A New Course of Study: Your Own Mind!

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes,

by Maria Konnikova

NY: Penguin, 2013

$16 pbk.

First Impressions:

When it comes to stories of the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, you’re either a fanatical follower or you’d pick up almost anything else before the desperation of a rainy evening alone in someone else’s remote cabin would tempt you to open A Study in Scarlet or The Sign of Four. Holmes fans simply cannot get enough of the master, while the rest of us politely cover our yawns when when a fan mentions his name. Yes, I admit it: I’m in the latter group. I don’t even like the movie versions much.

But hand me a book on how the mind works, and I’m as eager as a puppy with a new toy. Hand me Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or anything by Temple Grandin, and I’ll be opening the book while you’re still talking. How we human beings perceive and remember and reason and draw conclusions, including our making of egregious errors, never fails to fascinate me. The promise of Maria Konnikova’s book on the mental processes of Sherlock Holmes is that we, the readers, can learn to remember better, think more clearly, thinking less like Dr. Watson and More like Sherlock Holmes. Okay, I'm in.

Because who – I ask you, who? -- wants to stand there like a chump (or like Dr. Watson), mouth hanging open, in reverent awe of Mr. Holmes? Don’t we want to come up with the solution to the mystery? I’m not out to collar murderers, but I would certainly like to know where the charger to my cell phone is hiding or figure out where the Farberware Dutch oven has disappeared to.

The “scientific method” of observation, though, doesn’t sound like my way of being in the world. It sounds so cold, so detached, so objective. Quite anti-social, in fact, don’t you think? The skepticism the author cites as fundamental to scientific observation reminds me of Descartes’ radical doubt thought experiment. Is it really possible – would it even be desirable – to go through every minute of every day doubting before believing? What could that possibly mean?

When the author makes the distinction between fast and slow thinking, I’m more comfortable. My husband says of my decision process in general, “She grinds exceeding slow, but she grinds exceeding fine.” I’m a slow thinking by nature. But not always, of course, slow enough: the default setting Konnikova calls “System Watson” is always poised to jump in quickly. Like the left brain when the person holding the pencil is asked to draw a house, “System Watson” is there jumping up and down and waving its hand in the air and saying, “I have the answer!” The left brain wants to draw “what it knows” without bothering to see what’s in front of the eyes at that moment, and “System Watson” wants to go only on the evidence of its eyes in that moment, without reference to further observation or salient memories.

My favorite way of conceptualizing Konnikova’s “System Holmes,” in fact, is to think of it as the calm, quiet, open receptiveness of meditation. In our drawing class, we learned techniques to frustrate the noisy, know-it-all left brain so it would get out of the way and let us draw what we were seeing – really to let us see. Holmes uses ‘seeing’ in a pejorative sense, but in the lexicon of drawing class Holmesian ‘seeing’ is ‘knowing,’ the left brain running forward with answers before true observation has taken place.

Here’s a true story: I had been looking for my “lost” cell phone charger for two or three days before I started reading Mastermind. Arriving at page 22, I closed the book, sat calmly for less than 60 seconds, got up and went right to where the charger had been all along.

What’s the secret? My parents had emphasized throughout my childhood and adolescence that “retracing your steps” from the last place you can picture in memory having the lost object was the key to finding it. That isn’t a new idea to me. Purging the search of panic and frustration, setting aside judgment (e.g., “I’ve already looked there; it can’t be there”), I’m discovering, is as important as the retracing of steps.

Caveat!!! Beware!!! Konnikova does not promise instant results. She might even be dismayed by my story of finding a lost object before finishing the first chapter of her book! To improve our thinking, we need, she says, to be interested and motivated. She also emphasizes that it will take practice, practice, practice to retrain our minds. Interest, motivation, practice? That sounds like learning to draw, too! I’m hooked!

Summary and Conclusions

I finally had to give up hope of keeping the pages of this book pristine. If a book is to be more than entertainment for the time it takes it read it, if it is to be a tool, I have to make it my own in some way. A library book, then, would be bristling with Post-Its, and those slips of paper would have scribbled notes on them, and there might be additional folded sheets of paper inside with more notes and page numbers. With a paperback book of my own (this applies generally to nonfiction), I may begin with Post-It notes, but the more there is to remember and keep straight, the more likely I am to make, first, discreet little dog ears, then light pencil check marks in the margins, and finally – throwing all caution to the winds – underlining madly. My copy of Mastermind went through all these stages.

The book might have been written differently, and then I might not have resorted to underlining, or at least not as much, but Konnikova makes no allowances for chatting or tweeting attention spans. This is a book, with paragraphs are long and discursive. There are occasional section headings but no numbered or bulleted lists and no graphic displays illustrating the “brain attic” in states of order vs. disarray. Shorter and fewer sentences, with more signage along the way, may have improved this book’s chances at bestsellerdom. It would certainly have made it faster and easier to read. – But would it have made the book better?

What might first seem an unfortunate shortcoming can appear as a virtue in a different light. Just as there is no shortcut to thinking like Sherlock Holmes (you don’t read this book one evening and wake up a problem-solving genius the next morning), just as leaping to conclusions can prevent consideration of important evidence, and just as stopping to reflect on how much we actually know (as opposed to everything we’re tempted to think we know), just so a book that forces thinking to slow down and forces it over the same ground again and again may be the book best suited to fulfilling the author’s promise to her readers: You can improve your thinking, but you must be interested and motivated, and it will take practice, practice, practice.

 Many of the problem-solving pitfalls cited in Mastermind will be familiar to readers of literature going back to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s work on heuristics and biases in the 1970s and 1980s, work that has been amplified since by many other scholarly studies and popular books. Konnikova’s genius, if you will, is not only to draw all this work together but to present it in a familiar literary frame, so that the well-known characters of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes exemplify, respectively, error-prone and largely accurate and error-avoiding thought. Examples from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories that illustrate her points are well chosen.

I have a few minor quibbles. One concerns deductive logic. Konnikova is accurate when noting that formal logic is something different from what Holmes means by deduction. She is on less firm ground when explaining formal logic, which is not, as she seems to say it is, limited to Aristotelian syllogisms. The syllogism is one but not the only valid deductive form. In the same chapter she gives an example of an invalid form without explaining why the true statement in the conclusion cannot be relied on, only saying there is a problem with the reasoning. If formal logic is to be brought in at all, a paragraph or two might be added to clarify the difference between valid and invalid forms. Otherwise, it were better left out entirely.

Will this book find the audience it deserves or only the audience deserving of the book? “I’m not always known for my conciseness,” the author admits candidly in her Acknowledgements. But I have already admitted myself that too concise a Holmesian program might lead astray more minds than it improved.

Do Arthur Conan Doyle readers grab at studies by Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely? Maybe not, and this may be exactly the strength (in addition to the charm) of Konnikova’s book. A new audience for works on reasoning!

-- And then, on the other hand, maybe it will nudge me in a direction I’ve long resisted, back to Sherlock Holmes! 

Dickens--Zing! Kahneman--Zing!! Winter--Zing!!!

1. Where the Dickens Did We Get That Phrase?

“Cute as the dickens” describes my dog Sarah pretty well. But why do we say that?

“What the dickens--?” (my mother's phrase) is obviously a way of asking “What the devil?” without mentioning the devil, but again—why?

These questions never occurred to me until this year’s big Charles Dickens birthday started a tsunami of smart-aleck headlines. Bruce found one of them and brought it to the bookstore to use for a display. (SORRY--no pictures today--technical difficulties!)

So how did this popular author’s name come to be substituted for one so very, very unpopular? If you already know the answer, go to the head of the glass. (Steve, that will probably be you.) It had nothing to do with Charles and something (I hesitate to say “everything,” because who knows?) to do with Shakespeare. And, knowing him, don't you suppose he borrowed it from somewhere else? Be that as it may, February 7 was the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

2. I Was of Two Minds

This is embarrassing, but if Daniel Kahneman can confess errors in his thinking, who am I to sweep mine under the rug? The morning after my most recent post, I looked back at it and saw with a shock that I had introduced egregious errors into the story of business failure rates. I correctly reported Kahneman’s 35% success statistic, but then in my commentary somehow converted that to a 35% failure rate, effectively cutting the statistical failures in half! It was as if, at the same time I was passing on figures showing that two-thirds of new businesses fail in the first five years, I couldn’t quite believe it and softened the bad news, reinterpreting and misinterpreting, unconsciously, the very clear data, making it look as if only a third (which seemed like a lot to me) failed in that period. Having introduced one error, I went on to compound it in another sentence. It’s fixed now. I think I’ve eliminated the errors. But please check me.

Okay, bad enough, but that isn’t the whole story. Yesterday I got an e-mail from my sister, asking for clarification in the post previous to the one I’d found errors in, and—sure enough!—I’d done something similar there. In my discussion of regression to the mean, I had both golfers doing better on the second day! It should have been only the golfer who did poorly the first day who did better the second, the one who did well the first day doing less well the second day. Again, I think my unconscious mind did not want to accept the statistical truth and was rejecting regression to the mean! Unconsciously I was perfectly willing to see improvement in the one golfer’s game but was not willing to see deterioration in the score of the other. I wanted to think he was “better” than that, not merely lucky on the first day.

When I found my mistakes on business failure rates, my first inclination was to berate myself for making errors in simple math (percentages and subtraction). I should never try to breeze through numbers, I told myself, and should always proof-read such material several times over. Numbers are my nemesis! Then my sister pointed out the other error, and it was like a lightning bolt. My problem wasn’t math! My problem was that the statistical evidence is so counter-intuitive that even when I believed it and wanted to tell others about it, I didn’t want to accept it fully myself!  No wonder these errors are so persistent!

Kahneman says of himself that while he is very aware of certain common errors in statistical thinking, it will never be “natural” to him to see the correct version first, that he will always have to be vigilant and correct his original thinking. So I sigh, make my corrections, and tell myself that I’m in good company....

3. Winter, Having Neglected Us Recently, Makes Another Appearance

At least, that’s what the forecast says. Already temperatures have dropped. Will we really get three days of snow? And what then? Cold and snow make winter more expensive (heat, plow) and more hazardous (slippery roads and sidewalks), but in the bigger picture we need the cold and snow cover. Without snow’s mulching effect, the ground would freeze too far down. Without cold, trees would bud out too early.

To every thing, there is a season, and snow and cold serve purposes both of nature and man here Up North. It's snowing and blowing like the dickens up here today!

Apology: If you need to contact me in the next few days, try phone instead of e-mail. Yes, more of those pesky technical difficulties to be addressed....

Are Some of Us Just Plain Crazy?

Reality can be cold!

Have you ever dreamed of opening your own little bookshop? How about a restaurant or even a small coffee house? How would you rate your chances of success?

This is only one of many, many fascinating topics in Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. (Here is a synopsis by Jason Gots.) Time and time again, his research demonstrates that human beings do not make decisions by accurately assessing probabilities or even forecasting with reliability their own future satisfactions. Instead, we decide on courses of action and choose among alternatives with unwarranted confidence in our own judgment. Going into new projects, we overestimate our own abilities and skills and underestimate those of others. We have little idea what gives us a day-to-day sense of well-being. Our minds take the easy way out, retrieving easily available information and leaping to hasty conclusions; even in reflective mode, what Kahneman calls the “System 2” mind is generally only analyzing what the impulsive, get-‘er’done “System 1” mind came up with in the first place.

Let’s take just one of those weaknesses in our reasoning, overconfidence, and apply it to the business of business.

The chances that a small business will survive for five years in the United States are about 35%. But the individuals who open such businesses do not believe that the statistics apply to them. A survey found that American entrepreneurs tend to believe they are in a promising ine of business: their average estimate of the chances of success for “any business like yours” was 60% -- almost double the true value. The bias was more glaring when people assessed the odds of their own venture. Fully 81% of the entrepreneurs put their personal odds of success at 7 out of 10 or higher, and 33% said their chance of failing was zero [my emphasis added].

A third of the entrepreneurs said they could not fail, despite the fact that over two-thirds of the group will fail! Here it may be tempting to think that the failures were all in the two-thirds who admitted that failure was a possibility, but statistics do not bear this out. A very real advantage of optimism, on the other hand, is that an entrepreneur can survive repeated failure, always believing that he or she will be successful the next time around!

The 65% failure rate within five years is given for small businesses in general. What is the failure rate for independent bookstores? For restaurants (another dream business), 60% are out of business after only three years, and yet new restaurants open much oftener than new bookstores, a triumph of hope over—something! (Experience--that's the word I couldn't think of yesterday.)

Is overconfidence alone at work here? Kahneman says there is more to this failure of objective reasoning than emotion, that cognitive biases are at work, too. We focus on our own goals and plans, ignoring the base rate of success (he calls this the “planning fallacy”); focus on what we ourselves want to and can do, “ignoring the plans and skills of others”; think more about skill than about luck, so that we have the “illusion of control”; and, finally, we are overconfident because we focus on what we know and don’t take into account what we don’t know.

One of the charming traits of Daniel Kahneman as a writer and as a psychologist is that he is more than willing to tell stories on himself to make his points. Leading a group on a long-term education project in Israel, he began to wonder how long it had taken other groups to achieve their goals. (The goal was a textbook in the field.) His group thought they could complete their work in two to three years, but when Kahneman asked how other groups had fared, he was told that similar groups, when they had completed their work at all, had taken from seven to ten years. So what happened? His group stayed at their project without altering their time estimate. They took eight years to complete their project, which was never used.

For years, Kahneman says, when he told this story he was the hero, the only one who had thought to ask the question about other groups’ results. It took him a long time to see that he had failed in his leadership role, because having the facts changed no one’s beliefs, and the facts were not incorporated into the plan. “We should have quit that day,” he says now. Everyone on the project, he says, was taking the “inside” view, biased in their group’s favor; the “outside” view that showed a very different picture was ignored. All group members, including the leader, had the information, and all failed to process it.

Of course there is more to life than applying statistical algorithms, and the latter chapters of Kahneman’s book discuss happiness research: what makes people happy vs. what they think will make them happy, the surprising effects of the tiniest piece of luck (e.g., finding a mere dime planted by the researchers!) on mood and outlook, and how much our day-t0-day sense of well-being depends on where we focus our attention. How much money people need to be happy--barring poverty that makes every other crisis more difficult and dims ordinary pleasures—depends on individuals’ financial goals and how important money is to them, but even then, beyond a certain point (he says $75,000) happiness does not increase with income.

How much of any person’s day is spent in pleasurable, rewarding activities? How much time must be spent handling annoyances or crises? Are the surroundings harmonious or stimulating, confining or irritating? Much is in the eye of the beholder, but certain factors detract from anyone’s happiness—loud noise, pain and depression.

In one of Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey, the unlikely heroine (for so the author describes her) remarks that she has “learnt to love a daffodil,” and the hero’s response (I paraphrase) is that “It is well to have as many holds on happiness as possible.” The latest psychological findings support Henry’s view.

Kahneman denies that his research shows human beings to be “irrational.” All that it shows, in his opinion, is that there is more to us than machine-like computation. That old model of “rational man” was pure invention, and now that we’re getting closer to reality and learning who we really are, we can also learn to make better choices and decisions.

I don’t know any bookseller who went into the business expecting to become rich. Everyone knows that bookstores close every day and that “bigness” is no guarantee of success. I’ve been lucky. Dog Ears Books, now in its nineteenth year, has beaten the odds. I’ve been happy, too, and continue to be so. Even during the quiet days of winter in a little summer resort town, I am surrounded by books. I am in a little world of my own designing. I am my own boss. My dog comes to work with me. Reading and writing are part of the job description I give myself! And whatever the future brings, I have had this life for almost nineteen years!

Crazy? Irrational? Do you think so?

Spring will come again to Northport