Dispensing Wisdom

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer of Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Tom Spence, Chris Wragg, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing the joyous arrival of Aleph Insights' new baby. And due to the lockdown, unusually, we're recording this remotely. Nick, tell us, what's the news? I'm all over something. Astute listeners will notice that Peter is absent from today's podcast because he's just had a baby, or more accurately, his girlfriend has had the baby, and he's obviously been highly supportive. And this baby is a little girl, and she looks adorable and everything. I hope he's going to call her Aleph. That's what I hope. It's close. It's actually, I think it's Ada. Ah, okay. So, and of course, Chris and I have both had kids. We've got Tom here who hasn't yet had kids. He is a kid. I've had a child myself, yeah. And can you give people advice about what to do as a parent? Will they listen? And then actually, more generally, giving advice, old people give advice to young people all the time, don't they? And young people don't listen to it. And then the young people become old, and then they give advice to young people who don't listen. And it feels like this sort of eternal issue of generations not listening to each other. But more generally, I mean, can you actually meaningfully give advice to people who are younger than you, or indeed older? And should we listen, or are there good reasons to reject what old people say because their advice is rooted in outdated beliefs? Okay. I mean, just one thing. I can't remember if we've discussed this before. One thing immediately strikes me is that even the best advice in the world, even if it is, by whatever measure, correct, you've got to be in a receptive sort of state to accept it anyway. Anyway, that just leaps off the top of my head. Chris or Tom, do you want to leap in there?

Speaker B: 00:02:12

Yeah, well, I think the thing for me is, you know, I'm quite interested in sort of different cultural models, and, you know, the acceptance of advice, and also our sort of archetypes of, you know, what an advice giver is. And, you know, you've got these two kind of different models at work, you've got the sort of Gandalf kind of figure of where age represents, you know, wisdom. And then you've got this sort of, you know, Grandpa Simpson kind of character where, you know, age is ridiculed in some way. And, you know, that's all, it's obviously a really fundamental struggle that is not in any way unique to our time. At the moment, you know, you look at stories like King Lear, and that is all about sort of, you know, how one interacts with, you know, the kind of direction your parents might want you to go in. So, yeah, and I'm interested whether or not there are differences between different cultural settings, and the way that advice might be received, and also the different phases, because not only is the parental advice to the, you know, the young child that's being parented, but the thing that totally struck me was when I had children, people had told me about children, and I'd seen children, and I sort of had this idea that they were going to be a nightmare, right, but that there would be some upsides. But there's nothing that can prepare you for just what a nightmare they

Speaker A: 00:03:56

actually are in reality. Quite how little control you have over the outcome as well. It's, you know, how you kind of have this fantasy that you're going to be that perfect middle class family, where all the kids are sitting there discussing, you know, discussing Horace's odes, while everyone else's kids are on their screens. And you think, well, I'm going to do things differently. I'm not going to make the mistakes my parents made. And then within about a week, you've turned into

Speaker B: 00:04:21

your dad. Yeah, no, I wrote, before we had children, precisely to try and avoid this trap, I wrote a parenting manifesto. It was, it was short, but you know, and then I read it like, I read it several years later, and it was preposterous. It was just the most ridiculous thing. And I was like, that was only me a few years ago. What kind of stuff did you put in there? Oh, it was things like, you know, don't ever pander to the sort of child's desires, you know, make a strategic decision, and then impose it because it's for the longer term good. And it just all, you know, all disappears. And I had all this stuff about, you know, don't be emotionally blackmailed. And, and, and, and then you just find yourself on, you know, kind of one day waking up and realizing you're just doing all those pathetic things you swore you would never do. Like what? Well, like making the short term decision, you know, like, somebody wants an ice cream, and you're like, no, no, we're not having an ice cream, because you can't have an ice cream every day. I really want an ice cream, you know, okay, here, have an ice cream. It'll get me over the next,

Speaker A: 00:05:25

what you don't realize is not worth, you know, exactly. It's like an ice cream. It's £3.50. There you go. You know, go away. Yeah. Okay. I like it. Tom, let's bring you in. But before we do, I want to apologize, actually, Tom, because I think it's a bit of a cheap shot I said, because we were saying, you know, Nick's got kids, Chris got kids, and Tom, you're a kid, but I don't, I do know what it is. It's middle age envy, you know, so that's, that's why I disagree

Speaker C: 00:05:49

with you. I think I am pretty much still a child, to be honest. Oh, right. Okay. Especially in the world of Coronavirus. I mean, I'm living at home with my parents right now. Okay, fair enough. You

Speaker A: 00:05:58

know, so does that mean you're an advice giver? Are you a giver of advice? Or really, you should be a taker of advice and how receptive to advice? Just to put things in context, Tom, I think Yeah, I would, I feel like you're probably one of the youngest millennials. Is that accurate?

Speaker C: 00:06:13

I'm right on the boundary. I am. I am one of the youngest millennials, but very close. And I think a lot of my cultural touchstones are actually more Gen Z than millennial.

Speaker A: 00:06:24

Right? Okay. Okay. Well, I'm because I'm also intergenerational. So I don't really identify with millennials or Generation X. But we're almost Tom horrific, as this may sound, we're almost the same generation. Yeah, well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I think I'm Generation X. And you are squarely, you and Chris are massively generation. And I don't even know what the hell Generation X is. I mean, I kind of do. That's very Generation X to know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tom, yeah, people trying to give people are old farts, like us three trying to give well, apart from your fellow generational millennial, Nick, people like us trying to give us as fanciful as that seems

Speaker C: 00:07:04

people always try to give you advice. Yeah, well, I think there is a, I mean, people like giving advice, because when you give advice, you feel good, right? You feel like you've helped someone you feel like an expert, you know, wisdom. Exactly. Yeah. But I also think that when people give advice, they're often giving advice based on their own experiences, right? Because, you know, that's what they're a subject matter expert in, in themselves. And people are giving advice as to how they would have done things should have done things or did do things when they were the age of the advice receiver. But I think there's a there's a problem with that, which is that, you know, the world changes. I mean, if you think back to your parents, when they were your age, they would have been in a very different situation. I mean, I actually checked before this, this podcast, my dad, when he was maybe a year or two older than me, bought his first house, flat in London in Lambeth. Yeah. And it was one bedroom, and it cost about 30,000 pounds. I also just looked up on on right move here. One bedroom flat in Lambeth now cost about 400,000 pounds. So, you know, the advice he might give on saving up for a first home is not necessarily applicable anymore. I think there's a question that you see, we shouldn't just ask, you know, how willing are people to receive advice, but also, how useful is the advice that is being given?

Speaker A: 00:08:43

izens advice video from about: 1940

Speaker B: 00:13:07

Yeah, well, I think that that sort of that theory highlights two things for me. The first is that there is that there is a distinction between the themes about which the advice is required in. So, you know, whether there are, you know, and some of those are kind of, you know, not affected by time, they're kind of universal throughout time. But some of them probably are. But that's things like, you know, it might be, okay, I want to know about human relationships or parenting, you know, so there are those that or it might be I want to know how to deal with coronavirus, right, which is clearly not going to be an issue, you know, hopefully in a few years time. But there's then the solutions, right, which is the kind of content of the advice, which which I think is what Tom was hinting at probably is context dependent, right? So, you know, how do I deal with relationships? That that's a that's an ongoing question. And we, you know, we look back to Shakespeare for, you know, sort of wisdom on those kinds of things. But actually, you know, has the answer to that question changed over time? And so I think it's worth sort of remembering those separations. The second thing is, I think, you know, Nick's theory about, you know, we ask advice about stuff external to us, we require advice about things internal to us. And that might, there might be something around that, which is why we don't, perhaps accept advice, because the advice that's useful may well be about us and about, you know, effectively, a criticism of our personality in some way that we might want to, you know, well, really, what you should do is be less whatever. And that's difficult to accept, right, we've got our sense of self. And we, you know, in order to kind of protect that, we might ignore the advice, even if it means a bad consequence for us. Whereas if somebody says, Oh, what you should do is, you know, go and consult this, this government agency and fill out a form. You know, that's less sort of, you know, we may be more inclined to follow that

Speaker A: 00:15:23

advice. So we talked about a little bit about what sort of advice people see, but that doesn't always match with what people what advice is actually given. Tom, I think you've got something

Speaker C: 00:15:33

to say about that. Yeah, well, I think Nick and Chris both talked about the demand side of the equation there. So about what advice people ask for, and actually need, and how there's a mismatch between those. But then, I think on the other side, there's another mismatch between the advice that people should give, so the advice that is needed, and the advice that people do give. And I think that ties into Chris's point about, you know, the kind of advice on more personal, internal things often being unwanted, because it can be perceived as an insult, even though that is often the advice that is given. And going back to my earlier point, I think another trend in the supply side is that the advice that is given is for an environment that no longer exists, so may not be the right advice to give. There's a couple of things I found which,

Speaker A: 00:16:28

where, you know, there's, there does seem to be a mismatch between the perceptions of older people and younger people about what things younger people should or do worry about. So this was a survey of looking at, you know, what, so actual young people under 30s, more or less, what are they worrying about? And then what do people who are sort of middle aged or older think that young people worry about? And it's, it's not bad, right? I mean, you know, people 55 plus think that young people worry about jobs and housing and social media, and social pressures, and drugs. Right? What is totally wrong is drugs. Yeah, I was gonna say that no young person worries about drugs. Young people don't take drugs anymore. They're so foreign. They don't have sex. Or if they do, they haven't got any worries. So yeah, life is good. They don't take drugs or have sex. The number one thing they worry about is actually mental health.

Speaker B: 00:17:25

So I say they need more drugs. You're saying is anxieties causing anxiety, isn't it? Well,

Speaker A: 00:17:30

I mean, that's the so that's, that's the big, that's the really the big one, which which so young people are much more concerned about mental health and older people give them credit for. So that's, or, you know, other older people believe they are. But you know, they're there. Yeah. And I think but I think this issue, which Chris raised, which I know what Tom's saying as well, is actually it may be that, you know, there's two kinds of it's certainly solutions like, you know, okay, what do you want? If you like a, you know, if you if you want to be in a relationship, what should you do? If you tell someone that they should buy the girl at the grocery shop, a bunch of flowers, that may be considered outdated. Because these days, you're supposed to download Tinder, aren't you? Yeah, don't don't do that. Okay, so it's your advice as a young person. Don't Yeah, young person advice. But certainly that like that solution is wrong. But I think I think more generally, like, okay, that that question of what do you want a relationship for? What are you aiming for? Is what you're looking for? The thing that is going to make you happy? I feel like those kinds of those kinds of bits of advice, like, oh, when I was when I was your age, you know, I was thought I was madly in love with this girl. But you know, looking back, I can now see it was just, you know, it's just infatuation, and she wasn't really good for me, etc. Those are universal. I mean, I say, so I wonder if, you know, the issue is that the the the calling attention to the things people worry about, and sort of trying to put them in perspective, maybe that's useful. I don't expect that people listen to it necessarily. But the probably the solutions that people give, here's what you should do if you're in this situation, that is where it's most likely to be totally obsolete.

Speaker C: 00:19:12

Yeah, I think connected to that, the what I found most useful, when I've received advice isn't necessarily, as Nick said, do this and do that. But it's more of an understanding of the sort of cone of possibilities. So, you know, understanding that if x happens to me, that is you know, it's not necessarily unusual, or something to be worried about, it's happened to other people before. So I think kind of normalizing experiences that people are likely to have is one of the most useful things, because then they know to be able to go out and seek further advice on that if they want to, they know they're not alone in a struggle.

Speaker A: 00:19:52

Mmm. Yeah. Okay, we need to move towards a conclusion. I've got a question I want to ask. But before we do, I think both Nick and Chris want to say something, either of you leap in.

Speaker B: 00:20:06

Yeah, well, I was just gonna say, you know, the whether or not advice is taken is not is not clearly not just based on whether the advice is any good or not, right? It's something going on within the person themselves. And it might be a generational mistrust, or, you know, individuals may be less susceptible to advice. So I'm quite interested in psychologically, you know, what's going on with an individual when they make the decision to, to act upon advice, never mind whether advice is any good or not, have they accepted it. And I think, you know, one of the one of the interesting factors here, I mean, it's quite well established that there are differences. Culturally, you know, psychologists like Harry Triandis and Daphne Oisseman have, have looked at, you know, the differences between individualism and collectivism across different cultures, right. And obviously, it'd be unsurprising to hear that sort of the West is more individualistic. And to put it very crassly, the East is more, you know, collectivist in its in its view, and whether or not, you know, individualism, and a sense of familialism as well, you know, do you listen to advice from your from your family is, is that is at play. And, you know, there's an interesting study by Yaniv and Milovavsky at the University of Jerusalem, where they were looking at, you know, how people accept advice or not. And they found basically, as we would intuitively understand, that people value their own opinion more than they value an external opinion. Yet, if you if you step outside of that as a third party, and you look at it, and you say, well, here are two people's opinions, right? Why don't you split the middle, but as an individual, you value your own opinion more, you know, more than an external opinion. And they're looking at the reasons why that is the case. And you know, one of the one of their sort of hypotheses is that when you when you're looking at your own opinion, and effectively your own advice to yourself, you can see all the rationalization of it, you can see the working out for the decision, right? You understand where it came from. And yeah, you know, whereas when somebody gives you advice externally, you've only got that little bit of data about what they're suggesting, you don't see the same reasoning, but behind it. And so you know, there's a sort of, there's an inbuilt bias towards, you know, accepting our own opinion. Now, is that is that good? That's, that's, you know, that's a, that's the question, I suppose, presumably, that is that bias is there for a reason, right? Yeah, maybe we are better off. I mean, people do adjust to advice, but but they take into account they shift sort of 20 to 30% of the direction towards it rather than halfway as you would expect. Yeah. Yeah, no, nice. Final point, Nick.

Speaker A: 00:22:54

Yeah, just I think, worth mentioning, I think one of one of the drivers, certainly of this, if you like the perennial problem of advice, you know, you look, go back to Chaucer and Knight and the Squire, you know, the sort of generation gap and how the Squire thinks the Knight is a kind of boring old fart. And the Knight thinks the Squire is a bit silly. And, you know, but the and this thing that that I think, Chris is absolutely right. And Tom's absolutely right. There's all sorts of reasons why we shouldn't pay that much heed to older people. But I think one thing that we do need to be aware of is how bad we are anticipating the extent to which we will change over time. You know, like we were saying, when you become a parent, you think, well, I'm not going to be like my parents. And you know, you look at old people, you think, well, I'm not going to be a boring old person like that. I'm going to be one of these adventurous, exciting old people. And of course, you know, you actually just do, you replicate the same life path as people. And I mean, there's a lot of evidence about our inability to really to anticipate what we're going to be like in the future, certainly in the short term, things like really simple things like the extent to which we can enjoy a particular food, we're really bad at anticipating that there's a lot of experiments with crisps, weirdly, one of them was asking people how much they would enjoy eating crisps after the ice cream or after they eat sardines. And, and people, people massively people think they're going to enjoy crisps much more or less depending on what other food they've had, but they don't. There was an experiment also with crisps, where people had to choose which flavours of crisps they wanted on every day of a conference, and then another group were allowed to choose on the day. And the group who chose in advance always chose a variety of flavours, because they thought that that would be better. But but the people who chose on the day always chose the same thing that was went for the salt and vinegar or whatever. That's what they liked best. We're bad at that we're bad at anticipating what we might feel in a day or two days, or, you know, and then you look at things like the hyperbolic discounting problems where people, you know, people are much more biased towards the recency and make different decisions about their future selves than they do about their present selves. But I think more, more generally, you know, we, we underestimate how much we're going to change over time. And I found one study, which was a 50 year study looking at the same people at the beginning and end of a 50 year, 50 year period, and, and actually, you know, measured aspects of their personality, slightly old fashioned concepts of personality metrics, because they hadn't fully developed when they started. But looking at it, you know, there are some things which stay the same. So things like your stability, your impulsiveness, your appreciation of culture, leadership, your social sensitivity, those things seem to stay remarkably constant. But things that do change are your calmness and maturity and self confidence and tidiness. And, you know, if you're, if you're an untidy person at 20, you may be totally different at 70. And, and actually, on some of these metrics, you know, you, the person you're going to be in 50 years time is, is, you know, as different as a, as a complete stranger to you now. So, yeah, I mean, I suppose what I'm saying is, we underestimate the extent to which we will change over time, but we know that we will. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Good. All right. Um, look, we just need to sort of close the circle here. And I think it would be remiss of us if we didn't take this opportunity and notwithstanding everything we've said, see if we can take heed of our own advice while we've been doing this is to, to give, you know, new dad, Peter Coghill, and his coquillette, the benefit of our wisdom, either as, you know, all three or four of us here as fathers, and I'm sure Tom, I'm sure you've got all sorts of excellent advice you could also give to Peter as well. It'd be more like how to be a good dad, you know, from Tom's perspective as a dad rather than a dad. Can we also give some advice for Tom for fun? Well, if Tom doesn't mind, if Tom doesn't mind. Yeah. So who's got, let's start off. Okay. If Tom doesn't mind, let's all give Tom some advice. I'm ready. Nick, go for it. Yeah, it's just that. Yeah, strap in, Tom, this is gonna be good. This is, you know, these are gonna be pearls of wisdom flying their way at you. Nick. Yeah, something that stuck with me. I heard the person who wrote this life being interviewed about it was in the in the 90s. And she said, one of the things you realize when you get into your 30s is that things you thought were just coincidences, things you thought were bad luck, are actually a pattern. And it's probably you doing it. And I think this comes back to my thing about we tend to that attribution problem of we tend to, we tend to blame our failings on the external environment, and not on ourselves. That's also be aware that by the time you get to the age of 30, you'll realize that the things you did wrong is because you're a chronic procrastinator or something and not because you were just unlucky. Just to say, Tom, that's really good advice you're getting there. And I concur with Nick. And Chris,

Speaker B: 00:28:13

I would say just don't undervalue how good your 20s are. That would be my advice. They're probably the golden era of your life. Because when you're a child, you don't have agency. When you get into your 20s, you can do stuff, but you haven't got the familial responsibilities. So you're basically in the sweet spot of being able to do what you want. That's it, really. Yeah, just remember,

Speaker C: 00:28:43

you can do what you want. I don't know if you've noticed, but I haven't been outside my parents' home since March. I'm writing off this part of my 20s at least. Coronavirus aside, you can do

Speaker B: 00:28:56

what you want under normal circumstances. I think it's a good example of what you talked

Speaker A: 00:29:01

about at the beginning, Tom, about, you know, environment changing. And if ever an environment changed, there we go. My advice, I mean, look, Tom, have you seen the film Little Miss Sunshine? I have, actually. Yeah, a long while back. So all I would say is there's a moment where the granddad, who's a heroin addict, is in the minivan, and he gives some advice to the grandson without the little girl hearing, because she's got her earphones in. Do you know what, can you recall what the advice is? You don't have to tell me what it is, but do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker C: 00:29:32

Far too long ago for me to remember that, that I saw this film.

Speaker A: 00:29:34

Okay, so I'm not going to say it, so just check it out, okay?

Speaker C: 00:29:38

I'll have a look, I'll have a look.

Speaker A: 00:29:39

Yeah, yeah. And something very similar happens, I just saw it recently in Scent of a Woman, where Al Pacino gives some advice to a cat as well. So maybe check that out. It's basically the same advice. Tom, I mean, we don't have time really to talk about what you think of the advice that you've just received, unfortunately. But do we want to give Peter some advice? I've got one thing, which is what I always tell people who are going to be new parents. Go for it. What you do is going to be completely irrelevant to how your kid turns out, right? So just don't worry about the details. They will end up being able to walk and use a toilet, right? Don't get worked up about that. One thing I really wish I'd done is kept a diary, just kept a diary of what they're doing that day, because you forget so easily. You think, I'll remember this day for the rest of my life, because it's the day that they first picked up a ball and you totally forget. Nice. Yeah, Chris?

Speaker B: 00:30:38

Yeah, I think it's difficult. Parental advice is obviously very difficult. I would just say, eventually, it ends.

Speaker A: 00:30:50

Oh my God. Yeah. You're so bleak, Chris. Yeah. Should we just end the podcast on that? Yeah. Let's just stop right there. Yeah. Tom, as the daddy.

Speaker C: 00:31:02

I'm going to go a bit meta here and say that my piece of advice is about giving advice. And I think Peter should try to, because part of a parent's job is to advise their child, but he should try to keep his advice informative rather than prescriptive. So rather than advising his child what to do, he should tell them about the things that are possible and help guide the child's own decision of what to do.

Speaker A: 00:31:29

Well, you can put your finger in that electric socket, but if you do... Exactly.

Speaker B: 00:31:34

But how does that help him in the next week? Trying to rationalise with toddlers is pointless. That's another bit of advice.

Speaker A: 00:31:42

I think my advice is a bit trite, but just have fun. Enjoy it. And I like Nick's point about... A good time all the time. All the time. There you go. The best advice ever given anywhere. The best motto. All right, let's wrap up there. I really enjoyed that. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare, Chris Wragg, and Tom Spence of Aleph Insights. And a big congratulations to Peter Coghill and his new aliphette, Ada. Well done, Peter and Rosie, and all the best. That's all for now. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.