Taking Stuff For Granted

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for 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 Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing taking things for granted. Nick, lead us in.

Speaker B: 00:00:24

Well, so last week two things happened on the same day which both were related to taking things for granted, which is why I kind of noticed them both. First of all, I was trying to wipe the table down, you know, clean up. Not like you, but anyway, go on. Yeah, and after I'd done that it was still wet, so I wiped it with a tea towel and it was still bloody wet and I just thought, oh, well at least I know that evaporation will finish the job for me. And I thought, evaporation, there's something which doesn't get enough thanks because not only is evaporation essential for rain and therefore vital to the evolution of life on land, but it also helps me finish the cleaning, perhaps more importantly. And we go through life just assuming evaporation will work. You leave little droplets of water. We will be constantly awash with wetness if it doesn't. I thought, you know, I need to be more thankful for that. Then I'm reading Great Expectations to my son at the moment. It's brilliant. To my shame, I've never read it, only ever seen the David Lean film. And there's a passage in it I read which really stopped me and I thought, flipping heck, isn't life easy now? Where he's come back after meeting Magwitch, the convict in the graveyard who's asked him to steal some food for him, well, from his own house, and he says, I was afraid to sleep, even if I'd been inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning, I must rob the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then. To have got one, I must have struck it out of flint and steel and have made a noise like the very pirate himself rattling his chains. I thought, flipping heck, imagine if you just want to get up in the night and go to the toilet or something, having to get a flint and steel to make the light. And it made me think, well, no wonder they had chamber pots. Well, that's true. But, you know, that assumes you can see where the chamber pot is. Anyway, you know, the need for evaporation after that. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, just the sheer number of things we take for granted. I just wonder what taking things for granted is and whether it's, you know, good or natural or whether we should, you know, stop and say thanks more often or what? I think you're quite right. I think light is a

Speaker A: 00:02:41

good example. I think it's very easy to forget, you know, for, you know, until very, very recently human history, we lived in darkness a lot of the time, you know. Chris, what are your thoughts?

Speaker C: 00:02:53

Yeah. So, I mean, for me, there are kind of two elements for taking things for granted. One is that you assume that they will remain true. So, you know, the sun will rise in the morning, you know, that will occur. But the other sort of element is this lack of recognition of it, almost that you're not aware of this thing that you're reliant on all the time. So, you don't even consider it. So, those are the two kind of factors I think of when analysing what taking something for granted is, you know, both that it will continue to happen and that you don't even really notice that it's happening, but that it's fundamental to what you're doing.

Speaker A: 00:03:43

I think maybe there's a third element as well, which is that, you know, any human in whatever context will always find something to be unhappy about and dissatisfied with. And once one thing solved, so if we are sort of bumping into, you know, pushing our chamber pot over in the middle of the night going, damn, only if there was some light I could easily get hold of, once that gets solved, we just move on to other things to sort of be a bit miserable about. Yeah. Well, this is the,

Speaker B: 00:04:11

what's known as the hedonic treadmill. And it's very well documented. What you've just said, and which has been noted obviously by, you know, writers for hundreds of years is now pretty much, you know, been scientifically established. By and large, things getting significantly richer, you know, through things like winning the lottery doesn't on average have a significant effect on people's subjective wellbeing. In the long run, in the short run, it always does. Because of various things, you know, habituation, desensitization, but we constantly act like it's not true. We act, you know, we strive, we strive for new things. Yeah. If only I had these things that my children would take for granted. Yeah, exactly. So what's going on there? Like, we are with, you know, we it's like, we never seem to learn that this new this new Apple iPhone thing, what won't actually make us happier. But we keep wanting more stuff. We keep wanting more money. Now the evidence is that above a fairly sort of low standard of living. I mean, I think that I think on average, globally, it's something like $10,000 a year or something, you know, above that. Happiness is driven primarily by kind of you, unless by your circumstances. But we act like that's not true. You know, we all want to live in a penthouse in Central Park. And, you know, we think that if we did, we'd go through life cock a hoop. But the evidence is that we win. Right, which is a good thing, even if it makes

Speaker A: 00:05:53

us unhappy. Because it does mean that there is scientific progress, for example.

Speaker B: 00:05:59

Well, that's that's my that's my feeling about why we why we deceive ourselves about it. And I always imagine I imagine these two tribes, one of whom, you know, are sensible and they sit there and they go, you know what, we keep we keep trying to find that next bigger cave. And, you know, we've discovered that we're no happier when we when we get one, we should just stay where we are and live a nice life because it's better off. We'll be better off doing that. And another tribe who don't understand that and who keep they're driven always to get a new a new cave. Well, those guys are going to be the ones who take over, aren't they? They're going to be the ones who go and kill the other tribe who are just set about not inventing new spears. So, yeah, I think I think there's something very fundamental here, which is, you know, related to the to the fact that we sell with we're self-deceived, like it's almost necessary that we're deceived by it. Necessary that we have a blind spot in our learning here, because if we didn't, we wouldn't have evolved.

Speaker C: 00:06:52

And I also think there's self-deception going on in terms of so one of the things I I take for granted and it's only every so often that I don't take it for granted is my health. And the thing that causes me to to sort of be glad that most of the time I'm in good health is when I'm ill and you feel bad and you you sort of think, oh, God, you know, I really take not being ill for for granted. And the I think we deceive ourselves about the you know, one one element of taking something for granted is assuming the probability of that thing continuing is very is higher than it actually is. So people continually, you know, underestimate their risk of falling foul of, you know, particular diseases and so on, even though even when they know what the base rate of that disease is, people will will make judgments that they're, you know, the classic case of I didn't think cancer would happen to me, you know, that that kind of question that they took not having cancer for for granted. And at some point, you know, they have to address that. And, you know, that's the point at which they no longer take it for for granted. So I think, you know, this sort of self serving bias about not just what condition are we going to be in the future, but what is my what is my sort of homeostatic norm is is again, something where

Speaker B: 00:08:27

we deceive ourselves. Yeah. And I think this is in practice, what we mean, usually, when we say taking things granted, it tends to mean a failure to act to maintain something. You know, if you take your wife for granted, and you don't, you don't give up paying any attention to her and she leaves you kind of thing, you know, or Yeah, your health, like if you just you don't, you ignore it for 20 years, and then suddenly you have a heart attack, you know, that says, that's that tends to be what we mean by taking things for granted. It's an assumption that something will be permanent when it's not and actually where we need to behave in a certain way to keep it or a failure to plan for

Speaker C: 00:09:04

the consequences of it. So even if it's not something we affect, you know, like when when, you know, stable weather patterns or something, you know, and then the point at which they're they're unstable, we haven't, we've taken it for granted. We haven't done the biblical thing of, you know, laying aside however many years of grain it was we were supposed to have laid aside.

Speaker B: 00:09:24

And, you know, we're then we're then in trouble. Yeah, I mean, so but this, this and I mean, so they've also looked at the opposite of winning the lottery, which is becoming disabled. And similar whole similar findings hold, you know, that actually people, when people suffer very negative life events, they adapt much more than they think they're going to do. People, people generally, you know, again, after a sort of adjustment period returns to the level of happiness they were in before it happened. So So I think maybe we should be taking things for granted, we should we shouldn't give a shit. It doesn't matter if we get cancelled, we'll be fine.

Speaker C: 00:09:58

I'm sure that's not true. No, but the point is, from a psychological point of view, to have constant anxiety about the removal of things which generally do stay the same for a period of time would would be unmanageable. And in fact, people who suffer from anxiety are in this very condition of worrying about whatever it is that is in, you know, that everybody else assesses is improbable and not worth not worth being anxious about.

Speaker A: 00:10:30

This is what I was thinking about when you were talking about illness sort of, you know, we don't take for we sorry, we take for granted our health. And is the opposite of that, worrying about your health? Or is it more appreciating your health? But how I mean, this is quite difficult to do that, I think, to and to apply that in everyday life to

Speaker B: 00:10:48

constantly be appreciative of something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we are we say this, this issue of sort of being much more motivated to avoid losses, again, well documented. So there's kind of two relevant things. I think one is so loss aversion, where if people perceive something as a as a reduction in their, you know, general sort of well being, it's come that they will act sort of do take risks to avoid that happening. Even if you frame that the other way around. So for example, if I give you, if I give you 10 pounds, and I say, Do you want to risk that 10 pounds on a coin toss where you'll either get nothing or 20 quid, people are less likely to go for that, then if I don't give you the tenor, and I say, Would you like a certain 10 quid, or a coin toss? Now it's the same choice, right? But the fact that I haven't put that tenor into your hands, as soon as it enters your hands, it becomes magically more valuable than 10 pounds, and you become averse to losing it. And, and so we certainly behave we but and again, I mean, it's, you know, it's quite easy to think of why this is evolutionary, evolutionarily advantageous. We've got to remember that evolution doesn't has not doesn't work to make us happy. It works to make us successful. So you know, we've evolved to have anxiety about not even us successful,

Speaker C: 00:12:08

but our genes successful. Yeah, exactly. And there's a there's a fascinating study by Harris, Korner and Hahn, three British academics in the journal Cognition, which which backs this point up that Nick was talking about, which is where they show visual representations of probability, right? So the puzzle that they've, or the thought experiment that they've sort of given to people is a farmer and his orchard. And so if you can imagine like a big matrix plots with lots of spaces in it, and for trees that have particular conditions associated with them, they've coloured this. So it's a visual representation of the probability of a tree having a particular particular state. And they've shown these two, two subjects. And they've said, okay, imagine that the yellow coloured trees contain poisonous fruit, and the red coloured trees are this delicious fruit that's that's really nice. And the farmer's daughter is about to go round the field and pick fruit from these trees. What's the probability of her pick, so they just flash up this visual image, what's the probability of her biting into one of the poisonous apples and dying? And they've asked a control group the same. They've shown them the same probability plots. But in this case, the yellow trees, the fruit is sour, and rather than fatally toxic. And in that experiment, they've shown that people, even when visually presented with the same probability plots, make different judgments based on the severity of the of the outcome, presumably, I think it's much more likely when they think it's much more likely when the when the fruit is fatal. And there are a range of other things that they've done, like, you know, what are the chances of debris being dropped over? Here's the bit of the town, and here's the wilderness, what are the what are the dangers of overflight, you know, debris falling on on the people here. And then they've said, instead of it being a town, it's it's a forest. So the consequences would be much less. And again, people when they're worried about the people in the town down below, have made greater, greater probability judgments. And we see we see that all the time with with people when they're dealing with language as well. If you say that, oh, the chances of me banging my toe are quite rare. People will judge that in one way. If you say the chances of me getting fatal cancer are quite rare. They'll judge that in another way. And they will view the more severe outcome as being less rare than than the other the other event.

Speaker A: 00:14:53

Yeah. I'm not sure if this ties in but sort of bringing it slightly back around to taking stuff for granted. I remember years ago, I broke my ankle. And I was in cast for, you know, a number of weeks. And I do remember thinking, not long after I'd broken it, you know, within the first few hours, going, this is just so annoying, going through this horrible pain, wouldn't it be much better if our bodies are just, you know, if you had a red light that appeared, for example, there's all flashes, that's good. This bit isn't working. I'm sure we've discussed this before.

Speaker C: 00:15:24

That you could ignore.

Speaker A: 00:15:26

Yeah, yeah. And go, you know, there's that light going, all right, don't use your foot, you better put it in a cast. And, and all would happen, it would be exactly like, you know, in my car, when my petrol light starts flashing, I just ignore it for a bit. But we kind of need to have this emotional connection or this experience to change our behaviour.

Speaker B: 00:15:43

Yeah, I mean, I think this is the this is the so I mean, we haven't we haven't talked about sort of intergenerational, you know, taking things for granted, I feel like, you know, you personally, are able to draw on, you know, things that happen to you. So you can go, honestly, it's really nice being able to move your leg, or scratch your scratch your knee or whatever. But someone who has never had that experience, just is not going to be in a position to appreciate that as much. Now, when it comes to, you know, things that we went through as kids that our children don't have to contend with, I don't think there's any way really of making them get that, you know, and which is why, you know, you had the sort of 30s, you know, 20s and 30s generation, growing up and living through the Great Depression, and then, you know, making sure that kids were all really sort of well fed and well looked after. And of course, then you have this horrible spoil, you know, post war generation, who don't care about the past. And, you know, don't want to listen to these old cultures. And you get an obesity epidemic. Then you get an obesity. So yeah, I mean, it's, you know, you get it's the classic sort of rags to riches to rags in three generations thing, you know, you which is, you know, the reason that works as a phrase is because it's so flipping true, you know, you end up, you know, you end up you, you come from nothing, build up a fortune, give it to your kids and go, great, isn't it brilliant, you must be cock a hoop every day, because you don't have to be where I was, you

Speaker A: 00:17:08

know, at your age. Yeah, okay. Um, we're close to wrapping up. I want to move on to something else, just to wrap to finish this off. But is there anything you want to add to to finish to round

Speaker B: 00:17:22

this off? I think I one interesting thought experiment is what would we take for granted that we think we wouldn't? Okay, so so we take for granted that we don't have, but that so what so for example, we all want to be able to fly, right? That would be amazing. I feel like if I could suddenly fly, I'd be cock a hoop. Now, the fact is, if I could fly, I'd be like, yeah, I can fly. So what I can't be bothered on this, I'd still be lying on the sofa, you know, surfing the internet. Because, because, you know, flying would be a bit of an effort. And do you mean, like, I think I think, you know, we, we, what cool things could it would, if they happened, you know, which we think would be mind blowing, actually, we would find quite boring.

Speaker A: 00:18:05

But I know I'm having trouble imagining this, because I still think of stuff like being, for example, being invisible. I can't ever imagine taking that for granted. Would that ever get old? Yeah, I think every day of your life is you're a winner with that, you know, off. Well, I don't want to say what I'd like, but we don't we can imagine. Yeah. I think that, you know, so I actually refute this, I can't imagine anything that would be so wonderful, that I would then go, you know, it's all right, actually, Chris,

Speaker C: 00:18:34

I think the the existence of artificial super intelligence, I think we will take that for granted, we think about it now. And, and we say we can't conceive of it. And we think its impacts will be hugely transformational. I think we'll get there. And it will adapt to it. And it'll be

Speaker B: 00:19:04

ect, the other day, like from: 1985

Speaker A: 00:19:54

I go and have a cup of tea, you know, and then and see what your back garden looks like. Okay. And then something else. What about what do you think either you personally, I know, you let us in with evaporation. But what do you think you personally, or humans in general? I know, I know my one. Okay, I guess I know my one, but you go. Well, it'd be antibiotics.

Speaker B: 00:20:16

Okay, which you because I know for a fact that I would be dead several times over. And the very least blind if it wasn't for antibiotics, because I've had I've had a number of infections, you know, sort of my arm and my leg sort of, I think I don't know why I seem to be I've had two or three times I've had cellulitis, which, you know, would kill you die of sepsis if it was if there weren't antibiotics. And I've also had a corneal ulcer, which similar, you know, would have would have destroyed my eye. If it wasn't for antibiotics. I mean, unbelievable. But it's just 100 years ago, I wouldn't be here anymore. That's really amazing. So yes, I do try and I do try and give thanks to antibiotics. So great, great bunch of things. Good lads. Chris?

Speaker C: 00:21:05

Well, I'm gonna go sort of a bit bit Sartre and say, our very existence, you know, the fact that this planet is habitable, and you know, isn't isn't subject to massive solar radiation, or doesn't get struck by a meteorite or something like that. I think, I think, yes, just the fact that we have a habitable space and that exists in the first place, you ever get that thing where

Speaker B: 00:21:32

you think you have this sort of enormous conflict between the sheer improbability of existence, and the fact that we're here. And then you realise you're sort of, you know, you're, you're, you're watching some banal TV programme. Yeah. And you think, how? What? Wow, what's this is what we've done with the luxury of this thing, which is why is there anything at all? Yeah. Why is there a

Speaker A: 00:21:56

universe at all? Like what? What if there was just nothing? Yeah. I mean, I'm sort of closer to Chris on this with my one and also going back to you talked earlier on about us in being taken for granted our health, which is actually also your example. Yeah, I would say the fact that we're not dead is how I would phrase it. And that thing and not necessarily realising that one day we are going to die. That's a certainty. And not quite taking that on board fully enough. You speak

Speaker B: 00:22:24

for yourself. I intend not to die. Live every day as it is your last. One day it will be. Yeah. You mean I should get into a bed and hook myself up to an incubator? That sounds rubbish. I, I was, I've got this now we'll have to save my quantum immortality idea for another day.

Speaker A: 00:22:44

Tantalising, we'll keep that for another time. Yeah. And so I think, you know, if nothing else, you know, the Catholics are onto something good there with their idea of a memento mori, you

Speaker B: 00:22:53

know, I'm gonna but I will just say one thing. Yeah, I think I'm going to live to be the oldest person on earth. That's the consequence of this idea that I've got. But I can't I haven't got time to explain that now. But I want to get that down here now. So that when it happens, you people will go. So when we have to announce next, next week, Nick died. No, but that might happen to you, but it won't happen to me.

Speaker A: 00:23:16

The consequence of where I'm going with this. Okay, very good. All right. Let's stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.