Fixed mindsets

Carol Dweck is one of America's most important public intellectuals, and I believe that her idea, the Growth Mindset, is one of the most good and useful in America today. She's also a hedgehog. Meaning, of course, that she applies her One Big Idea to everything and anything, and tends to exaggerate its power and the evidence in favor of it. That's OK. Most promoters of big good ideas are hedgehogs. There are plenty of hedgehogs in the econ blogosphere - Scott Sumner, Paul Krugman, Steve Williamson. It's no big deal. I think that as a society we've gotten good at recognizing hedgehogs and mentally correcting for the hedgehogginess.

So because Dweck is a hedgehog, I won't totally lambaste Scott Alexander for attacking a straw man in his latest 10,000-word essay. Part of Scott's confusion and misdirection comes from Dweck's over-selling of her idea.

But only part. The rest is derp.

Scott gives a pretty good definition of the growth mindset idea:

[G]rowth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does. 

This is similar to how Dweck herself would describe the idea. However, Scott does not differentiate between the following two statements:

1. Natural ability doesn't matter; only effort matters.

2. Natural ability doesn't matter on the margin, but the marginal effect of effort is large.

I guess economics just makes me automatically think about whether an effect is an average effect o a marginal effect (or an average marginal effect, if we're running regressions!).

Now, in her book, Dweck makes it clear many times that natural ability does, in fact, matter. She states that among people of similar natural ability, having a growth mindset makes a big difference. What she is saying is that the marginal effect of the growth mindset on performance is large for most people, even though natural ability matters a lot in the average.

But what Dweck does not clarify is whether the optimal growth mindset is itself a belief about average or marginal effects of effort on performance! In other words, to get the effect, do I have to believe that natural ability doesn't matter? Or does it work if I believe that although natural ability matters, effort can have a big effect?

If it's the former, we have trouble. If the only way to get the positive effect of the growth mindset is to convince people that natural ability doesn't matter - i.e., a fiction - then eventually they will realize that the fiction is a fiction, and the growth mindset will go away.

But I don't think that's what the growth mindset is. I think that very few if any people, including the people Dweck describes as having strong growth mindsets, actually do believe that effort could make them as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan, as good a mathematician as Terence Tao, or as good a blogger as Noah Smith (cue hearty laughter).

I am betting that the growth mindset is a belief about marginal effects ("if I work hard I will get better") rather than average effects ("anyone can do anything if they work hard"). Scott Alexander, on the other hand, seems convinced that it is the latter.

One reason I would make that bet is the nature of the experiments that have tested the power of the growth mindset. Scott runs through a couple of the experiments in his post. Basically, these are priming experiments. It would be incredibly weird if a priming task could change people's bedrock beliefs.

Scott sees this and concludes (paraphrasing): "Since the growth mindset is a belief about average effects, and a priming task couldn't change people's beliefs about something as big as average effects, there must be something wrong with this research, and therefore with Dweck's thesis."

I look at the same facts and conclude: "Since a priming task can't change beliefs about something as big as average effects, the growth mindset must be a belief in marginal effects."

I find it highly likely that a priming task could change someone's belief about marginal effects. Marginal effects are local, average effects are global. Going from thinking "Trying harder won't help" to "Trying harder will help" is a lot easier than going from thinking "Natural ability matters" to "Natural ability doesn't matter at all."

(I'm going to stop explaining the difference between average and marginal now, since if you haven't gotten it yet, you just need to give up and be a janitor go back and try harder.)

Anyway, Scott goes on to discuss some other studies that might or might not support mindset theory. With a little rewording, most of his post - the substantive part, the part about research and evidence - could actually have been a post in support of Dweck's idea.

But it is not. It is a post criticizing Dweck's idea. And here is where the derp comes in.

At the beginning of his post, Scott - who is rightly renowned as being an intellectually honest person - states his priors:

I’ll admit it: I have a huge bias against growth mindset... 

I can sometimes be contrarian, and growth mindset is pretty much the only idea from social psychology that is universally beloved... 

Which brings me to the second reason I’m biased against it. Good research shows that inborn ability (including but not limited to IQ) matters a lot, and that the popular prejudice that people who fail just weren’t trying hard enough is both wrong and harmful... 

Which brings me to the third reason I’m biased against it. It is right smack in the middle of a bunch of fields that have all started seeming a little dubious recently. Most of the growth mindset experiments have used priming to get people in an effort-focused or an ability-focused state of mind, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate and cast doubt on the entire field. And growth mindset has an obvious relationship to stereotype threat, which has also started seeming very shaky recently.

Scott is a big believer in the importance of inborn ability. He thinks social psych and related fields have been captured by people who want to deny that fact. He thinks these fields have been using junk science to push their nurture-over-nature agenda. And this biases him against Dweck's ideas, and biases him toward skepticism with regards to research results that support Dweck's ideas.

Remember, derp is not confirmation bias. It is more rational than that. Derp is just repeating your strong priors over and over. That's what Scott's post is.

He cites some research in favor of the growth mindset idea, and expresses skepticism of the results. He restates his priors.

He then cites some research that might or might not favor it, and expresses no skepticism of the results. He again restates his priors.

He then cites some research that shows some stuff that might or might not suggest alternative explanations for the results that support the growth mindset, and expresses no skepticism of the results. He again restates his priors.

Then he restates his priors once more in the concluding section. Derp!

Actually, maybe I'm being too generous to Scott. Looking for flaws in studies that contradict your priors, while not looking for flaws in studies that agree with your priors, is confirmation bias. It is not Bayesian-rational. It appears to be what Scott does in this post. So calling Scott's post "derp", rather than "confirmation bias", is giving him the benefit of the doubt! :-)

Anyway, when discussing the growth mindset idea, I think we all need to keep the following things in mind:

1. Hedgehogs gonna hog (and not hedge). We should remember that Carol Dweck, like most promoters of big ideas, overstates her case. That doesn't mean her idea is not a good and useful one.

2. Average is not marginal. Belief in the average effect of natural ability and belief in the marginal effect of effort are two very different things.

3. Science is really hard. Even in physics and chem it's insanely hard to get robust, reliable, definitive conclusions. In psych it's much harder. That doesn't mean we should ignore big ideas in psych.


Update

Someone asked me how my post squares with the following part of Scott's post:

Likewise, mindset theory suggests that believing intelligence to be mostly malleable has lots of useful benefits. That doesn’t mean intelligence really is mostly malleable. Consider, if you will, my horrible graph: 

Suppose this is one of Dweck’s experiments on three children. Each has a different level of innate talent, represented by point 1. After they get a growth mindset and have the right attitude and practice a lot, they make it to point 2. 

Two things are simultaneously true of this model. First, all of Dweck’s experiments will come out exactly as they did in the real world. Children who adopt a growth mindset and try hard and practice will do better than children who don’t. If many of them are aggregated into groups, the growth mindset group will on average do better than the ability-focused group. Intelligence is flexible, and if you don’t bother practicing than you fail to realize your full potential.

Scott seems to think that his graph, if true, contradicts Dweck's idea. But I think that his graph is exactly Dweck's idea.

Scott also seems to think that in order to realize the benefit of a growth mindset, it is necessary to convince children of a fiction (i.e. that the overall effect of natural ability is 0). But Dweck doesn't think that. That seems unlikely to me. My guess is that you just need to convince kids of the truth - i.e., that effort matters a lot on the margin for most people. No fantasies required.


Update 2

Scott has a follow-up post.

When reading this discussion, it is important to remember that the following three things are different:

1. Dweck et al.'s belief about the effect of the growth mindset on performance

2. The belief of a person with the growth mindset about the effects of effort and ability on performance

3. Dweck et al.'s belief about the effects of effort and ability on performance

Bond bubbles

Apparently, I convinced Brad DeLong that the idea of a "bond bubble", though a slight misnomer, is not insane. Brad's explanation of the idea is a little convoluted, so let me see if I can boil it down to essentials.

Why can't a government borrow and spend infinite amounts of money? Well, interest payments might get too high, forcing the government to default. But what if interest rates keep getting lower and lower? As nominal interest rates go to 0, interest payments go to 0, so the govt. will always be able to make interest payments no matter how big the debt gets.

So all the govt. has to do in order to be able to borrow and spend infinite amounts of money is to get the central bank to keep interest rates at 0 forever, which the central bank can do by - basically - printing money and buying bonds from people and banks.

But what if people and companies stop buying the government bonds in the first place? Well, the central bank can just print money and buy the bonds directly from the government. (We call this "the full MMT." It is almost certainly the route Japan will have to take.)

So is this a free lunch? What's the danger? The danger is that all that money-printing will eventually result in a big inflation. A big inflation will also raise nominal interest rates, overwhelming the central bank's ability to keep them down. That will cause a government default.

So is this a danger for advanced countries right now? Well, markets have very low expectations for future inflation, and for future interest rates, for most rich countries. If you believe markets are efficient, this means that it's likely that governments can keep borrowing money, and central banks can keep printing money, without causing inflation - at least for now.

BUT, if markets are not efficient, then people could be underestimating the risk of a rise in inflation and interest rates. That is what people are afraid of when they talk about a "bond bubble." No, it's not a speculative bubble, but whatever. This is what I pointed out to Brad DeLong.

Note, btw, that a bond bubble isn't the only reason to take low inflation expectations with a grain of salt. Those low expectations could be based on people's predictions that governments and central banks won't engage in infinite-borrow-and-infinite-print policies. If governments surprise people by trying those policies, the markets could quickly adjust their expectations. You don't need a bond bubble to be afraid of a run on the currency - you just need Goodhart's Law.

The Hugo Award silliness

I will freely admit that I haven't been very enthused by the Hugo Awards in recent years. Looking back through 2007, they were a very good guide to stuff that I would like. For example, through 2007, I liked about 3 out of 4 Hugo nominees and winners for Best Novel. But since then, I've only really liked one of the Hugo winners - Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, and fewer of the nominees than before. In fact, many of my favorite SF novels that have come out since 2007 - Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief, Ramez Naam's Nexus - didn't even get nominated.

What's going on? I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe just statistical noise.

The thought had crossed my mind that maybe sci-fi fandom had shrunk, migrating to video games or anime or YouPorn or whatever, leaving a core of sci-fi writers who care more about literary writing quality than neat ideas. I enjoy literary quality, of course - I love me some Alice Munro or George Saunders or Russell Banks. One of the best literary writers I've ever read, Margaret Atwood, is also one of the best sci-fi writers I've ever read (Oryx and Crake is the best sci-fi book written since the turn of the millennium, dammit; the fact that it also didn't get a Hugo nomination may have been the beginning of the downward trend). But what writers like in sci-fi and what I like in sci-fi tend to be different, which is why I only tend to like about a third of the Nebula Award winners.

But anyway, this same thought appeared to have crossed the mind of sci-fi writer Brad Torgersen, who organized what he thought was a campaign to take back the Hugos. Joining together with another author named Larry Correia, he has been nominating a slate of authors called "Sad Puppies", which he claims represents a return to consumerism and fun.

If Sad Puppies really had been that, it might have been interesting or even a positive force. Unfortunately, Correia and other Sad Puppies followers had their own ideas of where the problem lay. They decided it was all about right-left politics, and that recent Hugos had been chosen as affirmative action picks. The solution, according to these Puppies, was to nominate a bunch of authors with rightist political beliefs.

Things got really bad when a troll named Theodore Beale, who calls himself Vox Day (presumably because if he called himself "Vox Dei" he wouldn't come up first in Google searches), one-upped the Sad Puppies by creating an aptly named "Rabid Puppies" list of even more right-wing authors. By gaming the rules for fan voting and by recruiting outside voters from GamerGate, the various "puppies" managed to grab most of the nominations for this year's Hugos.

By far the biggest beneficiary of the puppies' putsch was a man named John C. Wright, who writes very disrespectful things about gays and other such people who never did him any harm. He also writes science fiction (as an aside, I think his novels are unreadable, though I really liked this short story; but that is irrelevant to the point of this post). There just aren't many rightist sci-fi authors out there, so Wright became an army of one, grabbing six total nominations, including three in the Best Novella category.

This is basically an experiment in politics-based affirmative action, similar to what Jonathan Haidt wants to inflict upon American universities, but more extreme. My instinct says that it will produce a deluge of craptastic crap. It's not that being a right-winger is incompatible with being a good science fiction writer - I like Starship Troopers and Ender's Game. It's that whenever you select people based on their political beliefs, you select people along a dimension that is at an angle to actual quality. Since the pool of rightist sci-fi authors is small and the number of puppies nominations is large, I expect that the effect will be far more severe than for race- and gender-based affirmative action.

Of course, the puppies also did seem to follow Torgersen's wishes to some degree, picking some works based on fun rather than on Vox Day's right-wing politics. For example, I see a Jim Butcher novel in this year's nominations. Jim Butcher is great, and very fun. The rest of the Best Novel nominations look all right. For the other categories, the only right-wing nominee whose works I have actually read is Wright, and he did once write a story that I liked, so maybe some of these other stories by him are good, despite the fact that he himself is a bit of an orc.

So maybe the puppies won't utterly ruin the Hugos. But they can't have helped. And it's another step in the negative trend of the politicization of geekdom that began with GamerGate. I expect to see a counterattack by SJWs at the next Hugos, and further retaliation by the puppies. When rightists and leftists fight, no one wins. That was true in 1930s Europe, and it's equally true in modern geek fandom.


Update: George R.R. Martin has a great post rebutting the arguments of the puppies.

Update 2: John C. Wright appears to have taken down the disrespectful post that I referenced, and I commend him for doing so.