Everyone Here Is Above Average

I continue, in this series on David McRaney.

This is a poker blog that has yet to resemble a poker blog.

Bear with me?

McRaney:

Taylor & Brown revealed a new side to the research of well-being & found that you maintain happiness under the spell of three broad positive illusions: illusory superiority bias, an unrealistically positive view of yourself; the illusion of control, the belief that you have command over the chaos that awaits you every day; & optimism bias, the belief in a future that can't possibly be as great as you expect it to be.

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SUPERIORITY BIAS

Have you ever had the thought while stuffed into an airplane or pressed against strangers in a subway car that you are probably the dumbest person in the room? What about at a shopping mall near the holidays, people bumping into you, children screaming, long lines of angry shoppers huffing & loudly answering phones using the latest pop music hits to signal incoming calls -- in that environment, do you have a gut feeling that you would struggle in a game of Trivial Pursuit with the average shopper? How about opening night of a blockbuster movie? Do you sit in a crowd listening to people having casual conversations about their sister-in-law's hemorrhoid operation &, upon comparison with the people around you, see yourself as below average in the realms of politeness & consideration?

Imagine in any one of these scenarios that you had every person in the room take an IQ test. Where do you think you would rank compared with others in the group? Near the top? Near the bottom? What if you compared your driving skills with those of everyone else on the road during your typical morning commute? Imagine we created a graph that judged the cooking ability of every person in your high-school graduating class on a scale from one to ten. Where do you think you would fall on that scale? Most people put themselves slightly above average, so in this imaginary experiment -- unless you know you are a terrible or an excellent cook -- you likely thought you were about a six.

The illusory superiority bias allows you to move thru airports & movie theaters unhindered by the burden of realistic analysis. This is an enchantment generated by the brain that allows you to judge yourself in a light more positive & less harsh than the one you shine on others, & the end result is that you tend to see yourself as unique & apart from the crowd, & you tend to see the crowd as homogenous & a bit dull.

You may even wonder sometimes how everyone around you can be so stupid when it seems so easy to be, you know, smart like you.

Chances are you see yourself as slightly above average in most categories, & way above average in a few. When you compare yourself to an imaginary average person, you see yourself as superior in just about every category. The irony, of course, is that in most airports, subways, movie theaters, & shopping malls, the majority of the people squirming inside are thinking the same thing. The research suggests that the average person thinks she is not the average person. She thinks most people are dumb, & that she is not like most people.

Maslow, Part 2: SELF-ACTUALIZATION

The following excerpts are from You Are Now Less Dumb. McRaney writes:

In the 1940s & 50s, Maslow & [Carl] Rogers championed a view that preferred to see human beings as something more than just molecules of meat. They felt it was wrong to assume you could approach the mind as a biological machine that could be repaired & improved at the level of its cogs & gears. Instead, they advocated something that still reverberates in the public consciousness today: a holistic approach to mental health. They saw you as a creature with a sense of self & a desire for improvement of that self.

That final goal was called SELF-ACTUALIZATION.

Rogers called the gap between how you see yourself & how you really are incongruence.

Moving toward congruence, toward matching reality with your subjective experience, the happier you become. You no longer lie about your abilities or hide your shortcomings, but instead would be a totally open book during both introspection & conversation.

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The idea that people would be happier if they maintained a constant state of realism is a beautiful sentiment, but [researchers Shelley & Jonathon] Taylor & Brown found just the opposite. They presented a new theory that suggested that well-being came from unrealistic views of reality. They said you reduce the stress of terminal illness or a high-pressure job or unexpected tragedy by resorting to optimism & delusion. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you thru rough times & help motivate you when times are good.

Later research backed up their claims, showing that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. People who take credit for the times when things go their way but who put the blame on others when they stumble or fall are generally happier people.

Your explanatory style exists along a gradient. At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life & your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you & your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, & the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root.

About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, & psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower--the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad & weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning. The notion of depressed realism has its naysayers, but meta-analysis of the last few decades of research still favors the concept. It also shows that even if you are one of those people who seem to have misplaced their rose-tinted glasses, you can't eliminate positive illusions entirely. 

They may shrink up to dehydrated specks & look tiny alongside their giant delusional counterparts inside your most optimistic peers, but they don't completely disappear. 

TO BE A PERSON IS TO BE IRRATIONALLY POSITIVE ABOUT YOUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND & AFFECT THE WORLD AROUND YOU.

Maslow: Yes or No? (Part 1 of 2)

I have always, always, always, since I first encountered the various cartoon pyramid versions of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- told everyone it's the best thing since sliced bread.

Before I go into typing a bunch of shit someone else wrote about Maslow & about the concept of Self-Enhancement, a concept that undercuts Maslow in some way, I want to reiterate that I am perfectly clear as mud on this topic.

Which is to say: No doubt, self-enhancement bias is real. We delude ourselves all the time, it seems.

There is no doubt in my mind that the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid are also accurate.

Also, it's clear to me that those who are struggling at the lower levels of the pyramid are most assuredly going to delude themselves.

What I don't understand about the following passage I'm going to quote from is this: Who is the group of people that is deluding themselves while also being eligible for the upper levels of Maslow's pyramid?

The author is about to claim that because we delude ourselves, & because the top of Maslow's hierarchy is essentially "Sainthood," those two things are clearly incompatible, or they can't be true.

I'm leaning towards thinking, however, that they are not mutually exclusive, unless & until one reaches at a minimum the 3rd level, due to an idea that will recur on this blog: If you are a poor struggling wage-slave schmuck (as most of us are), delusion is REALISTICALLY better than your expected value in this life.

In other words, delude yourself while you can, because if you can delude yourself that means your not working a dumb job for the man. Or even better, if you happen to be currently working for the man, by all means go ahead & delude yourself into thinking your really on your yacht, anchored up to deserted island sipping mai-tais with supermodels, like your company's CEO is probably doing.

& where's his CEO on Maslow's scale? I can't say I've ever had the good fortune to pick the brain of one of the super rich, but from what I've seen, they are nothing but delusion.

***I'm making a part two for the actual passage.

The Overjustification Effect

We think that there is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what we love. I thought I loved poker & maybe I did. Truth is, I can't remember if I ever did or not.

What I do remember for certain is this: I thought I loved poker, & when faced with the seemingly unavoidable question of, "How are you going to get paid?"* poker seemed to be "the most-loved" of the things it seemed one could do in order to get paid.

Before this time, & this time was Age 21, freshly graduated from liberal arts school with meaningless paper made more meaningless by the pauper status of my fields of study: English & Philosophy.

Oh well, because before this time, I was lucky enough that money wasn't something that needed to be thought about. Yes, this was only possible because my parents spent an excessive amount of time thinking about money, climbing the ranks of the middle classes.**

Why is this blog called, "The Overjustification Effect?" Because either loving something isn't enough, or "loving poker" isn't the right wording for what it was I thought I felt for poker at the time I chose it for a career. Because getting paid for doing what we love causes our love to drop off a cliff. 

The GREAT GREAT GREAT David McRaney writes, "When someone reminds you that acquiring currency while ignoring all else shouldn't be your primary goal in life, it feels good. You retweet it. You post on your wall. You forward it, & then you go back to work."

Balance is great. & it's super-great to see that the poker community is becoming more & more about balance. There was a time there where all I cared about in the poker literature was related to balance. The creation of Jared Tendler (sp?) as a thing is, in terms of poker itself as a meme-creature needing to survive even while folks like Caesar's try to suck it dry, absolutely necessary. 

Guys who say they couldn't beat the nosebleeds if they weren't de facto Buddhas due to the amount of meditation & pre-frontal-cortex-directed thought required -- absolutely necessary -- if poker is to survive. But this blog is called THE END OF POKER AS WE KNOW IT for a reason, & that reason is that I don't think poker will be surviving, for a number of reasons. 

Today's reason: Balance is great. Poker-life-coaches are great, too. But this means the survival of poker is based on needing noobs to start meditating, or even most of this readership. 

De rigueur re-entry tournaments & the Bovadavization of Online Poker Thru Catering to the Recreational Player -- these will do a better job of killing the subculture than our collective torpor on the meditation matter.

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*Yes, "seemingly" unavoidable, because it wasn't until I was finally forced to have to make wages to keep myself in calories & shelter that I realized that this was even a thing (capitalism, survival by wages for wage slaves, et al). It gets too philosophical & there is a lot here to unpack. I'd love to unpack it, but I can't imagine anyone is interested. If you are, comment below please & that'll be keen.

**The reason the rich are justifiably envied is not due to the amount of money that they have. The real reason is that they live a life of insouciance & general freedom that is ONLY ONLY ONLY possible in the presence of a most supreme accumulation of capital.***

***Or, that even rarer accumulation: wisdom in the science of consciousness****

****Definitely for another time.