The chicken or the egg?

Through her exceptional book The Nurture Assumption, Judy Harris has profoundly influenced the way I read and understand the findings of social science research. One gem was her explanation of how data can be sifted, sliced and diced to produce puzzling results, which are sometimes utterly meaningless. Another was an insight about the (dis)connection between causality and statistics.

It is by now a commonplace that children who are praised tend to be sunnier and well-behaved, whereas children who are scolded and beaten tend to be ill-mannered. It's been presented that way as a finding of social science -- there are probably dozens of citations because it seems to me I've been reading this for decades. (I won't look them up for you; I'm offline at the moment.)

But statistics can't tell you whether kids are well-behaved because they're praised, or praised because they're well-behaved. In other words, the correlation between good behavior and good treatment could just as well be explained as:

Nice children get praised; surly children get beaten.

So why did we hear the converse for so long? Well, "nice children get praised, surly children get beaten" just doesn't sound very interesting. I mean, Duh! How much would you pay a researcher to tell you that? An article with that "shocking result" would never get printed! But "praised children are nicer" -- now that's an interesting conclusion -- even if it's misleading and useless!

Here's another one. I read somewhere that happy people tend to be healthier, more successful in their careers (and thus financially) than unhappy people. Or was it that healthier, richer, more successful people tend to be happier? (The comparisons were within the same culture; it wasn't saying that Americans were happier than Ethiopians for example.) Cross-sectional data won't tell us; we need time-series data -- we need to monitor people for decades. We must find happy 25-30 year olds, and see how healthy and rich and successful they are at 45-50. Or we can just assume that the causality works one way, and declare our assumption to be the assured results of a rigorous statistical analysis!

I tend to think that happy people tend to succeed, rather than the other way round. People who tend to be unhappy don't become happy when their plan works, when they get that promotion, or when their bank account grows. And happy people, who smile and encourage others -- realistically happy people I mean, not Pollyannas -- are easier to work with than Eeyores. It's easy to believe they get more promotions and find success more often, too. But that's just a hunch; the statistics so far neither prove nor disprove my guess.

A final example: religious people give more blood -- this according to Jonathan Haidt, the honest liberal atheist and psychology professor. Do these religious people give more blood because they believe in God, or attend church or synagogue? Or do generous people (who give blood as part of a generous lifestyle) tend to believe in God and join churches and synagogues?

I tend to believe the former, because I think God has the power to change people, but honestly I don't know how much of the effect is due to each cause. It could be that generous, religious people get that way because they're more aware of how much they've received. Statistics don't say.

As an engineer, how do I deal with all this? Well, as an engineer I simply note the correlation when it's useful to me. As a human being and a Christian, though, I pray (no statistics on that) and I give. And when I read "A new study shows that..." I think a little more than I used to about whether the study might show something else.

No Two Alike, by Harris

I've been working on a paper for ICSE 2008 lately. Since I've never done a conference paper before, I feel a little (or more than a little) anxious about style, format, etc. So it's been a while since I've posted here.

Lately I've been reading the subject book, No Two Alike, and mentioned something at our home-group the other night.

Rich talked about how children grow to become more like their parents -- which is true, if "parents" means "biological parents." The studies seem to show:

• twins raised together are no more similar than twins raised apart
• siblings raised together are no more different than siblings raised apart
• unrelated adopted children raised in the same home turn out no more similar than two people picked randomly off the street

Now by "similar" and "different" here they mean as adults, and in particular "...as measured by psychological tests." Those tests include all sorts of things: tendency to laugh, introversion, etc. They do not, however, include things like what mechanical skills, recipes, languages, or card games they know.

Do parents matter? Of course they do -- but just not in the way many of us like to think. Is that so bad? Think of it this way -- as Harris put it in The Nurture Assumption (1998): who will your husband or wife be after being married to you for 20, 30, 50 years? Do you influence what his/her personality will be like then? No? But that doesn't mean you should neglect, ignore, or abuse them! The same applies to your kids -- you may not be able to change the results that would appear on psychological tests 20,30,50 years hence, but you want them to be your friends -- as you want your spouse to be a good friend -- don't you?

One more thing that psychological tests don't measure, besides what they know: it's who they know. Do they know Jesus? Have they found forgiveness for their sins? Is their eternal destiny secure? As parents, we can't guarantee anything, but we can introduce our kids to Someone they need to know. And that's more important than personality, budgeting skills, or even car repair skills.

A religious whack job?

A friend from junior high school found my blog recently, and was rather dismayed to find so much God stuff on it. I was so "scientific" (his word) back in those days, he was shocked at what's happened to me. I have a narrative account of my experience meeting Jesus, written when we lived in Japan; a somewhat philosophically-oriented addendum follows.

You may remember the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a guardian challenges all comers with three questions:

1. What is your name?
2. What is your quest?
3. What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?

Provided that we know what kind of swallow we're talking about (European or African?), science can answer question [C]. But for [A] (identity: who am I, really?) or [B] (mission: what am I to do with my life?) it's of no help at all. In other words, math and science -- which I still like a lot -- can make for a more comfortable or convenient life, or a safer life; but science can't answer anything in life that really matters:

1. What is the good life?
2. Who is a good person, and how can I become one?
3. Does she love me?
4. Have I done well?
5. Will my kids turn out all right?
6. What should I give my life to?

Questions like this -- philosophical/spiritual/religious questions -- require, well, philosophy, spirituality, or religion! Psychology and literature might help a little, but they provide no ultimate, definitive answers, and again science (physics, chemistry, biology, math) isn't useful at all.

Please note that none of this means I've discarded any reasoning ability I may have had. I don't take phenomenological language ("The sun rises in the east...") literally just because it's in the Bible; I don't take parabolic ("A man had two sons") or polemical ("and there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day") discourse as historical; and I certainly don't take wisdom literature ("Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it" - Proverbs 22:6) as providing any absolute guarantee or as confuting social science (as you can see from my postings mentioning The Nurture Assumption).

A few words about technology

Though I like technology, it doesn't grant control over anything that really matters. Indeed, nothing that really matters is in our control. I can choose something from a restaurant menu, but really, that's about it; I can't control the choices my loved ones make, I can't control my health or career -- heck, I can barely control myself! How many times have I done the same stupid things I did 20 or 30 years ago?

And I certainly can't control any of the ultimate issues mentioned above, with or without technology. Technology won't make me a good person or give me a meaningful life; it can't make love last.

So that's what happened to me: questions of identity and mission, purpose and goals, security and significance. Those questions happened to me and I needed something beyond math and science. And certainly by the time of the 阪神大震災 (the great Kobe earthquake of 1995) it hit me that nothing that ultimately matters is within my control.

I still like science and technology, but life requires more than that. And if that makes me a religious whack job, well, so be it.

Visiting the kids

"Your kids will start giving you trouble at that age, unless they're like Collin's perfect children."

I heard that remark some months back, and it made me wonder what I'd been saying about the kids to my colleagues. Whatever it was, I guess it reflects my view of them.

The lovely Carol and I have been visiting the kids, now that they are both away at college, and seeing them in their new environs makes me even more aware that they are, well -- they are not "girls" any more; they really are young women. They have their own campuses, their own friends, their own rooms. We don't hear them coming home after class or after meetings or.... They really are "away"; they've left the nest. You might imagine that this has created a lot of complicated feelings in both parents, and you'd be right.

This morning, I picked up Merton and opened to his chapter on "Sincerity", which I don't recall reading before. Here I found this:

Your idea of me is fabricated with materials you have borrowed from other people and from yourself. What you think of me depends on what you think of yourself. Perhaps you create your idea of me out of material that you would like to eliminate from your own idea of yourself. Perhaps your idea of me is a reflection of what other people think of you. Or perhaps what you think of me is simply what you think I think of you.

No Man Is an Island, p. 194

I suppose I "knew" -- in a manner of speaking -- that how I think of the kids is affected by my view of myself. But which of Merton's distortions is operating when I look at the kids? Or is there yet another one? There are ways in which I wish I were different -- more understanding, less inept socially; I wish I were a better friend, less of a procrastinator -- am I projecting the person I wish I were -- dumping that onto my poor kids? I hope not! I know they are better students than I ever was (as their grades attest) -- so I'm not making that part up. They have nice friends -- for the most part, nicer friends than I had in high school. And they do sometimes procrastinate, though not as badly as I did in college.

Well, as I've said before, "Every father thinks his kids are geniuses, and I'm no exception." I know that the lovely Carol has something to do with them, as do I, but Harris's The Nurture Assumption makes me hesitate to take too much credit.

So I don't have this all figured out, but I wanted to tell you about it anyway. It sure is complicated being a dad -- not just stuff that a dad "does," but the personal growth that comes with it. It's definitely not for wimps.

Gender & Grace

I have been thinking lately about how a Bible-believing Christian deals with some of the claims of [social] science. I mean books like The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris. Fortunately we happened to have a copy of Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen's Gender & Grace, which talks about how a social scientist with a high view of Scripture can integrate the Bible into her understanding of science. This is great! I'm more of a computer scientist than a social scientist (though computer people are not all antisocial), and so I approach social science from the other angle -- how I (a Christian with a fairly high view of science) can integrate science with my understanding of what the Bible teaches.

Whoo... it's late so I'll write more about this at another time.

the burden of choice

"I have good news and bad news," the doctor says. "The good news is, you have enough money for the rest of your life."

"And the bad news, Doc?"

"You only have 5 minutes left."

I suppose I heard that somewhere, or maybe I just made it up. The hypothetical patient has one advantage: He doesn't have to decide much. He doesn't have to think about what to do next, how soon to retire, whether they can afford to send the kids to a private college. He doesn't even have to decide what kind of estate planning he's going to do.

But given the choice, most of us would hold on to those decisions. We want to make them, not leave them to someone else (or to outside forces). We want to make things happen, not just watch things happen (or, as the old joke says, "wonder what happened").

That said, there's a part of me that takes some comfort in not having to decide everything; part of me feels a little nostalgia for the days when more decisions were made for me. When I started at my first job, I was given assignments, told what to do. Come to think of it, when I started at my "new" job, now over 3 years ago, I was given assignments too. Take this class; fix this bug (here's how you do it); help these guys build that product. For most of my life, I've followed a path that seemed natural.

Jenny asked me the other day about my career. I told her that I decided maybe a half-dozen times to make a change of some kind. In 1981 or 1982 I told them I didn't want to be a manager. Later I was recruited by (not assigned to) a former boss. Around 1990 I asked to follow a former boss to her new group. In 1993 I initiated a transfer to Japan. There were a couple more, but otherwise my going-on-30 years have been just following along what came naturally.

A few months ago, I was recruited to a "quality team". I said I thought I might qualify for the "mediocre" team, but nobody was forming one of those -- at least they weren't calling it that. But I signed up for it - we are trying to improve the quality of our software products. Especially in this job, I have to decide more what I think ought to be done, and what in particular I want to do. And there is the question of what to do next (this is a 12-month stint).

And at home, I sometimes miss the days when life was simpler. I'd look at the paper and see an ad for a European vacation. "Someday I might be able to afford that," I thought. And that was it! I didn't have to think about it any more. I didn't have to trade it off against what else we might use that money for, because "that money" simply wasn't there -- I didn't have to worry about it.

Here's a dream/nightmare: what if I woke up one morning and decided, or could decide, that I didn't want to go to the office any more? What if the choice wasn't "rent or groceries" -- nor "tuna or chicken"? What if it was, "retire now, or pay estate taxes"?

There is a part of me that would love to leave real estate to our children. We would both love to have the kids near us, and if we can help 'em with housing, that increases the likelihood that they'll be able to live in the bay area when they have families of their own.

But there's another part of me that cries, "Folly! Why burden them with excessive choice? Besides, even if they do live around here (just 15 minutes away, say), they'll have their own lives." When they want their parents' time is now, not after they graduate from college. Well, they'll want us then, too, but not in the same way. It is probably a better idea to give the lovely Carol a new kitchen.

As I think about it, there are many things I want to do, but I don't have time. Some of them require a lot of money; many don't. Besides home improvement projects (some of which require big bucks), there are volunteer opportunities I'd like to take. I want to meet with the brothers in my church family for coffee or lunch, listen to them, help them through their struggles. As you know, I sometimes miss being on the receiving end of this sort of thing; but now it's my turn to give more. What if everything up to our 40s was just warmups? Well, I can't use that excuse any more.

Our church is holding a "Men's Summit" in a couple of months - it's a weekend retreat. I have never gone, because life has been too busy. If I didn't have to go to the office....

Part 3 of my "Why Not Python" series is late getting to the linuxjournal web editor.

Another article -- on how a thinking Christian deals with books like The Nurture Assumption or The Mind and the Brain or The Blank Slate -- is stagnating.

Nearby there is a home for kids aging out of foster care -- they could use some electrical work, maybe some computer work.

Our kids require a lot of shuttling around.

I think I've just about talked myself into it. I'll let you know.

And if you have any advice or insights for me, please leave a comment. Or email me if you have my address.