This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

  Kakonomics

  Gloria Origgi

  Philosopher, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris

  An important concept explaining why life so often sucks is kakonomics, or the weird preference for low-quality payoffs.

  Standard game-theoretical approaches posit that whatever people are trading (ideas, services, goods), each one wants to receive high-quality work from others. Let’s stylize the situation so that goods can be exchanged only at two quality levels, high and low. Kakonomics (from the Greek, the economics of the worst) describes cases wherein people not only have the standard preference for receiving high-quality goods and delivering low-quality goods (the standard sucker’s payoff) but actually prefer to deliver a low-quality product and receive a low-quality one: that is, they connive on a low-low exchange.

  How can it be possible? And how can it be rational? Even when we’re lazy and prefer to deliver a low-quality outcome (such as preferring to write a piece for a mediocre journal, provided they don’t ask us to do too much work), we should still prefer to work less and receive more—that is, deliver low-quality and receive high-quality. Kakonomics is different: Here, we prefer not only to deliver a low-quality product but also to receive a low-quality good in exchange!

  Kakonomics is the strange yet widespread preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about them. Kakonomic worlds are worlds in which people not only live with one another’s laxness but expect it: I trust you not to keep your promises in full because I want to be free not to keep mine and not to feel bad about it. What makes it an interesting and weird case is that in all kakonomic exchanges, the two parties seem to have a double deal: an official pact in which both declare their intention to exchange at a high-quality level, and a tacit accord whereby discounts are not only allowed but expected. Thus, nobody is free-riding: Kakonomics is regulated by a tacit social norm of discount on quality, a mutual acceptance of a mediocre outcome, satisfactory to both parties as long as they aver publicly that the exchange is in fact at a high-quality level.

  Take an example: A well-established best-selling author has to deliver his long overdue manuscript to his publisher. He has a large audience and knows very well that people will buy his book just because of his name—and, anyway, that the average reader doesn’t read more than the first chapter. His publisher knows this as well. Thus, the author decides to deliver a manuscript with a stunning opening and a mediocre plot (the low-quality outcome). The publisher is happy with it and congratulates the author as though he’d delivered a masterpiece (the high-quality rhetoric), and both are satisfied. The author prefers not only to deliver a low-quality work but also that the publisher’s response will be low-quality by failing to provide a serious edit and consenting to publish. They trust each other’s untrustworthiness and connive on a mutually advantageous low outcome. Whenever there is a tacit deal to converge on low quality to mutual advantage, we’re dealing with a case of kakonomics.

  Paradoxically, if one of the two parties delivers a high-quality outcome instead of the expected low one, the other party resents it as a breach of trust, even if he may not acknowledge this openly. In the example, the author may resent the publisher if the latter delivers a high-quality edit. Trustworthiness in this relation would mean delivery of low quality too. Contrary to the standard game of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the willingness to repeat an interaction with someone is ensured if he or she delivers low quality too, rather than high quality.

  Kakonomics is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it allows a certain discount that makes life more relaxing for everybody. As a friend who was renovating a country house in Tuscany told me: “Italian builders never deliver when they’ve promised to, but the good thing is, they don’t expect you to pay them when you’ve promised to, either.”

  But the major problem of kakonomics and the reason it is a form of collective insanity so difficult to eradicate is that each low-quality exchange is a local equilibrium, in which both parties are satisfied; however, each of these exchanges erodes the overall system in the long run. So the threat to good collective outcomes doesn’t come only from free riders and predators, as mainstream social sciences teach us, but also from well-organized norms of kakonomics, which regulate exchanges for the worse. The cement of society is not just cooperation for the good: In order to understand why life sucks, we should look also at norms of cooperation for a local optimum and an overall worsening.

  Kayfabe

  Eric Weinstein

  Mathematician and economist; principal, Natron Group

  The sophisticated scientific concept with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may come not from academe but rather from the unlikely environment of professional wrestling.

  Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that deception rather than information often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity’s future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

  If we are to take selection in humans more seriously, we may fairly ask what rigorous system could handle an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in development for more than a century, now supports an intricate multibillion-dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling’s insiders as “kayfabe,” a word of mysterious origin.

  Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, competitors who face each other in the ring are actually collaborators who must form a closed system (called “a promotion”), sealed against outsiders. Antagonists are chosen from within the promotion, and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed, at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct but from the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship, which “breaks kayfabe,” is called “shooting” to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception, called “working.”

  Were kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Confusing battles between “freshwater” Chicago macroeconomists and Ivy League “saltwater” theorists could be best understood as happening within a single “orthodox promotion,” given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades-old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the string and loop camps seems an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intrapromotional rivalry, given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.

  What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling’s status as a pseudosport, what few remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport known as “catch” wrestling, which held its last honest title match early in the twentieth century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks that define the category of activity that wrestling shares with other human spheres: (a) occasional but extreme peril for the participants and (b) general monotony for both audience and participants.

  Kayfabrication (the process of transi
tion from reality toward kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil the participants. Thus, kayfabrication is a feature of many of our most important systems—such as war, finance, love, politics, and science. Importantly, kayfabe also illustrates the limits of disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling’s system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real-life adultery following the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a kayfabe backstory. Eventually, even kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success, as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.

  When kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: Its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

  Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served clientside.

  Einstein’s Blade in Ockham’s Razor

  Kai Krause

  Software pioneer; interface designer

  In 1971, when I was a teenager, my father died in an airplane crash. Somehow I began to turn “serious,” trying to understand the world around me and my place in it, looking for meaning and sense, beginning to realize that everything was different from what I had assumed in the innocence of childhood.

  It was the beginning of my own “building a cognitive toolkit,” and I remember the pure joy of discovery, reading voraciously and—quite out of sync with friends and school—devouring encyclopedias, philosophy, biographies, and science fiction.

  One such story stayed with me, and one paragraph within it especially: “We need to make use of Thargola’s Sword! The principle of Parsimony. First put forth by the medieval philosopher Thargola14, who said, ‘We must drive a sword through any hypothesis that is not strictly necessary.’ ”

  That really made me think—and think again.

  Finding out who this man might have been took quite a while, but it was also another beginning: a love affair with libraries, large tomes, dusty bindings . . . surfing knowledge, as it were. And I did discover that there had been a monk, from a hamlet surrounded by oaks, apocryphally named William of Ockham. He crossed my path again years later, when I was lecturing in Munich, near Occam Street, and realized that he had spent the last twenty years of his life there, under King Ludwig IV, in the mid-1300s.

  Isaac Asimov had pilfered, or let’s say homaged, good old William for what is now known in many variants as “Ockham’s razor,” such as

  Plurality should not be posited without necessity.

  Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

  Or more general and colloquial, and a bit less transliterated from Latin:

  A simpler explanation invoking fewer hypothetical constructs is preferable.

  And there it was, the dancing interplay between simplex and complex that has fascinated me in so many forms ever since. For me, it is very near the center of “understanding the world,” as our question posited.

  Could it really be true that the innocent-sounding “Keep it simple” is really such an optimal strategy for dealing with questions large and small, scientific as well as personal? Surely, trying to eliminate superfluous assumptions can be a useful tenet and can be found from Sagan to Hawking as part of their approach to thinking in science. But something never quite felt right to me. Intuitively, it was clear that sometimes things are just not simple—and that merely “the simplest” of all explanations cannot be taken as truth or proof.

  • Any detective story would pride itself in not using the most obvious explanation of who did it or how it happened.

  • Designing a car to have “the optimal feel going into a curve at high speed” would require hugely complex systems to finally arrive at “simply good.”

  • Water running downhill will take a meandering path instead of a straight line.

  The non-simple solution is “the easiest,” seen from another viewpoint: For the water, the least energy used going down the shallowest slope is more important than taking the straightest line from A to B. And that is one of the issues with Ockham: The definition of what “simple” is can already be anything but simple. And what “simpler” is—well, it just doesn’t get any simpler there.

  There is that big difference between simple and simplistic. And seen more abstractly, the principle of simple things leading to complexity dances in parallel and involved me deeply throughout my life.

  In the early seventies I also began tinkering with the first large-scale modular synthesizers, finding quickly how hard it is to re-create seemingly “simple” sounds.

  There was unexpected complexity in a single note struck on a piano—complexity that eluded even dozens of oscillators and filters by magnitudes.

  Lately, one of many projects has been to revisit the aesthetic space of scientific visualizations, and another the epitome of mathematics made tangible: fractals, which I had done almost twenty years ago with virtuoso coder Ben Weiss, now enjoying them via realtime flythroughs on a handheld little smartphone. Here was the most extreme example: A tiny formula, barely one line on paper, used recursively, yields worlds of complex images of amazing beauty. (Ben had the distinct pleasure of showing Benoit Mandelbrot an alpha version at a TED conference just months before Mandelbrot’s death.)

  My hesitation about overuse of parsimony was expressed perfectly in a quote from Albert Einstein, arguably the counterpart blade to Ockham’s razor: “Things should be made as simple as possible—but not simpler.”

  And there we have the perfect application of its truth, used recursively on itself: Neither Einstein nor Ockham actually used the exact words as quoted! After I sifted through dozens of books, his collected works and letters in German, the Einstein Archives: Nowhere there, nor in Britannica, Wikipedia, or Wikiquote, was anyone able to substantiate exact sources. And the same applies to Ockham. If anything can be found, it is precedences.

  Surely, one can amass retweeted, reblogged, and regurgitated instances for both very quickly—they have become memes, of course. One could also take the view that in each case they certainly “might” have said it “just like that,” since each used several expressions similar in form and spirit. But to attribute the exact words because they’re “kind of close” would be—well, another case of it’s not that simple!

  And there is a huge difference between additional and redundant information. (Or else one could lose the second, redundant “ein” in “Einstein”?)

  Linguistic jesting aside: The Razor and the Blade constitute a useful combined approach to analytical thinking. Shaving away nonessential conjectures is a good thing, a worthy inclusion in “everybody’s toolkit”—and so is the corollary: Don’t overdo it!

  And my own bottom line: There is nothing more complex than simplicity.

  Heat-Seeking Missiles

  Dave Winer

  Visiting scholar in journalism, New York University; pioneer software developer (blogging, podcasting, RSS, outliners, Web content management)

  New York City, my new home, teaches you that although we are social creatures, it’s often best not to admit it.

  As you weave among the obstacles on the sidewalks of Manhattan, it’s easy to get distracted from your thoughts and pay attention to the people you’re encountering. It’s OK to do that if you’re at a halt, but if you’re in motion and your eyes engage with another, that signals you would like to negotiate.

  Not go
od. A sign of weakness. Whether the oncoming traffic is aware or not, he or she will take advantage of this weakness and charge right into your path, all the while not making eye contact. There is no appeal. All you can do is shift out of his or her path, but even this won’t avoid a collision, because your adversary will unconsciously shift closer to you. Your weakness is attractive. Your space is up for grabs. At this point, you have no choice but to collide, and in the etiquette of New York street walking, you’re responsible.

  That’s why the people who check their smartphones for text messages or e-mails while walking so totally command the sidewalks. They are heat-seeking missiles, and it’s your heat they seek.

  I don’t think this is just New York; it’s a feature of the human species. We seek companionship.

  For a while in 2005 I lived on the beach in northeast Florida outside St. Augustine. The beach is long and relatively empty; they let you drive on the beach to find the perfect spot to bathe, and if you’re willing to drive a bit, you can be alone. So I would drive to a secluded spot, park my car, and go out into the surf. When I came back, more often than not, there was a car parked right next to mine. They could have parked anywhere within a mile in either direction and had it all to themselves.

  Add that to your cognitive toolkit!

  Entanglement

  Marco Iacoboni

  Neuroscientist; professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences; director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab, Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California–Los Angeles; author, Mirroring People