You forgot how to use a can opener
Can you smell what the incentive structure is cooking?
Intro: Get Troxler’d, Noob
Pictures like these are fascinating:
If you stare at the centre of the image for several seconds the colours will eventually go away. This is called the Troxler effect.
Beyond the visual aspect of the illusion, it highlights two fascinating details of our cognitive cognitive machinery:
The majority of the time, focusing on something provides clarity. In this instance, it does precisely the opposite.
The fact that we are aware of this effect will not change our experience. I can tell you that the colours are going to go away if you stare long enough, and knowledge of this fact won’t actually allow your brain’s visual system to counteract it.
Of course, becoming blind-by-consistent-exposure is not a new discovery. Anybody with a functioning sense of smell can attest to this; we’ve all had the experience where we walk into our college roommate’s dorm and find ourselves blinded by the smell of Kraft dinner and cat litter, only to realize the roommate is perfectly unaware of the smell because he’s too busy doing Adderall and playing Call of Duty until 4:00 A.M.
We’ve all had this exact experience.
But the thing is…
Our internal states are Troxler’d as well
When people have extremely bad seizures, the best way to solve the issue is to *check’s notes* cut their brains in half. No joke. Slicing the nerves in the corpus callosum stops the erratic electrical activity from spreading, thereby preventing the seizure.
People who have to undergo this type of surgery are called split brain patients, and they consequently become some of the most fascinating use cases of neuroscience. In their skulls they have two entirely separate brains controlling the same body. Consequently, they call into question many elements of consciousness and the nature of the self.
This video does a great job of summarizing the implications of people with split brains. TL;DW — split brain patients allow us to see how divided we are within, especially when it comes to our motivations and reasoning.
In split brain patients it's obvious because only the left hemisphere has access to speech. As a result, when they are interrogated under the conditions of a controlled experiment, the left hemisphere will make up random explanations to justify the actions of the right hemisphere.
Here’s simplified example of what it would look like:
An experimenter can whisper to the patient’s right hemisphere something like “lamb shank.”
The experimenter can then ask the patient’s left hemisphere (which controls speech) “What do you feel like having for lunch?”
The patient replies “lamb shank.”
The experimenter asks “Why did you choose that?”
The patient replies “Oh, I was passing by a billboard with a juicy lamb shank on it last week. I guess it’s been on my mind ever since.”
The unsettling thing is that the split brain patients are not lying. They have no idea they are coming up with a complete fabrication for their motivations. The part that controls the speech is unaware of the "other brain" sitting inside the skull.
They can’t step outside their own consciousness and see the obvious truth of why lamb shanks were on their mind(s). They have, in effect, been Troxler’d.
For the rest of us non-split brain people, it’s even harder to notice when we’ve become Troxler’d, considering…
When we throw in the incentive structures of the modern world, the whole thing becomes a mess.
My very first post on this Substack related to perverse incentives, and more recently I reiterated on the subject in a more unhinged yet entertaining fashion.
Many issues of the modern world can be boiled down to bad incentives:
Social media leverages our need for in-group approval in order to boost engagement, and hyper engagement might as well be synonymous with addiction.
Political candidates are frequently swayed by the interests of lobbyists rather than the voter base they are supposed to represent.
Pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to prescribe medication, considering they are simultaneously more tangible and profitable than other potential remedies. This was a non-trivial cause of the opioid crisis.
In 2008, the American banks and financial regulators overlooked the riskiness of the mortgages they were providing, believing that systemic housing collapse was near impossible.
The majority of corporations are evaluated on current or future market capitalization, causing them to prioritize growth and profit metrics over nebulous externalities such as impact to the climate.
Housing and higher education have effectively become luxury goods, as the incumbent portion of the population who possess these goods are incentivized in favour of scarcity. The value of a Harvard degree or Hampton House goes down if we allow everybody to have it.
So the natural question arises: if we know about these perverse incentive structures, why don’t the people at the top of their respective ecosystems attempt to fix it?
Of course, we can attribute some portion of the answer to a combination of apathy and malice. Those who benefit from a given system hardly have the incentive to change it. There is that Upton Sinclair quote and what not.
Additionally, people derive their status from standing at the top of these status hills, no matter how arbitrary or ill-founded. A non-negligible portion of our life satisfaction comes from social comparison.
But another salient truth is that the dominant players within a given ecosystem tend to have a Troxler’d outlook. They’ve been “staring at the image” for so long, they can no longer see the colours that guide their behaviour. That’s why a lot of media facing billionaires or Hollywood celebrities appear “out of touch” despite otherwise appearing intelligent.
Okay, but what the hell does all of this have to do with can openers? You know, the title of your post?
Previously, I’ve written about how we needed to learn even the most basic aspects of how to function in this society. The example I used was a can opener; it’s a pretty simple tool, but unless you’re actually taught how to use it, it might as well be a NASA rocket.
People who have unconscious competence within that same domain have an extraordinarily difficult time remembering what it was like before they were an expert. It's the curse of knowledge.
The central point of this post highlights instances of the reverse; there are times when being completely ignorant of existing paradigms of a system or incentive structure serves to your advantage. In this sense, it’s less of a curse of knowledge, and more of a curse of focus, since focus correlates with becoming Troxler’d.
Being the fool who doesn’t know how to use a can opener works to your advantage, because you're the only one asking how a can opener works. That's the first step in making a better one.
Okay, you've given us a ton of abstractions and analogies. How about something tangible?
Sure. Sadly, it's detachment.
If we find ourselves Troxler’d, it’s only with the benefit of detachment — cognitive, physical, or temporal — that we can start to see the colours more clearly again.
Examples of each:
Cognitive
We’ve all had that one friend who is stuck in a bad relationship. We can see it, everybody else can see it, but they can’t seem to see it.
And this can be for anything. I recently watched “The Iron Claw” featuring former teenage heartthrob and current adult heartthrob Zac Efron. Without giving anything away, the characters had become Troxler’d by their love of wrestling, resulting in heavy consequences for many of the characters. For the audience, who is not Troxler’d in the same manner, the experience becomes emotionally devastating.
Physical
A couple months ago I went on vacation to a part of the world where productivity and “the grind” simply wasn’t a thing. The physical distance for an extended interval allowed for sort of clearheaded reflection which is otherwise unavailable. After coming back, it became far more obvious how much of the hustle culture pervades our desires and daily actions.
Going away and coming back allows us to call into question things that we otherwise wouldn't consider. Another example: a friend recently went to Japan and was amazed that people would leave their bags on their seats while they would go away to another part of the mall. They didn't have to worry about the bags getting stolen.
Temporal
Fifty years ago there was a “smoking section” in planes. Today we have discovered that planes are closed self-contained systems with very little air recirculation.
This is only one of many examples of how we can clearly see the insanity of the past. And yet, 50 years from now, there will be aspects of our current lives which will seem just as patently insane. From their perspective, the insanity will be obvious. Some of them are predictable, such as our treatment of animals and our apathy for the atmosphere. Others less so — and will thus leave us shocked and dumbfounded.
Thanks for reading. To learn more about the inspiration for this post, click here.