Kluge

Gary Marcus

45 annotations • Jan 2024 – Jul 2024 • data

Chapter 1

At the same time, we humans are the only species smart enough to systematically plan for the future—yet dumb enough to ditch our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification.
Where Shakespeare imagined infinite reason, I see something else, what engineers call a "kluge." A kluge is a clumsy or inelegant—yet surprisingly effective—solution to a problem
Virtually everybody agrees that the term was first popularized in February 1962, in an article titled "How to Design a Kludge," written, tongue in cheek, by a computer pioneer named Jackson Granholm, who defined a kluge as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole."
For the most part, we simply accept our faults—such as our emotional outbursts, our mediocre memories, and our vulnerability to prejudice—as standard equipment
Nature is prone to making kluges because it doesn't "care" whether its products are perfect or elegant. If something works, it spreads. If it doesn't work, it dies out. Genes that lead to successful outcomes tend to propagate; genes that produce creatures that can't cut it tend to fade away; all else is metaphor. Adequacy, not beauty, is the name of the game.
Steven Pinker has argued that "the parts of the mind that allow us to see are indeed well engineered, and there is no reason to think that the quality of engineering progressively deteriorates as the information flows upstream to the faculties that interpret and act on what we see."
From the gene's-eye view, it was well worth it for our male ancestors to take the risk of overinterpretation because gaining an extra reproductive opportunity far outweighs the downside, such as damage to self-esteem or reputation, of perceiving opportunity where there is none. What looks like a bug, a systematic bias in interpreting the motives of other human beings, might in this case actually be a positive feature.
Natural selection, the key mechanism of evolution, is only as good as the random mutations that arise. If a given mutation is beneficial, it may propagate, but the most beneficial mutations imaginable sometimes, alas, never appear. As an old saying puts it, "Chance proposes and nature disposes"; a mutation that does not arise cannot be selected for.
Indeed, sometimes elegance and kluginess coexist, side by side. Highly efficient neurons, for example, are connected to their neighbors by puzzlingly inefficient synaptic gaps, which transform efficient electrical activity into less efficient diffusing chemicals, and these in turn waste heat and lose information
This gives rise to a notion that I call "evolutionary inertia," borrowing from Newton's law of inertia (an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion). Evolution tends to work with what is already in place, making modifications rather than starting from scratch.
Whether kluges outnumber perfections or perfections outnumber kluges, kluges tell us two things that perfections can't. First, they can give special insight into our evolutionary history; when we see perfection, we often can't tell which of many converging factors might have yielded an ideal solution; often it is only by seeing where things went wrong that we can tell how things were built in the first place
Stephen Jay Gould noted, imperfections, "remnants of the past that don't make sense in present terms—the useless, the odd, the peculiar, the incongruous—are the signs of history."

Chapter 2

Pilots have long known that there's only one way to fly: with a checklist, relying on a clipboard to do what human memory can't, which is to keep straight the things that we have do over and over again. (Are the flaps down? Did I check the fuel gauge? Or was that last time?) Without a checklist, it's easy to forget not just the answers but also the questions.
Contextual memory has its price, and that price is reliability. Because human memory is so thoroughly driven by cues, rather than location in the brain, we can easily get confused
There are too many Tuesdays, too many Wednesdays, and too many near-identical waffles for a cue-driven system to keep straight. (Ditto for any pilot foolish enough to rely on memory instead of a checklist—one takeoff would blur together with the next. Sooner or later the landing gear would be forgotten.)
Those briefly primed by terms like professor or intelligent outperformed those prepped with less lofty expressions, such as soccer hooligans and stupid. All the trash-talking that basketball players do might be more effective than we imagine
A memorable line from George Orwell's novel 1984 states that "Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia"—the irony being, of course, that until recently (in the time frame of the book) Oceania had not in fact been at war with Eurasia. ("As Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.") The dictators of 1984 manipulate the masses by revising history
By a process known as "reconstruction," we work backward, correlating an event of uncertain date with chronological landmarks that we're sure of. To take another example ripped from the headlines, if I asked you to name the year in which O. J. Simpson was tried for murder, you'd probably have to guesstimate. As vivid as the proceedings were then, they are now (for me, anyway) beginning to get a bit hazy. Unless you are a trivia buff, you probably can't remember exactly when the trial happened. Instead, you might reason that it took place before the Monica Lewinsky scandal but after Bill Clinton took office, or that it occurred before you met your significant other but after you went to college.

Front

What's more, we (unlike computers) don't have to keep track of the details of our own internal hardware; most of the time, finding what we need in our memory becomes a matter of asking ourself the right question, not identifying a particular set of brain cells.*
This phenomenon, which has come to be known as "anchoring and adjustment," occurs again and again. Try this one: Add 400 to the last three digits of your cell phone number. When you're done, answer the following question: in what year did Attila the Hun's rampage through Europe finally come to an end? The average guess of people whose phone number, plus 400, yields a sum less than 600 was A.D. 629, whereas the average guess of people whose phone number digits plus 400 came in between 1,200 and 1,399 was A.D. 979, 350 years later.*

Chapter 3

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." —LEWIS CARROLL, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Another phenomenon, called the "focusing illusion," shows how easy it is to manipulate people simply by directing their attention to one bit of information or another. In one simple but telling study, college students were asked to answer two questions: "How happy are you with your life in general?" and "How many dates did you have last month?" One group heard the questions in exactly that order, while another heard them in the opposite order, second question first. In the group that heard the question about happiness first, there was almost no correlation between the people's answers; some people who had few dates reported that they were happy, some people with many dates reported that they were sad, and so forth.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman spun a wheel of fortune, marked with the numbers 1–100, and then asked their subjects a question that had nothing to do with the outcome of spinning the wheel: what percentage of African countries are in the United Nations? Most participants didn't know for sure, so they had to estimate—fair enough. But their estimates were considerably affected by the number on the wheel. When the wheel registered 10, a typical response to the UN question was 25 percent, whereas when the wheel came up at 65, a typical response was 45 percent
Laboratory studies, for example, have shown that if you make people contemplate their own death ("Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die..."), they tend to be nicer than normal to members of their own religious and ethnic groups, but more negative toward outsiders. Fears of death also tend to polarize people's political and religious beliefs: patriotic Americans who are made aware of their own mortality are more appalled (than patriots in a control group) by the idea of using the American flag as a sieve; devout Christians who are asked to reflect upon their own death are less tolerant of someone using a crucifix as a substitute hammer.
Over time, the name Pollyanna has become a commonly used term with two different connotations. It's used in a positive way to describe eternal optimists and in a negative way to describe people whose optimism exceeds the rational bounds of reality.
In short, if you give someone half a chance to make up their own reasons to believe something, they'll take you up on the opportunity and start to believe it—even if their original evidence is thoroughly discredited.
As a test of Spinoza's hypothesis, Gilbert presented subjects with true and false propositions—sometimes interrupting them with a brief, distracting tone (which required them to press a button). Just as Spinoza might have predicted, interruptions increased the chance that subjects would believe the false proposition;* other studies showed that people are more likely to accept falsehoods if they are distracted or put under time pressure.
Experimental evidence bears this out: merely hearing something in the form of a question—rather than a declarative statement—is often enough to induce belief.

Chapter 4

Reaching is close to a reflex, not just for humans, but for every animal that grabs a meal to bring it closer to its mouth; by the time we are adults, our reaching system is so well tuned, we never even think about it.
And often, the closer we get to conscious decision making, a more recent product of evolution, the worse our decisions become. When the NYU professors reworked their grasping task to make it a more explicit word problem, most subjects' performance fell to pieces. Our more recently evolved deliberative system is, in this particular respect, no match for our ancient system for muscle control.
Another experiment offered undergraduates a choice between two raffle tickets, one with 1 chance in 100 to win a $500 voucher toward a trip to Paris, the other, 1 chance in 100 to win a $500 voucher toward college tuition. Most people, in this case, prefer Paris. No big problem there; if Paris is more appealing than the bursar's office, so be it. But when the odds increase from 1 in 100 to 99 out of 100, most people's preferences reverse; given the near certainty of winning, most students suddenly go for the tuition voucher rather than the trip—sheer lunacy, if they'd really rather go to Paris.
And that system in turn has the peculiar property of being "nonlinear": the difference between 1 and 2 subjectively seems greater than the difference between 101 and 102. Much of the brain is built on this principle, known as Weber's law. Thus, a 150-watt light bulb seems only a bit brighter than a 100-watt bulb, whereas a 100-watt bulb seems much brighter than a 50-watt bulb.
If the necklaces didn't budge at $100, you'd scarcely expect them to sell at $200. But that's exactly what happened; by the time the shopkeeper had returned, the whole inventory was gone. Customers were more likely to buy a particular necklace if it had a high price than if it had a low price—apparently because they were using list price (rather than intrinsic worth) as a proxy for value
In every species that's ever been studied, animals tend to follow what is known as a "hyperbolic discounting curve"—fancy words for the fact that organisms tend to value the present far more than the future.
As the former president Jimmy Carter put it in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture (2002), "In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents."

Chapter 5

As the fourth-century philosopher Augustine, author of one of the first essays on the topic of ambiguity, put it, in an essay written in the allegedly precise language of Latin, the "perplexity of ambiguity grows like wild flowers into infinity."
In the hodgepodge that is language, at least three major sources of idiosyncrasy arise from three separate clashes: (1) the contrast between the way our ancestors made sounds and the way we would ideally like to make them, (2) the way in which our words build on a primate understanding of the world, and (3) a flawed system of memory that works in a pinch but makes little sense for language.
Part of the answer stems from how our prelinguistic ancestors evolved to think about the world: not as philosophers or mathematicians, brimming with precision, but as animals perpetually in a hurry, frequently settling for solutions that are "good enough" rather than definitive.

Chapter 6

WOE BETIDE THE HUMAN BEING who doesn't know what happiness is; yet woe to the writer who tries to define it.
The technical term for that is adaptation* For example, the sound of rumbling trucks outside your office may annoy you at first, but over time you learn to block it out—that's adaptation. Similarly, we can adapt to even more serious annoyances, especially those that are predictable, which is why a boss who acts like a jerk every day can actually be less irritating than a boss who acts like a jerk less often, but at random intervals.
Think back to that study of undergraduates who answered the question "How happy are you?" after first recounting their recent dating history. We're no different from them. Asking people about their overall happiness just after inquiring into the state of their marriage or their health has a similar effect. These studies tell us that people often don't really know how happy they are. Our subjective sense of happiness is, like so many of our beliefs, fluid, and greatly dependent on context.
Perhaps for that reason, the more we think about how we happy we are, the less happy we become. People who ruminate less upon their own circumstances tend to be happier than those who think about them more, just as Woody Allen implied in Annie Hall. When two attractive yet vacant-looking pedestrians walk by, Allen's character asks them to reveal the secret of their happiness. The woman answers first: "I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say," to which her handsome boyfriend adds, "And I'm exactly the same way." The two stride gaily away. In other words, to paraphrase Mark Twain, dissecting our own happiness may be like dissecting frogs: both tend to die in the process.
We do our best to succeed, but if at first we don't succeed, we can always lie, dissemble, or rationalize. In keeping with this idea, most Westerners believe themselves to be smarter, fairer, more considerate, more dependable, and more creative than average. And—shades of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average"—we also convince ourselves that we are better-than-average drivers and have better-than-average health prospects. But you do the math: we can't all be above average. When Muhammad Ali said "I'm the greatest," he spoke the truth; the rest of us are probably just kidding ourselves (or at least our happy-o-meters).

Chapter 7

There can be little doubt that the human brain too is fragile, and not just because it routinely commits the cognitive errors we've already discussed, but also because it is deeply vulnerable both to minor malfunctions and even, in some cases, severe breakdown. The mildest malfunctions are what chess masters call blunders and a Norwegian friend of mine calls "brain farts"—momentary lapses of reason and attention that cause chagrin (d'Oh!) and the occasional traffic accident. We know better, but for a moment we just plain goof. Despite our best intentions, our brain just doesn't manage to do what we want it to. No one is immune to this. Even Tiger Woods occasionally misses an easy putt.
If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) once said, a foolish inconsistency characterizes every single human mind.