bearing blog

Sunk costs and fractional success.

Brief article on the psychology of sunk costs in the Atlantic:

The costs to a person who does not know when to quit can be enormous. In economics it's known as sunk cost fallacy, though the costs are more than financial. While we recognize the fallacy almost immediately in others, it's harder to see in ourselves. Why?

There are several powerful, largely unconscious psychological forces at work... But the most likely culprit is this innate, overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.

Sunk costs are the investments ... that you can't get back out. They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate, or waiting for your commitment-phobic boyfriend to propose. They are the thousands of dollars you spent on redecorating your living room, only to find that you hate living in it. 

Once you've realized that you probably won't succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn't matter how much time and effort you've already put into something. If your job or your boyfriend have taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn't make sense to let them use up the years you've got left. An ugly living room is an ugly living room, no matter how much money you spent making it so.

Recent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui demonstrates an effective way to be sure you are making the best decisions when things go awry: focus on what you have to gain by moving on, rather than what you have to lose. When people think about goals in terms of potential gain, that's a "promotion focus," which makes them more comfortable making mistakes and accepting losses. When people adopt a "prevention focus," they think about goals in terms of what they could lose if they don't succeed, so they become more sensitive to sunk costs. This is the focus people usually adopt, if unconsciously, when deciding whether or not to walk away. It usually tells us not to walk away, even when we should.

Many of the folks in the comments seem to think the takeaway is "you should always walk away and never press on," and are arguing, "But sometimes the right thing to do is press on!"

That's not the lesson here.  The lesson here is that "sunk costs make people irrational when they try to decide whether to quit or press on, and usually nudge them in the press-on direction."

The evidence seems to be that, if people emphasize future benefits as they weigh the outcomes of different possible paths, rather than emphasizing thoughts about what they have that might be lost, they more often choose strategies that include walking away from sunk-cost situations.  

Sometimes walking away will be the better choice and sometimes it won't be.   But once you've identified a source of systematic error, it's good to check for it when you're making a decision.  Hindsight is 20/20, they say; and you can't get that in advance; but what you can cultivate is detachment from the past, and all kinds of detachment help you see with clearer eyes.

"I'm having trouble figuring out whether I should make a change.  Could I be suffering from inordinate attachment to the status quo?"

I think part of the problem is that we think of the effort we've spent in the past as being, somehow, part of what we possess.  We see the wished-for outcome, and know that we've expended effort and resources in pursuit of it, and we think of it as possessing a fraction of the outcome.   

With many, very simple goals, it makes a lot of sense to think this way.  If I have a goal of stocking up six months' supply of canned food and dry goods for emergency preparedeness, then after I've expended effort for a while I may have three months' supply, and a little more and I'll have four months' supply, and so on.  If I have a goal of educating my five-year-old through high school, several years later I'll likely have educated my child through the third grade.   Having extended part of the effort, I have made a real achievement, which happens also to amount to part of my original goal.

But a lot of goals aren't that way.  Partial success is meaningless.  If your goal is to get a certain job that requires a bachelor's degree, but you quit your degree program with half the credits you need -- they're not going to give you your job part-time.  I think we have trouble thinking about these because, unlike "save food to eat later," these all-or-nothing games are often artificial constructs, consequences of complex society.

I've certainly been through big decisions.  The kind where you can see two really great paths ahead of you, and you must choose one or the other, can sometimes be the toughest.  Because you know that you will lose one of those two futures, and somehow you wish you could stay in the now, and cling to them as bright possibilities, equally possessed.  The thing that might be gained seems as if it is also the thing that might be lost.

But of course it is not a thing that might be lost until it is a thing that you actually have.  What you stand to lose by choosing the path to the left is not the path to the right.  What you will lose is only the moment of standing at the crossroads and knowing that you could take one or the other.  

Guess what.  You lose that no matter what you decide.

 

The problem's not that we sexualize breasts, but that we've lost the sense that sexuality is ordered towards self-gift.

Marc Barnes is a college student who writes with admirable boldness (sometimes heading down a path of "oops, I tried to make a really clever, shocking analogy but it all went wrong" in my opinion) over at Bad Catholic. Sometimes I think Marc blogs what G.K. Chesterton might have penned if he hadn't had the good fortune to have an editor. It falls on his combox readers sometimes to push back and say "dude, what you just said? No, and here's why" and to his credit he listens to them and often corrects himself.

His latest is called "Is Female Purity Bullshit?" and it is shaping up to make some good points. I am looking forward to the promised followup posts. However, what I wanted to point out today is to pull out a complete comment from an anonymous commenter who signed herself "a mom." Responding to a male defender if public breastfeeding who argued that men "should not always consider breasts as sexual," she wrote:

As a woman and a mother, I'm really grateful to see/read guys defending public breastfeeding as a chaste action :-) But I do have a recommendation, and that is to not balk at the idea of breasts always being "sexual." They are. Accepting that is one step closer to rightly integrating one's sexuality.

I'm going to make my case short and sweet:

"Sexuality" is the quality of being either male or female.

Women have breasts that are able to nourish a child. Men don't. Breastfeeding is, therefore, an inherently "sexual" capability. In other words, it differentiates one sex from another.

The essential difference between the sexes points to our complementarity, and our complementarity points to the fact that we are called to sexual unity. This is the logic built into our sexual -- male and female -- bodies.

So yes, it's perfectly "natural" that that which differentiates us helps to attract one sex to the other. It's perfectly "natural" that there would be an element of awe, an element of attractive beauty attached to what is "other" or outside of our own experience of life. "I'm made for you. You're made for me. We see this in our bodies. We belong together."

But that logic of complementarity, in the mystery of its imago dei, does not simply feed one into the other, as if it were a matter of filling a mutual void. No, the logic of complementarity that we read in our bodies necessarily pours outward in new fruitfulness, increasing wonder upon wonder.

Thus, when men (or women) make the argument that mothers ought to cover up when breastfeeding "because their breasts are sexual," my heart aches for the vision they lack.

By reducing "sexual" to "that-which-arouses-me," they have reduced complementarity to an exchange of self-serving use, and have severed its fruitfulness. In saying the "erotic" value of the breasts trumps the nurturing, self-donative value, they have shown their ignorance of the meaning of "sexual" in the first place, and in doing so have shown their poverty. And those who insist upon this poverty, as if it is "just how God designed men," are missing out -- not just on the full beauty of the sexuality of women, but in the dignity of the sexuality of men.

That child breastfeeding is the crown of our sexual complementarity -- a gift that completes the sexual logic of our bodies and showcases it in all its glory. That child is a reminder to a man that a woman is his equal in dignity, not his object of pleasure or his toy. That child reminds man that together he and she have poured their lives out to one another for neither simply his sake nor hers, but for that of another.

A man who is truly attracted to the full sexuality of a woman should see in the act of breastfeeding the epitome of her sexuality -- and his response should be awe, gratitude, and respect. It should be the same awe and gratitude with which a father watches his wife gently tend to any of their child's other needs with the special grace bestowed upon her.

It should never be a jealous, "I wish I were in the child's place," nor an uneasy battle with an interior desire to "have" or "own" her, nor disapproval or disgust. The latter, sadly, are too often the reality for those who make the argument that women ought hide themselves away while breastfeeding. They are the mark of a man who wants to keep woman for himself.

Yes. Breastfeeding is sexual. It is something only she can do. And we should thank her for it, as it is a reminder that we all exist for the good of the other.

 

I really loved this.

I think sometimes people point to the relative comfort and ease that it appears (from our perspective) other cultures have towards breastfeeding and assume that our culture's leering, mocking horror of it results from "they don't think it has anything to do with sex, and they're right and we're wrong, because breasts aren't for sex, they are for feeding babies." I think the relationship is a little more complex than that, and I don't recommend pretending to read the mind of any other culture so that we can make noble-savage assumptions about it. Every human culture has its own gifts, but also its own insidious pathologies, and I doubt any of them have the perfectly correct attitude toward human sexuality, which is to say, the correct attitude toward human-ness.

Part of it is, I am certain, our culture's insistence on refusing to acknowledge the connection between sex and babies. The act of breastfeeding is a squirming, snorting reminder that the reason humans have sex is because sex makes babies and sex prepares a home for them, and that is where they come from. The culture rejects this public, explicit, naked sign.

Some reject it from the "babies are good, but we don't want to talk about sex, because sex is private and fraught with danger" end. Some reject it from the "everything about sex is good and wonderful and should have free expression, except for making babies from it" end. Both of those ends tend to be disgusted and/or alarmed by the public, united mother-baby pair. Hide them away. They're embarrassing us.

There is, perhaps, an argument to be made (from the babies-are-good end) that, though open breastfeeding is good and in a perfect world there would be no problem, the poisonous culture has created an environment where it isn't "safe" to openly feed babies in public. The culture with its ambitions ("your-sexual-identity-is-for-my-pleasure-and-profit") has declared war, of a sort, on the brazen, public nourishing of children.

I wonder if the divisions between those who say "hide it away to protect mother/baby/onlookers," and those who say "do it anyway because it's right," could be summed up as a difference between battle tactics. One, an impulse to retreat; the other, an impulse to advance.

 

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Semiannual maintenance post, May 2013.

Five years ago this week, I woke up one day and decided to try being hungry for a change.  Those of you who've been through my archives know that this decision eventually led to my dropping 40 pounds and 6 pants sizes, and returning myself from BMI-obese to BMI normal.

I guess it's sticking for now.  I guess it's real.

I try to remain detached from the number if I can.  For instance, I always keep in mind that if I have another pregnancy, or when I go through menopause, I could wind up at another weight.  Mostly I think I've learned to manage that detachment, but from time to time I forget.

+ + +

Last month I forgot for a while.  

From time to time I think back to the months while the number on the scale was dropping.  During those months -- May to November of 2008 -- I was, frankly, obsessed and controlling and fearful (that whatever magic was working would stop working).   I was developing good habits, but at the same time I felt very driven by the numbers.  And yet I look back at that time with amazement at my power and self-control.  

Sometimes I start worrying, "What if I gain weight and I need to lose it again?  Will I ever be able to do what I did then?  Maybe I'll never recapture it, if I ever need it."

And I say to myself, "I know how I can make myself feel better.  I'll prove I can still do it.  I'll lose 1 pound, starting right now.  Even though I don't objectively need to lose any pounds, I'll just lose 1.  If I still have what it takes, it won't take long, just a couple of weeks, a month at most once I get back in the groove again.  I'll crack down really hard on myself and I'll lose 1 pound, and I'll prove to myself that I could still lose weight again any time I want to."

And then I can't "crack down on myself" as hard as I think I should, and the little line I still plot on a chart most days goes down a little and up a little and down a little just like it always does, and I fret some more.  Maybe I'll never get that groove back, even if I need it.  If I can't make it happen whenever I want to, whether I need it or not, will I be able to make it happen someday if I do need it?

And then I imagine a future where everyone makes fun of me because I blogged about overcoming gluttony but then I got fat again.  Seriously?  This is what I worry about?  Becoming a data point on the nobody can lose weight and keep it off side?  Or is it being proven wrong?  Am I a thin-person impostor?  Are the size 2's only a disguise?

This is not a healthy mental space to be in.

+ + +

So, last month I confessed to Mark that I was trying to lose ONE POUND and I couldn't manage to do it.  

(I mean, obviously my weight fluctuates day to day, but I wasn't seeing a permanent shift downward that would stick.)

And he reminded me:  

You are getting it backwards again.  

If you are worried about putting the weight back on, look at your behavior, not at the numbers.

Look at your habits.  Are you developing habits you don't want to develop?  Are you losing good habits you wanted to keep?

Because if you are slipping back into old patterns that you associate with the time when you were heavy and when you ate constantly, then that is a problem.  And it's a problem you can do something about.

But if all your habits are good, then you don't need to try to force the numbers to do ANYTHING.

+ + +

He's right.  He's absolutely right.  And I know this.  I don't know why I keep forgetting it.

But I do forget it from time to time.

I cannot directly control the number on the scale.  

I can directly control the choices that I make.

And I want to make choices every day that are compatible with living out the rest of my life in a healthy relationship to food and physical activity.

That's what I want.  To make choices now that are good for the rest of my life.

I can't really go wrong doing that, no matter what the numbers do.

+ + +

Fretting about the numbers often accompanies feelings of loss of control over those good habits.  And I usually find that, if I can remember to examine the habits instead of the numbers, I find that I have some places I should re-commit to.

The "diet mentality" has always been a mistake for me.  The idea that I can or should deprive myself strictly for some temporary period and then return to "normal" eating once I've acheived some number.   This has only been destructive.

(The only exception:  On occasion, I've found it helpful to cut out sugar and cut back on carbs for a few days, just to break a spiraling descent into a carb-craving cycle.   I don't think of it as dieting.  I call it detox even though I know that's a stupid word for it.)

Instead, I need to look at each behavior I engage in, and ask:  

Do I feel confident that repeating this behavior, regularly, for the rest of my life, would be good for me?  

If I made it to the end of a long life and looked back, what habits would I be telling everyone were my secret?

+ + +

Here are some of them, I think:

• Eat just enough at meals so that I have a real appetite when I sit down at the next one.  Pay attention to how much that takes, and learn.
• Have sweets and desserts at any meal time that I wish, but keep them small.  
• Go to bed a little bit hungry.  Have a drink in the evening instead of a snack. 
• Keep alcohol portions modest at dinner--or at least put off the drinking until the food's cleared away.
• Sugarless gum after meals -- good for teeth, and good for reminding me not to nibble as I clean up.
• Prefer dressed vegetables to carbs.  Use carbs judiciously to extract the maximum textural experience from each portion.
• I only typically need one snack, in midafternoon:  make it small, balanced, pleasant, and on a plate.
• Share my food with people who ask.
• Half sandwiches.    Most sandwiches are too damn big, at least for me. 
• Graciously accept some of whatever I'm offered, but I don't have to eat all of it.
• Refuse to think of an occasional, deliberate choice to enjoy food for pure pleasure as a "failure." 

These are not difficult to live by and don't represent deprivation, but they do take a little bit of attention.  And when my attention slips, I make choices that aren't as good.  It's as simple as that.  I need to pay a little attention to make good choices regularly, but the choices I want to make are choices I can feel happy about for the rest of my life.