Authors: Raj Magesh, Julian D’Costa

Vignette #1

You’re crossing the road, biting into a Subway® Double Chocolate Chip cookie, relishing the indescribable mix of flavors delighting your taste buds. Everything about the cookie is gorgeous: the vibrant brown hues, the warmth as it melts in your mouth, the delicious scent of butter wafting into your eager nostrils – even the satisfying crunches it makes as you munch down in sheer joy. Your eyes roll up involuntarily, and you moan in decadent satisfaction. The cookie is bliss; you are in Nirvana.

And then a truck slams into you.

Your cookie falls to the ground in slow-motion, tumbling… tumbling…

Your eyes shoot open and you gasp wildly, adrenaline spiking through you. Your body is drenched in sweat, chest heaving for breath. It was just a dream , you think to yourself, silently relieved. When you finally feel the restraints on your neck, wrists and ankles, the relief shatters. This isn’t my bedroom… Where am I?!

Harsh fluorescent lights flicker on, and you see the silhouette of a man hovering menacingly over you. As you blink in incomprehension, he reaches out a practised hand and deftly begins removing electrodes from your scalp, placing them in a saline bath by the bed. His movements are quick and efficient; he’s done this hundreds of times before. Fear clogs your throat.

“Who are you? Why am I here?” you rasp, throat dry.

“Hush, my child. Don’t worry. You won’t remember a thing…” murmurs the man, running a hand lovingly through your hair. A hypodermic needle glints menacingly in his free hand. You feel a sharp jab. As you drift into unconsciousness, the last thing you see is the man’s name-tag, pinned neatly to a green apron decorated with cookies of all shapes and sizes.

Jared, Subway® Advertising Department.

Only one thought runs through your head. The cookie was a lie.

Epistemology

How can you trust your senses? If you’ve ever been sleep-deprived, drunk, or high on LSD, you know that your brain can play tricks on you. Paranoia, schizophrenia, hallucinations: popular culture is chock-full of references to psychiatric disorders that can make you see things that aren’t there, hear voices that don’t exist, and converse with people who are long dead.

As a society, we have a perverse fascination with the mentally ill: we point and laugh at the asylum escapee on the streets raving about the giant pineapple in the clouds, whilst giving a silent prayer of thanks that we are not so afflicted.

I ask you this: how are you so sure? What gives you the supreme confidence, the sheer unmitigated hubris , to claim that your experience of reality is more valid than that of the Giant-Pineapple-worshipping madman? Ask him, and he’ll claim with the utmost gravitas that the rest of the world is blind to His Fruitiness and he has been Chosen to be His sole prophet, the only one blessed to hear His Juicy Voice.

To him, you’re the mad one.

René Descartes, the French mathematician and philosopher universally hated by all students studying coordinate geometry, postulated an “evil demon”, an omnipotent entity that could control all your sensory inputs and completely alter your perception of reality. Jared the Demon could make you think you’re stuffing yourself with delicious cookies all day long while in reality, your body is one of thousands of enslaved automatons used to mine the Chocolate Caverns of Baghdad.

This delicious terrifying thought experiment of Descartes was once a mere whim: after all, who believes in evil demons? Today, however, Jared the Demon doesn’t seem all that impossible. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies, though still primitive, are improving by leaps and bounds. At some point in the future, such simulations will almost certainly become indistinguishable from reality. Given the possibility of such hyper-realistic simulations (à la The Matrix), can you claim, with 100% confidence, that the reality you are experiencing is the “true” one?

In fact, who’s to say you’re not already plugged into one of these machines? Maybe everything you know to be true – your family, your friends, your entire world – is artificial. How can you know anything for sure? Are we to throw our hands up in desperation and claim that reality is inherently subjective? Should the Giant-Pineapple-Prophet’s beliefs be given equal credence as yours? After all, in principle, you could both be equally right.

Epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, seeks to address such questions. The answers are, unsurprisingly, contentious even among philosophers. Despite all these unsettling hypotheticals you don’t muddle through your day worrying about whether your existence and experience of reality are real in any meaningful sense, do you? Often, the best answer to such questions is a working definition.

No, we do not accept that reality is inherently subjective! No, we do not accept that the Giant-Pineapple-Prophet is right! We postulate, axiomatically, the existence of an external objective reality independent of the internal subjective reality shaped by our individual experiences. This is an assumption. There is no a priori reason for me to deny our Giant-Pineapple-Prophet his delusions, but I do anyway, because assuming an objective reality makes life really interesting!

Philosophy of Science

Why am I rambling about this? This isn’t the Indian Institute of Philosophy. You’re reading Quarks magazine, not Quacks magazine (though the Editor-in-Chief might secretly be a rubber duck!). All I’ve concluded thus far (arbitrarily) is that reality exists. A meme connoisseur would surely respond: “Such impressive, much wow”. But this assumption of the existence of empirical truth is the backbone of the scientific endeavor.

Science is the attempt to understand our empirical reality by building accurate models of the universe. We modern scientists are the counterparts of the ancient cartographers who sailed the uncharted seas and created beautiful, elaborate maps to reflect the virgin territory they explored.

Again, we make implicit working assumptions to make progress. We assume that the universe follows natural laws, and that Jared the Demon is not actively messing with our superconductivity measurements. We assume that these laws don’t change unpredictably. We assume that our subjective experience of reality is a reasonable map of the external territory – that our senses and brains, despite their flaws, catch glimpses of the true world. As our model of the universe improves, our beliefs align better with reality.

Beliefs? There’s no room for subjectivity in science, you may scoff. Belief, here, is used technically: our belief in the proposition that X is true is represented by a value in the open interval (0, 1). This is the Bayesian definition of probability, where the probability of X is our degree of confidence that X is true, given available evidence. This “belief” is not subjective: given new evidence, there is exactly one correct way to update beliefs,based on the laws of probability – Bayes’ theorem.

Bayes’ Theorem

\[\frac{P(\text{hypothesis true} \mid \text{given evidence})}{P(\text{hypothesis false} \mid \text{given evidence})} = \frac{P(\text{evidence seen} \mid \text{hypothesis true})}{P(\text{evidence seen} \mid \text{hypothesis false})} \times \frac{P(\text{hypothesis true})}{P(\text{hypothesis false})}\]

Cancer test example: 10000 people, Base Rate = 1/1000,

Test Accuracy = 90% both ways

New odds = Old odds x Weight of evidence

The more careful reader would have noticed a glaring omission in our definition: we have excluded the points 1 and 0, corresponding to the binary TRUE and FALSE. Does that mean we can never unequivocally state that X is true or that Y is false?

Yes! This is a direct consequence of the fact that we are working from a position of incomplete knowledge. Even the statement “This is an apple” cannot have probability 1 despite the red object looking like, smelling like, and tasting like an apple, because we can’t rule out the infinitesimal possibility that Jared the Demon, is messing with you.

Only the Sith deal in absolutes.

This is a restatement of the aphorism that in science, you can’t prove anything. Nonetheless, you can be pretty Pineapple-damned certain that something is true: P(X) = 0.999 is good enough for all practical purposes!

If all this was obvious to you, or perhaps a formalization of something that was already intuitive, that’s good! The next step is using this framework to actually understand reality: the scientific method.

Vignette #2

Four thousand years ago, in Ancient Greece, ALEX and HELEN are standing on a cliffside, admiring the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean. Their marriage – sixty years ago to the very day – had surprised the entire community. Two philosophers, marrying? Those stooges wrapped up in their dusty scrolls and enraptured by hours upon hours of tedious debates? Hah! No way! But their wedding had proceeded without a hitch (well, besides theirs), and their bond had only grown stronger as the days went by, like a tender sapling maturing into a solid oak.

ALEX: Your beauty invigorates me, dear Helen! Like the fresh ocean breeze on a sweet summer day!

HELEN: [cocks an eyebrow, smiling] Are you sure that’s not just the fresh ocean breeze you’re feeling, Alex?

Alex laughs, then picks up a conch shell from the ground. He presses it to his ear, listens for a moment, and passes it to Helen.

ALEX: My dear, tell me, why do you think we can hear the sound of the sea in conch shells?

HELEN: Why, Lord Poseidon’s generosity, of course! The spirits of ancient Water Nymphs who fought bravely during the Titan War rest within every seashell, with Poseidon’s blessing. What we hear are the remnants of their voices, echoing through the deepest recesses of our souls.

ALEX: [shakes his head] You must be joking, Helen! After all, all voices that we hear come from the air, the domain of Lord Zeus. The rumbling of thunder, the crack of lightning! The sound we hear in conch shells must be the resonances from the souls of the Wind Aurae who helped Zeus during his struggles.

HELEN: Hippocampus droppings! There’s no way that we could hear the sea in a conch shell because of Zeus . Poseidon would never stand for his brother usurping his domain!

ALEX: No, no! All you’re hearing is the wind , Helen, and mistaking it for the sea! Think for a moment, there’s no water in a conch shell. How could Poseidon have any dominion there? Air, on the other hand–

HELEN: [crosses her arms] Don’t you tell me what I do or do not hear, Alex, do you hear me?

ALEX: [mouth agape] Hades, woman you’re impossible!

The sound of metal-shod hooves rings against the stony path up to the cliffside. Alex and Helen whirl around. A twenty-foot-tall CYCLOPS trots in on a Giant Wooden Horse that sounds remarkably hollow. A giant Band-Aid Ⓡ covers the left half of his eye and a web of scarring can be seen extending beneath. Alex and Helen wince in sympathy.The CYCLOPS dismounts from his Trojan steed and walks forward, leather boots thumping loudly on the rough-hewn stone

CYCLOPS: Greetings, mortals! It is I, Polyphemus, King of the Cyclopes, and I am in the pursuit of a scoundrel with shifty eyes and a silver tongue. Hast thou seen any such man, perchance?

ALEX: [stammers] King Polyphemus, N-n-nobody has been this way.

POLYPHEMUS: [elated] Nobody ? It is him! At long last, after so many fruitless summers, my search is ended! My revenge shalt be sweet!

A hastily-aborted chuckle comes from Polyphemus’ great steed, though its face remains wooden, immobile. Alex’s eyes flick to the horse. Polyphemus appears not to have heard. A panel on the neck of the horse slides up noiselessly. From within the horse’s body, Odysseus raises a finger to his lips, eyes twinkling with mirthful laughter

ALEX: Uh-

POLYPHEMUS: Tell me, dear mortals? What is your heart’s desire? Riches beyond compare, gold and diamonds trickling like waterfalls? Fame everlasting, your name sung by bards across the realm?

ALEX: [blinking] King Polyphemus, you honor us with your generous offer. Alas, we are but humble philosophers who seek nothing but the wisdom of great minds. We would seek your wisdom in resolving a minor disagreement between my wife and I.

Alex sneaks a glance at Helen. She rolls her eyes, feet tapping impatiently, but raises the conch shell to Polyphemus. He peers down curiously at it.

HELEN: Do conch shells house the spirits of Poseidon’s water nymphs or Zeus’ wind aurae?

POLYPHEMUS: [blinks and straightens] Well… I suppose… Posei- Zeus? I really don’t know, actually. My History tutor never covered this.

ALEX and HELEN sigh, and glare at each other.

POLYPHEMUS: [brightens] Wait! I know how to find out!

Polyphemus’ plucks the conch shell deftly out of Helen’s outstretched hand and crushes it within his palm. A cloud of chalky dust emerges from his fist. Alex and Helen stare, uncomprehending

With a resounding crack, a bolt of silver lightning races down from the heavens and slams into Polyphemus’, who wears a surprised expression. As his corpse topples to the ground, a gigantic waterspout emerges from the ocean, rises up to the clifftop and deftly pulls the cyclops into the sea. Alex, Helen and Odysseus stare at where Polyphemus’ had stood a scant minute ago, unblinking.

ODYSSEUS: [from inside the Trojan horse] What. Just. Happened.

Alex and Helen look to each other, eyes wide. Then, they race back to town, whooping excitedly. Finally , something they could publish in Nature.

The Scientific Method

1. Question. What is DNA shaped like?
2. Hypothesis. Helical
3. Prediction. X-shaped diffraction pattern
4. Experiment. Photograph 51
5. Analysis. Build models, phosphorus on the outside.
6. Iterate. Falsify, retest
7. Communicate

Cognitive Biases

There’s an oft-cited cautionary tale about making erroneous conclusions despite collecting good data.

A froggologist is investigating the sensory systems of well-trained frogs. He begins his experiment: placing a frog on a table, he barks the command, “Jump!” and the frog leaps up three feet into the air! The froggologist meticulously notes this down. Now, he grabs a pair of shears, snips off the frog’s front legs, and barks “Jump!”

Tears streaming from its eyes, the frog jumps up two feet into the air. The froggologist notes this down too. Dispassionately, he cuts off its rear legs, and barks “Jump!” but the frog doesn’t move. He repeats himself, louder and louder, but the frog simply does not jump any further. The froggologist rubs his chin excitedly and concludes: “Upon surgical amputation of all four legs, the frog becomes deaf!”

Where did the froggologist go wrong? He’d trained at the best scientific institutes in the nation. He’d learnt all about frogs: their anatomy, their physiology, what kind of flies they loved to eat and even how to train them to respond to voice commands! He had followed a precise experimental procedure. He had replicated his experiment over a hundred times with different species of frogs, frogs trained in different languages, and even different knives! His p-values were well below 0.05 and he had used MATLAB to plot complicated fits to his data. He’d done everything right!

But lest we laugh at our dear froggologist, we first have to understand our own cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in reasoning. Unlike random errors, systematic errors are insidious: collecting more data will increase your confidence in your erroneous result. If you think that legless frogs not jumping on command is indicative of deafness, repeating your experiment and calculating p-values is not going to help.

As the name suggests, cognitive biases arise from our underlying cognitive processes. Our brains evolved in an ancestral environment where quick decisions meant life or death. If you spot something orange moving through the grass, you don’t pause and calculate the probability of it being a tiger considering the time of day, your location and feline mating habits – you hightail it out of there! Humans are remarkably good at making rapid yet accurate heuristic judgments but this ability comes with the price of making systematic errors of several types. Seems abstract, doesn’t it? From inside your head, everything you do always seems sensible enough. No one ever thinks they’re behaving irrationally and this lack of selfawareness can come back to bite you in the rear. Cognitive biases have been studied by psychologists for decades in the role of human decision-making, creating a vast body of literature illustrating exactly what traps humans are likely to fall into.

Here we present a carefully-curated collection of cognitive biases and suggestions for avoiding them. Please note that reader discretion is advised: the authors are not liable for any loss of limbs, illusions or dignity.

Confirmation Bias

“People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.” — Peter Watts, Echopraxia

As his severely-insulted wheelchair-bound colleagues pointed out, our froggologist had assumed that the only reason his beloved frogs would fail to obey their God was that they couldn’t hear him. All his experiments were designed to confirm his hypothesis and never once disprove it. In science, testing a hypothesis always involves trying to falsify it. The more you fail, the more likely your hypothesis is to be true. In our froggologist’s case, he could have simply ordered his frogs to croak twice if they loved Jesus – or for the atheistic frogs, if they loved flies! We suggest dealing with your own confirmation biases by assuming that your opinion on any issue is wrong and trying to figure out why that might be the case post facto. Once you think you can handle this, check out the 2-4-6 puzzle!

Scope Insensitivity

“A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” — Stalin

Stalin had commendable self-awareness, despite being a terrible human being. If you’re being stalked by lions in the savannah, the difference between one lion and ten might be huge but the difference between a thousand lions and ten thousand is negligible – you’ll die anyway. We just can’t appreciate the bigness of big numbers because we never really needed to. We have no suggestions on overcoming this, apart from telling you to be aware of it. In case you wish to kill a million people, to fully appreciate the gravity of your actions, make sure you personally promise to pass on their last words to their families before you gently slit their throats one by one. See? I bet you just visualised doing that with one person. Not a million people. Your brain simply can’t process that feeling multiplied by a million. Smoke would come out your ears.

Planning Fallacy

(Why you can’t ever get anything done on time)

As every IISc student knows, the amount of time you think it will take you to do something and the amount of time it actually will, cannot be measured in the same units without invoking a logarithmic scale. For some reason, we are terrible at planning. From iGEM to Pravega, nothing that happens in IISc happens on time. But lest you fret, this is a universal human experience: we are all broken in the same way.

We always think we know why this specific project will happen on time, unlike the previous ones. Maybe your prior experience would help get things done faster. Maybe you have more manpower to help. Maybe you bunked all your classes to focus on it. Whatever your reasons, you are lying to yourself . The only reliable measure for how long a project will take is how long similar projects took in the past.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

“I’m in too deep, man.” — Someone, probably

Many, many people regret doing their PhDs. They’ll come to the realization that they hate academia sometime during their PhD, of course. Maybe it’s the stress, or their advisor, or the series of experiments that continues to fail repeatedly despite all the effort they’ve been putting into it at the cost of their health, freedom and sanity. No, I’m not bitter. For some, this torture eventually pays off and they enjoy their further years in academia or industry. Others are stuck doing a job they hate with a degree they don’t want.

Why people stay in situations they hate often boils down to the sunk cost fallacy: the feeling that you’re too invested in something to give up. Maybe you’ve spent a lot of money, or time, or effort. If you quit now, all that suffering means nothing, right ?

Wrong. If that’s the only reason you can think of to stay in a situation, get out immediately. The correct thing to do is run an honest cost-benefit analysis of the situation ignoring all sunk costs that have already been put in. You can’t change the past, you can only change the future. If you believe that the benefits of a PhD are worth the mental stress it’ll put on you for the next few years, go ahead and do it! But if you’re trying to justify it using effort you’ve already expended, don’t bother.

A good strategy to avoid the sunk cost fallacy is to periodically imagine that you’ve just been teleported into the body you currently occupy. Somebody else made all the decisions that govern your life right now. You’re starting from scratch, as of this moment.

Are you sure there aren’t things you want to do differently? Go do them!

The Dunning-Kruger effect & Impostor Syndrome

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” — William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The Dunning-Kruger effect has been popularized everywhere on the Internet, and most of us understand it as “Dumb people are too dumb to realize they’re dumb.” Despite several controversies regarding Dunning and Kruger’s experimental methodology, the effect seems robust: unskilled people tend to overestimate their skills.

The converse (though again contested) is also common: skilled individuals in a professional or academic setting often underestimate their skills, leading to a persistent feeling of self-doubt. This has been termed “impostor syndrome” and has been correlated with stress, anxiety and depression.

If you ever catch yourself thinking, “I’m not actually smart. I just got lucky. I’m just good at fooling people into thinking I’m competent,” you are likely to be a victim of impostor syndrome. Remember, you were objectively good enough to get into IISc. You are competent. You are smart. No one can take that from you.

These are especially difficult biases to overcome because they are often tied to our notion of self-worth and we humans hate thinking rationally about things that also evoke strong emotions. Yet, knowing that these effects exist can help protect you against them: the next time you catch yourself shrugging off a compliment because “Oh, they’re just being nice. I’m not as great as they think I am,” you’ll know to blame impostor syndrome.

Hyperbolic Discounting

(Why you can’t ever get to bed on time)

Just one more game… Just one more episode… Just one more cookie…

Sounds familiar? That’s your brain doing mental gymnastics to convince you that a little bit more will do you more good than harm. Hyperbolic discounting occurs when you value a small reward obtained immediately over a large reward obtained at a later time. The longer the delay, the less the large reward is worth.

You might think, this doesn’t sound like me, I never think like this. You’re probably wrong. While you may not have explicitly put it into this form, you behave as though you implicitly think this way. One more game of DotA or one more episode of Game of Thrones sounds incredible compared to a full eight hours of sleep. That’s because the restfulness you gain from good sleep comes much later than the entertainment value of one more game/episode.

In fact, the effect is so robust that hyperbolic discounting is a pillar of behavioral economics. To gain some self-control and get your messed-up life back in order, we suggest recruiting help: someone you trust to curb your excesses.