Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Cold
And why we overestimate ourselves, in either case...
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival…
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”
-Rumi, “The Guest House”1
I love my emotions.
No, really, I do. Would I lie to you?
The greatest misconception about a Moneyball approach is that the primary goal is to take emotions out of the equation. While there is an upside to understanding when emotions get the better of us, Moneyball’s goal is not to take emotions out of the equation because emotions are always a part of the equation. Getting rid of them means that we are no longer human.
If anything, my personal devotion to Moneyball impacted my emotional awareness more than any other concept because this approach allowed me to “get on the balcony,”2 to quote Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, and learn how to harness my emotions. And like any tool, emotions help or hurt based on how we use them.
Just ask Judah and Joseph…
Hot-Cold Empathy Gap
In Parashat Vayigash, a dramatic encounter takes place between Judah and Joseph. The emotional risks Judah and Joseph take seem irrational; Judah puts himself in danger by protesting to a mysterious Egyptian bureaucrat, and Joseph risks his power by unmasking himself. Rashi’s commentary captures the heightened emotions:
Why does Judah’s speech draw attention? The harsh tones.3
Why does Judah lie and say that Benjamin’s brother [Joseph] “is dead”? Fear.4
Why does Joseph finally unmask himself? Joseph can no longer hold it in.5
Why are the brothers unable to speak when they learn Joseph is alive? Shame.6
Why can the brothers and Joseph finally reconcile? Joseph’s heart is “free from hatred.”7
One impossible but fascinating question is how Judah or Joseph would say that they would handle this situation if given some distance from the decisions they actually made, and whether there would be a gap between the two.
This gap has a name: the “hot-cold empathy gap,” sometimes called the “empathy bias” or “empathy gap.” George Loewenstein writes that “affect,” a subjective feeling, “has the capacity to transform us…profoundly; in different affective states, it is almost as if we are different people.”8 However, most people are unaware of how much reactions change depending on whether or not someone is “hot” or “cold”:
When a person is in a “hot” emotional state, they tend to underestimate how much their behavior is influenced by that affective state, believing “that they are behaving more dispassionately than they actually are.”9 As such, in that hot state, a person is blind to how their actions might change with more emotional distance.
When a person is in a “cold” state, “they have little appreciation for their own feelings and behavior in hot states,”10 thinking they will respond more rationally when faced with strong feelings (hunger, pain, anger, etc). In a cold state, people “fail to take measures to avoid situations that will induce such [hot] states.”11
Of course, in Judah and Joseph’s situation, it’s an unalloyed good that each of them enters a hot affective state and lets their actions be driven by “big feelings” (as my children’s teachers would say). However, it’s not hard to imagine instances where this gap is an unalloyed bad. Loewenstein, Louis Giordano, and a group of researchers found that those suffering from an addiction to heroin underestimated how much they would pay for an extra dose of methadone12 when their addiction was “satiated” as opposed to when they wanted to regain their high.13
Emotions are powerful tools, even when the difference between emotions can be the difference between life and death.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
If you’ve read Thinking, Fast and Slow, you might be wondering why I did not encourage you to read Daniel Kahneman’s magnum opus months ago. Ultimately, Kahneman’s book is a fantastic and detailed analysis of the heuristics we’ve studied thus far, but it can be an intimidating read without any background. However, if you’ve stuck with me, add it to your bookshelf ASAP.
The two main “characters” of Kahneman’s book are System 1 and System 2:
System 1 is the mental system that operates “automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.”14
System 2 is the mental system that “allocates attention to effortful mental activities,” often associated with the “subject experience of mental activities.”
In other words, System 1 is the mental system I am currently using to type this article on my computer without looking at my keyboard, but System 2 is the mental system I use to figure out what I am going to write each week. Reading about these systems for the first time, you might be tempted to immediately associate System 1 with “feelings,” and System 2 with “rationality,” making it the classic battle of passions vs. reason that dates back to Aristotle, Plato, The Stoics, etc.
But Kahneman’s argument is much more sophisticated (sorry, Aristotle). Our mind needs both of these systems to function; neither is inherently “good” or “bad.” System 1 acts automatically so that we can do things like solve 2+2=4 or read words on a large billboard, important daily actions that the mind needs to perform quickly.15 And while System 1 can lead to heuristics by not slowing down our mental processes, ultimately Kahneman sees System 1 as the “hero of the book,”16 because while System 1 is “the origin of much of what we do wrong…it is also the origin of most of what we do right.”17
However, the reason we need to learn about the biases created by System 1 is that this frame of mind “does not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable.”18 Our mind is a powerful tool, sometimes so powerful we do not even know when it is letting us down…
Weekly Links
Gaming and White Supremacy: Correlation does not equal causation, so one should not conclude that video games “cause” anti-Semitism any more than video games “cause” depression or violence. That said, the ADL found that 10% of gamers between ages 13-17 were exposed to white supremacist ideology in multi-player games, and the Forward had a great piece on linkages between gaming and white supremacy. And by “great,” I mean “frightening”...
Remembering the Unthinkable: This past month’s issue of The Atlantic had a powerful cover story on one writer’s journey to Germany to ask what America should and should not learn from how German society memorializes the Holocaust. Easily the most insightful article I read on the subject since Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reflections on the subject in 2014.
How to Avoid Task Paralysis: Much like my email, I do not want my to-do list to own me. The purpose of email or to-do is for you to manage work better, not let it cause you to be less effective. Here’s a great piece on the way in which we can avoid paralysis around critical tasks. Just a good reminder that Ezra Klein was correct when he “said” that “time is way weirder than we think.”
How Does GPT Work?: I will confess that I barely understood this article on the technical structure that allows Chat GPT to work. But I am going to read it until I understand it so that I know why a robot will eventually write my Divrei Torah.
Can Moneyball Improve Your Relationship with Yourself?: Yes. Next Question.
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, “The Guest House,” The Essential Rumi, Translations by Coleman Barks (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2004), 109.
Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change, “Chapter 3- Get on the Balcony” (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002), 51-74.
Rashi on Bereishit 44:18.
George Loewenstein, “Hot-Cold Empathy Gaps and Medical Decision Making,” Health Psychology, Volume 24, Number 4 (2005), S49-S56.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Methadone is a medication used to treat Opioid Use Disorder (OUD)
Louis A. Giordano, Warren K. Bickel, George Loewenstein, Eric A. Jacobs, Lisa Marsch, and Gary Badger, “Mild opioid deprivation increases the degree that opioid-dependent outpatients discount delayed heroin and money,” Psychopharmacology, Volume 163, Number 2 (2002), 174-182.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011), 20.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 415.
Ibid., 416.