The Anatomy of Decisions and the Mobile Phone Contract

How do we make decisions? There's no right way: we could flip a coin. The "proper" answer is to make a list of all the pros and cons, weight those by utility, and pick the option with the highest utility. Then there's the one about taking the first option that's better than the first one you thought of - though that really applies to temporal processes like job offers and picking spouses. Some people who commit the sin of linguistic inflation call these "heuristics", though more homely terms are "rules of thumb" or "guidelines". 

These rules and guidelines assume many things, one of which is that the decision is really about what we think the decision is about. Here's an example of when it isn't.

Renewing the mobile phone contract sets my inner "proper" decision-maker up for the long haul. It triggers my inner scrooge and it also sets off my inner little-boy-who-likes-toys. My inner Scrooge thinks it's a huge waste of money to be on a monthly contract with 300 minutes when I barely make any calls. Or even receive any. My Scrooge accepts that one decent job offer justifies a good few years of minimum-cost mobile ownership, but that's as far as it goes. As for iPhones, mobile internet and the rest, Scrooge is having nothing of it. Meanwhile, in my left ear my Inner Boy is whispering that if I don't get a fun phone this time around, I'll spend another two years regretting the decision every time someone does something cool on their HTC or iPhone. The     last time I went through this process I was comparing the iPhone (horribly expensive) vs other phones that weren't really comparable but were almost as expensive, or free phones that had the core functionality but not the pizzazz. This time HTC are producing phones that have near-iPhone functionality and good, anonymous styling.I like anonymous styling; it doesn't say anything about you, and it doesn't attract thieves.

So I set off on a long cost-comparison exercise, complete with calculations of break-even minutes / month - which at 25p per minute on a PAYG contract aren't many - after taking into account data contracts and the like. Half-way through this, after putting together combinations of low-function PAYG phones and schlepping a £100 slim camera and my Nano everywhere, I suddenly wrote down what I wanted if I didn't give a damn about cost. Which was: a DSLR camera, a Macbook Air and a 5MP smartphone, most likely the Desire S, on the cheapest contract that made it free.

Which changed the nature of the decision. It wasn't just about the phone, it was about my personal, portable electronics. I have been finding my trusty Canon AS510 a little restrictive of late. What I was looking at was an upgrade. I did that with my TV and hi-fi a couple of years ago.

This is one of the many things that's wrong with the classical theory of decision-making: it assumes that you know what the decision is about. Whereas often you only think you do. In some parts of business what I did is called things like "scope creep" and frowned upon. But sometimes what you really want to do isn't what you start off thinking you need to decide. You might be thinking about which movie you want to see, but really all you want is to get out of the house and do something, anything, for a couple of hours. If you persist in seeing the decision as being about movies, you won't do what you really want to do, which is not-be-in-the-house.

Having decided that this was about upgrading, I could dump the Scrooge options and stop attempting to justify an HTC smartphone. An iPhone would need justification, because it's so much more expensive than the almost-comparable (for my purposes, maybe not yours) HTC's. The Desire S on the cheapest contract that makes it free, along with the company discount, now becomes a shoo-in. 

Now I could look for a DSLR. Since I work with a qualified (and very good, IMHO) wedding photographer, I asked him about cameras. For what I wanted to do, he said, I should get a mid-range (£400) consumer model and spend the money I saved over the next-up (£700) on a decent lens later. Which advice and some reading got me to the Canon 1100D. What Camera? liked it, Amazon reviewers  liked theirs, I like the pictures my AS510 takes and I don't see myself with a Nikon.

I need internet access and portable computing, since The Bank doesn't let us access our webmails and its internet access is a frustrating exerience (it still uses IE7!). I don't need that every day, but I should use it more often than I do. I have an Asus netbook (running Ubuntu Zonked Zebra - I'm cool) already. It's anonymous, already paid for and slightly heavier than the Macbook Air. I do notice its weight in my Eastpak messenger bag (Eastpak messenger bags are the epitome of "anonymous style"), but while the Air isn't that much lighter it is way, way more expensive. There's the iPad, of course, but it has no real keyboard. It's for media consumers, and I'm a text producer. 

Accepting that this was a decision about upgrading also changes the conversation with my inner Scrooge. I'm not now arguing about the details of various money-saving schemes and the relative value-for-money of the options. Details are how Scrooge distracts me from what the decision is really about. He knew he had no chance once I made it about quality-of-life. I'm not going out and splurging on a £1,000 DLSR, a £45pcm iPhone contract and a 128GB Macbook Air. The Air is on hold indefinitely, as it breaks the "anonymous" part of my chosen mode of "anonymous style". That's also why I can say NO to the iPhone.

Sometimes you make a decision by making another, larger, decision which is easier to make. I could quibble with my inner Scrooge about how many minutes of calls I expect to make for hours, but he's going to have a hard time telling me that I haven't felt the urge to upgrade my kit for a while now.

Here's a very important rule about decision-making. Money should never be the deciding factor. What you can afford sets the limits, but within those limits you decide what fits your style best. And if nothing does, either don't do it at all, or take the cheapest option with the least commitment. That way you can get what you want later, when you do have the money, with the least wasted spending.

Behavioural Psychology, Ultimatum Games and Trolley-ology

Behavioural psychology has been a hip thing for quite a while. Much of the research involves a thing called an "Ultimatum Game". In this A is given an amount of money or other good, and has to offer B some of it. If B doesn't like the offer, she can reject it and nobody gets any money. In the early versions of this game, the amount was $10 and A and B were undergraduates.

It's worth noting that, according to "rational economics", B should accept at offer of 0.01$, because it's a cent she didn't have before and how can it matter to her that A gets to keep $9.99. Well, that shows how much insight into human affairs, and hence the stock and bond markets, rational economics provides.

The Ultimatum Game is to economics and behavioural psychology what the Trolley Game is to moral philosophy. Both have a common fault, which is that neither side knows what relationship they are in. The other fault is that, at lease in the simple version,  there's no negotiation. B has to accept or reject. If she could negotiate, and A could reject her counter-offer, B would say: "split it 50-50 or I beggar both of us". At least a B with a healthy sense of self-regard and fairness would. Others might offer something less fair, but would be re-negotiated back to fairness - or of course, they could go on negotiating forever. A variant of the simple game that allowed for conditional negotiation revealed that the majority of people settled for a close to 50-50 split. Who would have guessed?

The essential condition of the game is that both sides know that it's not A's money. If it is A's money, there needs to be a relationship between A and B that makes sense of the idea that B should get any of it. Perhaps B is A's temporarily broke sibling who needs $5 to get home. Perhaps B is a charity offering to do something about a situation that A cares about. This is the familiar land of obligation and quid pro quo. Nothing to see here.

Except that there's a version, called the Dictator Game, due to Elizabeth Hoffman at the University of Arizona which shows that people will behave more generously if they suspect other people are watching (Wow! What these people find out about the depths of our souls!). William Poundstone, whose excellent book Priceless I have taken this stuff from, tells us we should not be shocked by finding out that people will keep more of what only they know they're getting than they will if they know other people know what they're getting. After all, he says, that's what we do when we don't donate a chunk of our salaries to charities.

That's too much Peter Singer. Donations to charities from our salaries are not the same as donations to charities from anonymous envelopes full of money given to us by researchers, or even by oil company executives. You need to be a very clever academic, or really to despise salarymen, to have that distinction blur in front of your moral vision. 

Ultimatum games don't really tell us anything we didn't know, except the extent to which people aren't willing to enforce fairness on each other (A shouldn't even think she could offer less than $5 to B for fear of being told off). Unless, of course, we are old-school economists, when it's all a huge surprise and a proof that people are crazy. Which attitude is almost as bad as the idea that people are cute in their erratic behaviour.

The attraction of the Ultimatum Game is that it can be, with the right squint, made to look like a lot of economic behaviour. Perhaps A is a supermarket and B is a supplier, and A's offer is what they are willing to pay for the goods. In which case, the fair answer is: cost plus an acceptable profit, plus a 50-50 split of any super-profit due to the consumers' willingness to pay a silly price for the product. (The super-profit is what's left after the supermarket takes it's fair profit.) Of course, in real life what happens is that the supermarket offers $3 and then when it actually has the £10 from the customer, only pays £1.50 because, well, like B has a choice?

The sad thing is that most of the research seems to be about how companies can exploit customers and suppliers. I guess that's what the academics can get grants for. Where's the research that helps customers, workers and suppliers exploit the faceless bureaucrats who own the shares in the companies?

Facebook Is Reminding Me That My Life Sucks

So I joined Facebook, and now I feel like I used to at a certain kind of house party, where everyone else was chattering away and moving between the kitchen (drinks) and the living room (music, people) with great purpose and many nods of recognition. Everyone else, not me. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing there. So I hung around the edges for a while and then either got drunk or found someone to talk with. Or I just left.

The difference between Facebook and the house party is that I could and did get drunk at the house party. That was the point of going to parties: to get drunk, to get laid, to get fed and to get away from home. Meeting people? Maybe a little, for a while, but the only people I really wanted to meet was a girl I hadn't met before and probably wasn't going to again. Later on, of course, I made a point of meeting Jack Daniels and Jim Beam and all those other guys. 

Turns out I'm a career number-cruncher. There aren't many of us: most people who bash SQL and non-financial numbers aren't actually really any good at it, and don't really get the fun, and fall sideways into jobs that are about "project management" or "account management" or "engagement" or some other such soft stuff. Anyway, I fucked up my life and this is the only way I know how to make a living. So I work with people who are mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five, and I enjoy it. They keep me sharp and stop me getting complacent. I like them, and I'd like to think they like me, however odd they think I am, but we don't invite each other round to our places, go on holidays together or any of that stuff. If I was handed my P45, they would be upset for me, and not miss me by the same day the following week. I'm not being harsh here, but realistic.

They are, however, all the life I have, other than my family of origin and a couple of friends left from the Old Days. My only LTR finished about three years ago and there's been nothing since. I can remember the last time I had sex because it was the only time in the last seven years. Yes, you heard me. Seven years. That's what staying in an LTR that's lost its intimacy, but still seems to provide something, does for you. When I call my good looks "fading", I should probably say "vanished": my face is like a rubber death mask that can contort into a few stylised expressions. I look at it in the mirror when I shave, otherwise I don't want to see it. I have no idea why anyone would want to spend time with it. Are they all humouring the "old man"?

I'm fifty-eight next birthday. I have no money to pay for weekends and hotels, and nothing by way of a life to offer anyone. Sure I'd like some real sex^TM, but at my age I have to bring a life or the things money can buy. There aren't many people "like me", I know that because I never saw another single guy my age in the restaurant lunchtime on the Cote des Basques reading Hegel's Aesthetics, or anything close: wherever I go, I don't see another me. Almost all men my age are either married, materially comfortable and living in smug denial, divorced and living in dingy flats making two sets of maintenance payments (one for the flat, one for the ex-wife), or they are weird cranks you wouldn't want in your life either. Non-married women my age? Either long-term single like me, and therefore as suspect as me, or looking for replacement fathers / husbands / first partners. 

You think I'm talking myself into a corner here, but you don't see the world from where I stand. There's a lot of it, and it's all a long way away, just like it used to be, but now I know that since I can't get drunk at the house party, it really isn't worth me going. I never went to the kind of house parties where you might meet the co-writer or the hot girl or the guy who can introduce you to the guy who can back your venture. The house parties I went to were full of regular suburban kids like me.

I'm feeling down, and some of the descent is for good reasons. Right now, I look at the world and there's nowhere I want to be. The only place I've ever wanted to be is somewhere I don't have to come back from. Plenty of places I don't want to be, but nowhere I want to be. Not even here.

Oh. Facebook? I could ignore it, but that wouldn't change the actual facts of my life. I'm sure there's some creative way to use it - especially if I could stop all the junk coming to me account whenever I "like" anything.

True Force... All The Kings Men Cannot Put It Back Together Again

A couple of Fridays ago, I went to the gym after work. I do that regularly, except I don't usually get utterly breathless after running 800m at the sedate pace of 11kph. I had to stop three times in the mile-and-a-half I usually do on Fridays. My legs weren't there, and my breathing was tight and shallow. I went swimming about twenty minutes later and didn't have any problems, so it wasn't about having a cold or cough or whatever. No. It was about having eaten the wrong stuff at lunchtime: too many carbs cooked in too much fat disguised as a kind of pancake. Plus I hadn't had a decent walk all week: the previous two weeks I've walked from Waterloo to St Paul's and hopped on the Central Line to Liverpool Street there. Not the fastest way, but damn good exercise.

I'd spent the day trying to find data in the wreckage that is The Bank's MI since a project called "Release C", which was supposed to bring the data from the two merged banks together, but actually does nothing of the sort. Our Bank databases are still there and being updated, but Their Bank data is segregated in some ghastly 1990's attempts to produce a suite of normalised data tables, which has actually produced a set of tables called "I don't mind if it goes into ****** as long as it goes somewhere useful as well." In my circles, that line is a consistent laugh-getter. I am not making progress with the project I'm working on, and I'm spending more time repairing the damage done to our neat, easy-to-use, data environment by those vandals who ran Release C. I am waking up and wondering how much longer I have to keep going into work. I know the answer to that: I have to work until I die, because my pension isn't worth a damn. This is frustrating.

So gasping for breath on the treadmill kinda did it for me. That's enough. I'm letting this new location and office get to me, and it has got to stop. I need my morning walks. I need to eat right, and after Xmas, have a month on the 1,500-calorie diet. I need to find a way of being able to think straight again. I need to stop being self-pitying, and get a life and a whole load of other things. 

Or as Travis Bickle says: "I gotta get in shape now, from now on it will be 50 press-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups, from now on it'll be total organisation, every muscle must be tight."

This year my challenge was getting into some kind of physically-fit shape, and actually taking holidays. I did both of those things. I was pretty clear about what the challenge was for 2011 at the end of 2010, but I'm not so sure about what it is for 2012.

The Phenomenology of a Day At The Beach

Remember when your parents took you to the beach on summer holidays? How the days lasted forever with a huge gap between breakfast and tea? I'll bet you're thinking "ah the innocence of childhood, wasn't it great?". Going by some recent experiences, it has nothing to do with being nine years old, and everything to do with the circumstances and the way we felt.

I found it happened when we were, or I am, on the beach. Some of it is the sunshine, the blue skies, the sound of the waves, the sand and the process of playing or walking on the beach, which requires you to surrender to the present moment. Living in the present for even a couple of hours puts the past way, way behind, and the sunshine, sky, sea and sand make it easy to live in the present. I suspect sailing does something similar and for the same reason. Walking across a moor or through a park or zoo does not have the same effect, even if the weather is the same. Perhaps because moors and fields are already human spaces, colonised by our herd animals and crops. Cows and sheep are always someone's cows and sheep and they are there to provide milk and ultimately beef; fields of corn or flowers are always someone's fields and there to be picked and sold. A wild moor might be different, but it the beach has one huge advantage: turn around and there is safety, familiarity, the car, the hotel, the resort. In the middle of a moor, you're a long way from help or an ice-cream.

I think it's something to do with the uniformity of the colours at the beach and the white noise of the waves - which is why I don't lose touch with time on the Mediterranean or the Caribbean the same way I do on the Atlantic. We can gaze at the seaside, experience it, but we don't need to understand it, interpret it, ask what parts of it are called. Every moment it is different, but the difference does not signify. Until the tide surprises us. And then all it takes is a quick scamper up the beach. A surfer may experience it in another way, with the sea as a source of waves, becoming disappointing, or tremendous, as it does not or does provide waves.

All this is true. Unless, of course, I was sulking or having a family squabble. Then time tick-tocked by. Emotions don't so much create the awareness of time as create something to remember. This is another hour I am hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, sad, aroused, excited, lustful, intrigued, interested, puzzled. Sensations by contrast provide a distraction from an otherwise bland or unpleasant episode, or enhance a pleasant one. This is why ice cream never tasted so good as at the beach, or why a whisky is so potent in a tense moment, or why in an hour of tedium, the sudden appearance of the sun from clouds may be so absorbing. 

Happiness and contentment are a kind of satisfaction, of fullness or repleteness, just not necessarily caused by consuming something. This is not what we feel at the beach. Strictly we feel nothing there, except for the sensations of sand, waves, heat and breeze, because we are distracted from ourselves and the world by being there. This is not being in the zone, that much-hyped state of productive nirvana, because we are not productive at the beach, and the in the zone we so occupy ourselves with the task that we cease to notice the world, whereas at the beach, we are so occupied by the world that we cease to notice ourselves.

I Have Nothing Coherent To Say... so here's a song

One of the few bright spots near the new location is that Rough Trade Records (East) is about three hundred yards away and is full of stuff that Fopp and the high street stores of the West End don't have, and I wouldn't think of looking for on Amazon. So I've paid that a couple of visits, picking up three samplers and the John Maus album. This is "Copkiller"

I've also switched from French Radio London to Amazing Radio, which plays a lot of stuff that Rough Trade has. I switched to FRL because I was tired of the sound of English voices and for a while it reminded me of Biarritz and general French-ness. They play cover versions of any song you care to think of and their mixes can be eclectic and yet at the same time French.

It's winter, it's dark, it's cold. It's week three of the move and it's still not home. I have too many ideas for entries that need time I don't have and concentration I don't have. It's also near sodding Christmas, and I don't like this time of year. Only the dog days of January (Britain closed, opens again in February) are worse. I may have a cold. Bleeuuugh.

"Living In The Day" - Don't Do It Unless...

There's a spiritual practice known as "living in the day". It's generally taken to be a part of the AA Programme, but I can't recall it being mentioned in the Big Book. It's one of those phrases I heard in my early days and wondered what they were all talking about, and at sometime over the years, I stopped wondering, because I was doing it. I can't explain what it is, and it's nothing like any of the quotes you may find if you google the phrase, but this may give you an idea.

Living in the day lets me feel emotions. Joy, irritation, frustration, exhilaration, calm, pleasure... all these are emotions that pass in a fairly short time, leaving me able to get on to the next thing I need to do. I wake up the next morning feeling whatever my physical condition is - rested, horny, creaky, tired - but starting emotionally from zero. I don't feel anything else until I load up the diary for the day, when I may then feel various shades of anticipation, dread or irritation. Sounds good so far?

For that to work, yesterday must leave little or no emotional traces. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine not carrying over any emotions from yesterday. No, I don't just mean anger, frustration, irritation and all that other bad stuff we are exhorted to leave outside the bedroom door. I mean, not carrying over any emotions. LIke, you know... Love. Affection. Ambition. Fascination. Absorption. 

Because it turns out that practising the techniques that let me leave behind the bad stuff and the small stuff also leaves behind the big stuff as well. I don't even really remember what it is I feel for whoever's in bed with me: I just give them a chance to show what mood they are in, and react and deal accordingly. That's how you will feel about the woman you're married to or the kids you created, if you "live in the day". And if you're wondering, no, that's not how you are supposed to feel. Not at all. Those emotions about those people are supposed to be always with you - whichever emotions it you'e feeling at the time. 

Love, hate, ambition, despair, enthusiasm, hope, desire, lust, care, revenge, affection, friendship, competition... The emotions that make life worth living, that give it structure, colour and flavour, do so because they infuse our bodies - literally, with hormones - and create continuity and memory, linking the days together, linking this hour with an hour four days or four weeks ago. When I live in the day I feel none of these, not because I don't want to, but because whatever it is that lets the insults and pleasures of the day roll off my back like a duck, also means that the meaningful emotions won't stick either.

One of the things that happened to me as I recovered was that I understood that all I ever really felt was variations on that sick neediness, pain and emptiness that comes with the territory. These are also meaningful emotions that create memory, but none have anything to do with other people, other specific people, as love and hate do. For screw-ups, emotions are endless loops inside our own heads, hearts, bodies and memories. Dump those emotions, deal with the resentments and guilts in the Steps, and it's quite easy to live in the day. 

In the early years, it's a helluva an improvement on being hungover, withdrawn, flooded with pounding adrenals, ridden with undeserved guilt and hearing punishing voices in your head. But in the same way a Japanese stone garden is an improvement on the brambles and weeds that were there. It's clean, it's simple, it's low maintenance, and it's pretty vacant. I'm not sure I have much of choice, just as you don't have much of a choice about never knowing what a co-homology group is (because you gave up maths well before you went to university and you haven't got the time or background to read it up now). Which doesn't stop my body telling me from time to time that it's missing some stuff it needs to function really well, which leads me to feeling a tad empty, directionless and generally de-motivated and lacking sparkle and vigour. That passes, given enough time, but the last few weeks have been just a little empty.

Living in the day, like a lot of the other "spiritual"-sounding practices, is not for ordinary folk. It's for people who are or were severely fucked-up for an extended period of their lives: heroin addicts, alcoholics, children who passed through The System or who were abused or mistreated, not to mention people who have been through extended traumatic experiences that the rest of the world knows nothing of. That is unlikely to be you, gentle reader, and you'll screw your life and soul up if you try it.