{"id":5963,"date":"2015-06-03T11:51:16","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T19:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5963"},"modified":"2015-06-03T11:54:11","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T19:54:11","slug":"false-prophecy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5963","title":{"rendered":"False Prophecy"},"content":{"rendered":"

(…being another reprint of a months-old Nowa Fantaskya<\/em> column, because I’m still in Vancouver and haven’t yet had time to do my epic comparison of Fury Road<\/em> and Kingsman<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve been called a prophet now and again. Articles about neuron cultures running robots or power grids generally provoke a comment or two about the “smart gels” from my rifters trilogy. \u03b2ehemoth is likely to get a shout-out with each new report of mysterious sulfur-munching microbes, deep in the bowels of hydrothermal rift vents. Recently The Atlantic posted a piece about Louis Michaud’s work <\/a>on energy-generating tornadoes; readers of Echopraxia<\/em> pricked up their ears.<\/p>\n

I didn’t foresee any of it, of course. I just read about it back before it made headlines, when it was still obscured by the jargon of tech reports and patent applications. In fact, my successful “predictions”\u2014 submarine ecotourism, Internet weather systems, smart gels\u2014 are happening way sooner than I ever expected.<\/p>\n

Predict the future? I can barely predict the present.<\/p>\n

I’ve only made one “prediction” (although “insight” would probably be a better term) whose rudiments I haven’t stolen. I’m really proud of it, though. Screw those recycled factoids about head cheeses and vortex engines: I’m<\/em> the guy who wondered if Consciousness\u2014 that exalted mystery everyone holds so dear and no one understands\u2014 might not just be some kind of neurological side-effect. I’m the guy who wondered if we’d be better off without it.<\/p>\n

I may not be the first to pose that question\u2014 I’m probably not\u2014 but if I reinvented that wheel at least I did it on my own, without reading over the shoulders of giants. And the evidence in support of that view\u2014 the review papers<\/a>, the controlled experiments<\/a>\u2014 as far as I know, those started piling up after Blindsight<\/em> was written. So maybe I did get there first. Maybe, driven solely by narrative desperation and the desire for a cool punchline, I threw a dart over my shoulder and just happened to hit a bullseye that only later would get a name in the peer-reviewed literature:<\/p>\n

UTA, they call it now. “Unconscious Thought Advantage”. The phenomenon whereby you arrive at the best answer to a problem by not<\/em> thinking about it. I like to think I got there on my own.<\/p>\n

So you can imagine how it feels to stand before you now, wondering if it was bullshit after all.<\/p>\n

The paper<\/a> is “On making the right choice: A meta-analysis and large-scale replication attempt of the unconscious thought advantage” by Nieuwenstein et al<\/em>. The journal is Judgment and Decision-Making<\/em>, which I’d never heard of but this particular paper got taken seriously by Nature<\/em> so I’m guessing it’s not a fanzine. And the finding? The finding is\u2014<\/p>\n

Actually, a bit of background first.<\/p>\n

Say someone gives Dick and Jane a problem to solve\u2014 something with a lot of variables, like a choice between two different kinds of car. They’re both given the same data to work with, but while Dick gets to concentrate on the problem before making his decision, Jane has to spend that time doing unrelated word puzzles. The weird thing is, Jane makes a better decision than Dick<\/em>, despite the fact that she didn’t consciously think about the problem. Conscious thought actually seems to impair complex decision-making.<\/p>\n

I first encountered such findings almost a decade ago, while correcting the galleys for Blindsight; <\/em>you can imagine the joyful dance my hooves tapped out upon the floor. In the years since, dozens of studies have sought to confirm the existence of the Unconscious Thought Advantage. Most have done so. Some haven’t.<\/p>\n

Now along come Nieuwenstein et al. <\/em>They wonder if those positive results might just be artefacts of sloppy methodology and small sample size. They point out a host of uncontrolled variables that might have contaminated previous studies\u2014 “mindset, gender, motivation, expertise about the choice at hand, attention and memory” for starters\u2014 and while I’d agree that such elements add noise to the data, it seems to me they’d be more likely to obscure a real pattern than create a false one. And though it’s certainly true that small samples are more likely to produce spurious results, that’s what statistics are for<\/em>: A significant P-value has already taken sample size into account.<\/p>\n

Still. Sideline those quibbles and look at what Nieuwenstein et al <\/em>actually did. They used a much larger sample, applied stricter protocols. They avoided the things they regarded as methodological flaws from previous studies, reran the tests\u2014 and found no evidence of a UTA. No difference in effectiveness between conscious and nonconscious problem-solving.<\/p>\n

Shit.<\/p>\n

It’s not a fatal blow. In fact, Nieuwenstein’s study actually found the same raw pattern as previous research: the responses of distracted problem-solvers were 5% more accurate than those of the conscious-analysis group. The difference just wasn’t statistically significant this time around. So even if we accept these results as definitive, the most they tell us is that nonconscious decision-making is as<\/em> effective as the conscious kind. Consciousness confers no advantage. So the question remains: what is it good for?<\/p>\n

The authors tried to talk their way around this in their discussion, arguing that “people form their judgments subconsciously and quickly, then use conscious processes to rationalize them”. They speculated that perhaps these experiments don’t really compare two modes of cognition at all, that both groups came to their conclusions as soon as they got the data. Whatever happened afterward\u2014 focused contemplation, or distracting word-puzzle\u2014 was irrelevant. It’s a self-defeating rationale, though. It’s not a defense of conscious analysis, only an acknowledgment that consciousness may be irrelevant in either<\/em> case.<\/p>\n

The jury remains out. A day after “On Making the Right Choice…” came out, the authors of the original, pro-UTA papers were already attacking its methodology. Even Nieuwenstein et al<\/em> admit that they haven’t shown that the UTA model is false\u2014 only that it hasn’t yet been proven. And these new findings, even if they stand, leave unanswered the question of what consciousness is good for. The dust has yet to settle.<\/p>\n

I have to admit, though, that Nonconscious Isn’t Any Worse<\/em> doesn’t have quite the same ring as Nonconscious Is Better<\/em>. Which, personally, kind of sucks.<\/p>\n

Why couldn’t they have gone after my smart gels instead?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(…being another reprint of a months-old Nowa Fantaskya column, because I’m still in Vancouver and haven’t yet had time to do my epic comparison of Fury Road and Kingsman) I’ve been called a prophet now and again. Articles about neuron cultures running robots or power grids generally provoke a comment or two about the “smart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blindsight","category-sentiencecognition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5963"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5967,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963\/revisions\/5967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}