand its significance. Though I wonder what our ancestors could have come up with if there were any visible effects of this global polarity flip was happening two thousand years ago .

I conjecture
I have read a whole bunch (though I know nothing too rigorous) about how animals and birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it to navigate and find their through migratory paths. It would be a great opportunity to see if such a flip causes changes in various organisms and/or ecosystems.

After all if we can find out how exactly, if at all, birds can track magnetic fields, maybe someday in the future we can enable communication via electromagnetic signals straight to the brain. That's exactly how its going to happen... in the future... Telepathy... yea' I seen it!!!

In other news finally robots make rotis. Big deal for the future of robotics and the diet of millions of culinarily handicapped Indians like me.

Playing God : Can Man Create Life?

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!

Incredible news I read today.

Itsy bitsy bacterium gets a bigger genetic code (2014) published in nature here

First truly artificial organism engineered (2003)

Be sure to read the article in its entirety... after you read this post of course. So you should know hopefully that all life on earth seemingly exists only to propagate their genetic information to the next generation... information written in a chemical language called DNA. The alphabet of this language has 4 letters or bases, A T G C, which stand for 4 distinct chemical compounds, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine. Each cell of the human body contains a DNA sequence that is approximately 3.2 billion base pairs, (pairs because DNA is almost always present as a pair of strands twisted around in a helix).

That pretty much sums up all life on earth from bacteria to rats to pterodactyls to humans... all life we have ever known to have existed has the exact same genetic makeup made up of ATGC bases pairs. 

Until now.