I GOT IT

A theme I have been exploring in this blog has been heuristic thinking.  You might think that I have been downgrading rational thinking.  I’m not, but the point is that rational thinking, which counts on extensive information gathering and calculations of that information is, one, simply not what people do and, two, not what people, in many situations, can do.  Oh; it turns out; heuristics seem to have a pretty good track record.  To remind you, heuristic thinking is the thought process one employs that is based on a “rule of thumb.”  Let me share an example that I think is very telling and refers to the best sport devised by humans, baseball.  The example is provided by Gerd Gigernzer.[1]

Assume you want to study how players catch balls that come in from a high angle – like in baseball, cricket, or soccer – because you want to build a robot that can catch them.  The traditional approach, which is much like optimization under constraints, would be to try to give your robot the complete representation of its environment and the most expensive computation machinery you can afford.  You might feed your robot a family of parabolas because thrown balls have parabolic trajectories, with the idea that the robot needs to find the right parabola in order to catch the ball.  Or you feed him measurement instruments that can measure the initial distance, the initial velocity, and the initial angle the ball was thrown or kicked.  You’re still not done because in the real world balls are not flying parabolas, so you need instruments that can measure the direction and the speed of the wind at each point of the ball’s flight to calculate its final trajectory and its spin.  It’s a very hard problem, but this is one way to look at it.

A very different way to approach this is to ask if there is a heuristic that a player could actually use to solve this problem without making any of these calculations, or only a very few.  Experimental studies have shown that actual players use a quite simple heuristic that I call the gaze heuristic.  When a ball comes in high, a player starts running and fixates his eyes on the ball.  The heuristic is that you adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze, the angle between the eye and the ball, remains constant.  If you make the angle constant the ball will come down to you and it will catch you, or at least it will hit you.  This heuristic only pays attention to one variable, the angle of gaze, and can ignore all the other causal, relevant variables and achieve the same goal much faster [making catching the ball possible], more frugally, and with less chances for error [a likely event given the number of complex computations described above].[2]

Please excuse the length of this quote, but I think it’s so cool.  Why?  Because I loved playing baseball and I, in an instinctive manner, applied the gaze heuristic on the streets of my New York neighborhood playing stickball some sixty or so years ago.  This is not such an outstanding achievement on my part; dogs apply the same heuristics catching Frisbees.[3]  What the example shows, among other things, is that some heuristics are part of our evolutionary wiring.  Yet some are taught and some are developed subconsciously due to their functionality – our subconscious mind notes that if we act this way, this other desired event will happen.

Now, what if our robot is not built to catch a ball but to carry you along in traffic (as in self-driving cars)?  Would you feel comfortable if that car functions with a set of heuristic formulas or would you want it to take into account as many variables as possible?  I can’t help thinking that this is part of the design thinking that those companies who are developing these cars are considering.  My point is:  we can’t make a blanket statement that all heuristic formulas are better than reasoned calculations.  I mentioned above that heuristics are formed by our mental makeup, our being taught them, or by our subconscious developing relations between events.  But there is another way:  we believe relations because our emotions dispose us to believe certain heuristics even when experience should teach us otherwise.  Gigerenzer quotes H. G. Wells:  “If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things:  reading, writing, and statistical thinking.”[4]  So part of a civics teacher’s job is to convince students that reality is complex; that in order to deal with that reality, a variety of thinking is needed, some rational and reasoned and some instinctive and based on hunches relying on as good a knowledge base as is practical given the constraints of the situation.  My hunch is that we don’t pay those who are to do this sort of thing enough compensation.[5]

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[1] Gigerenzer, G.  (2013).  Smart heuristics.  In John Brockman (Ed.) Thinking: The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 39-54).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Ibid., pp. 50-51.

[3] Ibid.

[4]Ibid., pp. 40-41.

[5] Not asking for pay raise; I’m retired.

IT’S A POTTY THING

I feel compelled.  To what?  To write about the restroom situation in North Carolina and other states where there has been legislation or pending legislation to state that in public restrooms, such as in schools, a person is to use the bathrooms dedicated to the biological designation to which he/she was born.  In other words, transgender persons are not to use the bathroom facilities with which they identify, but to the bathroom their biological status – “equipment” – aligns.  This is making it very uncomfortable for transgender people.  The thinking is that if we honor transgender persons’ rights to live the gendered life they feel they have, this would give non-transgender voyeurs the license to opt a transgender persona and gain access to the bathroom of the opposite sex.  I know; I know; it sounds a bit absurd, especially in a school setting where taking on such a persona would be an overly taxing proposition given that everyone knows everyone else pretty well.  Just think about it.  You are a young man (and the fear is always about young men being able to invade a female bathroom) and you would have to dress like a girl, do girl things, be prohibited from taking part in guy things, not to mention the potential derision for being transgender (a condition that should not be, but there it is) and all so you can do is go to the girls’ bathroom from time to time.  Wow.

The North Carolina governor adds the issue of showers.  My experience with this issue does cause me to think a bit.  In my high school days, I played sports.  After a game or practice, I was mandated to take a shower in an open shower area, but my experience goes beyond that.  I happened to attend a new high school that was built on a site where a girls’ high school already existed.  During the first year or so – I don’t remember – we guys had to use the girls’ shower facility – obviously when they were not there.  This was my first experience with this shared shower business (I guess I had the previous experience of showers at public pools), but between individual shower stalls there were walls that came up to about chest high.  There was no curtain behind the user of the stall, but there was this provision, in the form of these walls, for modesty.  When the boys’ shower facility, sans walls, was finally provided, the experience became different in several ways.  But not much thought was given to the arrangement; you showered, dried, and got dressed.  That was it.  Does this entire scene pose a different sort of scenario for the accommodation of transgender students?  I don’t know.  But I feel fairly assured that it will be worked out.  What we need to do is give the circumstances some thought, be willing to spend some money, and find the solutions that respect everyone’s rights.

The reason I am compelled to write about this is that the issue is a federal one.  The fact is:  North Carolina is claiming, through its governor, that it has the right to make such a law; it is a local matter.  Running schools is not one of the delegated powers which the Constitution hands over to the central government.  This is true.  But the thing is, that by joining the federal union, that state, as well as of all of the others, has legally committed itself to abide by certain provisions when it comes to individual rights.  These are seen as integral to the federal agreement in which each entity in the arrangement is to be protected in these rights.  And one of those rights is to be equally protected under the law.  The question becomes, at least as I see it, does gender constitute enough of a person’s identity so that it is part of who a person is?  In denying a person from leading the gendered life he/she feels, does a ruling force fundamentally invade that space and render the action as unequal protection?  Apparently, according to psychological research, it does.  Just “google” psychological factors of transgender or psychological importance of transgender identity and you readily find a literature about the centrality of gender identification on a person’s mental well being.  So the issue is no small matter.  I am not an expert, but what I can garner, for those included in such realities, is that being discriminated against or segregated can be very serious including incidents of murder or suicide.

But all this does not do away with levels of discomfort – for all involved – over sharing a bathroom or shower room with someone who is of another sex, regardless of what gender he/she is.  I happened to be in a Miami restaurant recently and had to use the restroom.  I had not been in that restaurant before, so I looked for some sign indicating where the restrooms were.  Spotted, I followed the sign and then started looking for the second set of signs:  “Men” and “Women” or those symbols with which we are familiar.  No such designations were to be found; instead, there were two doors which had on the doors those “occupied/non occupied” gadgets you find on the doors of airplane restrooms.  I then had the unfamiliar experience of having to queue and wait for an unoccupied room.  I say unfamiliar in that the only time I have had to do that has been on planes, not restaurants.  It was okay; I had an interesting conversation with the woman in front of me, which ended abruptly when her restroom became available.  This system seems to solve any problem with transgender patrons – or is the problem with the other patrons?

I think that before all of this is over, there will be some rearranging of restrooms and shower rooms.  But first, let’s stop being overly concerned with little girls.  Little girls in public facilities do not go to the bathroom unaccompanied by some guardian – usually a parent.  In schools, I’m sure teachers and other supervisory personnel will come up with a system in which children will be safe from predators or voyeurs, a problem I do not believe exists or will exist. 

To place this in perspective, it is estimated that the transgender population in the US is about .3 percent.  That’s about a million people.  If they were allowed to live normal lives, they would probably be evenly dispersed among our population, meaning that in a nation of over 300 million people encountering a transgender person, the chances would be infrequent.  But what if they numbered millions?  What then?  Then they would have more political clout and accommodations would be secured.  But constituting the smaller number, this does not diminish their legal claims.  It does call on us, collectively and individually, to be mature, honest, calm, and reasonable.  We are, after all, in a federal union; let’s act the part.