Good morning. Hello. How are you? #545
An argument about toothpaste leads to a crisis of faith about the Behaviouralists
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Wednesday today, what fun. Been a busy week, but a busy week where the days aren’t flying by. Often, those feel kind of like a drag, sludgy, dirgey. But this one feels sunstantial. Meaty. Like there’s enough time to get everything done, even though there’s a lot to do, and not stress me out of send me into a manic mode of panic that there’s lots to do. It’s like a solid meal. I am into it.
Last night I was getting ready for bed and even though Emma was gonna stay up a while to work she was in the bathroom with me and we were chatting as I did my evening pre-sleep ablutions. I picked up my tube of toothpaste. Longtime readers will be pleased to know I am still buying and using Close-up because of my childhood crush on Linda Rondstadt and how her and that red and white polka dot dress are seared into my brain. It was last June or so I started using it again, after I found it still in business, still on your grocery store shelf, albeit on the very bottom shelf, and still costing like $1.95. It is cinnamon. I like cinnamon.
Anyway, the tube was running low and it was time to start the “roll the tube from the bottom” paradigm on this tube. So I gave it the first few rolls from the bottom. Only I misjudged things and a substanstial amount of toothpaste squirted out of the tube. Like three inches.
Emma and I giggled.
“It’s like what Jane does every night.” I said. “I just let her.”
“God I hope she’s not swallowing it.”
Now, what I should have said here is that even though she squirts tons of it out of the tube, she doesn’t actually put that much on her toothbrush, most of it just sort of slops around the tube, and every week or so I have to wipe down the tube, but it was bedtime, I am sleepy, and not a good communicator, so instead I say. An alternative path not taking. The Sliding Doors moment.
“eh. It’s fiiiiiiiine. Plus she’s a good rinser.”
“It’s true, she is, but I’m sure she swallows too, and you’re not supposed to swallow fluoride.”
“It’s fiiiiiine.” I say, again.
“I had a cousin [or something, I can’t remember, because I am a bad listener] who swallowed a lot of toothpaste and got brown teeth.”
“Wait so what is the deal with toothpaste again? You’re not supposed to swallow it? Fluouride is bad for you? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s in our water and stuff.”
“I’ll look it up on the internet tomorrow,” she continues.
“You can’t trust what you find on the internet,” I say, which is… simultaeously preposterous, true, and sort of condescending, like Emma’s not qualified to find real information on the internet or something.
“I don’t know, that’s what the dentist said last time we were there. Just a small amount of toothpaste. Size of a grain of rice.”
I did vaguely remember this from the last visit and thinking it was weird, but I had forgotten. I also do not acknowlege that I remember this.
“You can’t trust what dentists say,” I say, absolutely falsely. I am smug about the dentist: I never go, then when I go, my teeth are just perfect, so I apply my personal experience to the world as a whole, which is a fallacy based on egotism but one I cling to.
“What are you talking about?” Emma not unreasonably asks.
Then she has a stroke of brilliance.
“So I don’t need to listen to them about flossing?” she asks puckishly (women can be puckish too you know).
Now, I am, for all practical purposes here, rhetorically caught. You see, I am a fantastic flosser, and Emma is a… well, we’ll say normal flosser, becuase I am trying ot be fair, but us fantastic flossers all think you normal flossers are terrible flossers. We feel very superior about our flossing habits.
So I am, then, basically caught. Emma has won this argument. I am positing that you can’t listen to dentists, but to double-down on that would be to lose a much more important argument in my life, that Emma should floss more.
I should also point out this is all very good natured and we are not actually arguing, don’t fret.
BUT I am not going to back down. I am an American, and I am stubborn. What happens in my brain is that I choose to invert this. Instead of seeing this as a situation where this argument has caused a larger cost to me, bleeding into a more important topic, I instead elect to elevate the importanceof the fluoride-and-Jane argument, and view it not as I might lose something, but that hey, now I might gain something!
Instead of thinking “uh oh I might lose the flossing argument here, and that one is more important to me,” I think “oh hey cool, whatever happens here, I win something: either I win this long-standing flossing argument, or I win absolution about my terrible parenting habits when it comes to Jane’s teeth time.”
We both chuckle, say good night, let it go, because we are adults.
But as I am laying in bed, I thought to myself, “well, this is interesting, because you did all that immediately, and subconsciously. The behavioralists like Kahneman and Tverskey posit that the answer to the Allais Paradox is “loss aversion” — that is, when humans make mathematically irrational choices consistently in fixed choice architecture experiments, the explanation is usually that there is a fundamental slight bias for avoiding loss, even if the potential mathematical gain is slightly larger (I am simplifying here).
But I did not do that at all. I instantly, subconsiously pursued gain preference, even in the face of a larger loss. Is this something I have developed over the years as an arguing strategy to throw off oponents? That seems plausible, I used to really like to argue and employing the Nixon gambit is always useful. But even if that is the case, I am hardly alone (hence the Wikipedia link in the last sentence). I strongly suspect there is a good chunk of the population that does this. And this is broadly counter to loss aversion. I wonder if loss aversion has a lab bias that does not actually translate in the real world. I wonder if there are arenas where humans are less prone to loss version.
I had breakfast with Noah Briar at Balthazar the other day (man I missed Balthazar. I mean, I missed you too, Noah, but I really missed Bathazar) and Noah was expressing a fairly strong skepticism about behavioral economics. We chatted about it and came to an agreement on a more narrow skepticism, around the over application of choice archiecture and the tendence to use it in place of actual policy or, well, guts. But what if the broader critique has merit?
Oh my god, what if its all wrong?
Before this could metamorphose into a larger crisis of faith about my patron saints, I fell asleep.
Whew.
Covers playlist!