I am enjoying the intelligent writing in “Mindfulness Redesigned” by Amit Sood, MD. At one point, he mentions having difficulty with the concepts of quantum entanglement and rank dependent utility. I wrote my dissertation about utility measures and subjective probability and his comment threw me back into thinking about attempts to create a set of axioms that encapsulate human assessment of risk and decisions to do this or avoid that.
I have sat in many classrooms with a groups of people, some groups of age 7 and some of average age of 50. The variety of directions that talk and action can take in such situations is quite broad. I found it much easier to stay relaxed but alert during twists and turns than to try to anticipate every possible which way the lesson might go. So, I was interested in game theory and attempts to explain decision making mathematically but I have never felt that type of project was going to be very helpful in training teachers or conducting lessons.
When I think of surprising turns life in class can take, I often think of the little redheaded girl. She is a little girl that we rarely get a chance to see but she is often in the thoughts of Charlie Brown, Charles Schultz’s famous comic strip hero. Like Charlie, I have a head and eyes and nervous system that made it easy for me to notice girls, even in kindergarten. I understand the male impulse to try to impress the girls, even when we are too young to be able to explain much about the impulse or its consequences.
Picture a mathematically inclined psychologist over in the corner of the casino, happily watching his model of human decision making being confirmed by the behavior at the slot machines and the roulette wheels, when all of a sudden, one of the men at the tables commits an act or refrains from acting in a way that is inexplicable. See, what happened was the little redheaded girl came into the room! Ok, now she is a little white-headed girl but she is even more of a dish, a doll, a beauty that she was in the 2nd grade. She is infinitely more charming and Charlie has lost his interest in winning more chips. He might retire to his room and start writing to her. He might retire to his room and record bitter regrets that he wasn’t bolder in the 2nd grade and in the 12th grade. Investigation may reveal that Charlie and she were married for three decades and he might be rejoicing in the fact that he is no longer her husband.
People are complex and tricky so stay loose! Don’t be too disappointed if artificial intelligence and machine learning have a difficult time explaining humans and their thoughts, desires and actions.
