Elephant paths

Paved paths, roads and streets, and often unpaved ones as well, lead us where we want to go, from A to B. Some came into existence long ago, sometimes even in prehistory, and later they have become official roads. Other roads are new. Whatever their origin is, roads are ways for directing people. In modern society, they are the trails we are supposed to follow. As Michel de Certeau tells us (p.98): “[A] spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities … and interdictions” and roads are part of such a social order. If we leave them, maybe we come on private ground, or we violate some law or traffic rule.
Therefore, it is right to say that roads are manners of directing people and they are also often made that way. Roads are constructed that way that people follow them to their destinations in an orderly manner, and that way that people will avoid places where authorities don’t want to have them go. For instance, think of the main roads that avoid cities, towns and villages, discussed in my blog last week. Or, another example, parks have paths, so that the visitors don’t walk on the grass, – or not too much – even if it is allowed. Nevertheless, often people don’t follow them the prefab roads and paths. They think – intentionally or without being aware of it – that they are wiser than the planners. Often people don’t accept certain constructed roads or paths, for practical reasons, or for pleasure, or for other reasons, and they make their own shortcuts. Car drivers leave the main roads and follow secondary roads, when they think that by doing so they can reach their destinations faster or that they can avoid traffic jams; often to the annoyance of local residents and local authorities. Or it can happen that pedestrians don’t follow the constructed footpaths in a park but walk where they like and take shortcuts through the grass. When many people follow the same shortcut, finally you get a path. I think that everybody knows the spontaneous trails that come to exist in parks, on lawns, between roads, between official footpaths, etc. that are known by many names like desire paths, game trails, goat tracks, elephant paths and so on. Although there may be some slight differences between these kinds of unofficial footpaths, I want to summarize them under the name “elephant paths”. Maybe a shortcut is used only once by one person and then it will fade away. If that person uses the shortcut regularly, it has become a kind of private shortcut; a private passage. Maybe the passage will wear out or it will not. However, as soon as many people are going to use the same shortcut regularly, it will certainly wear out. Then, what was once a hardly visible trail has become a clear path, and it has become an unofficial passage; a path that came into existence by habit. It has become an “elephant path”. Once it is there, people may come to see it as an official path; as a real path. They will use it, if it leads to where they want to go. What once was a trail or even not more than a casual shortcut has become institutionalized by habit. Although by definition an elephant path originates spontaneously, sometimes it is recognized by the authorities and turned into an official path, for example by paving it. Sometimes planners leave a piece of land partially or fully unpaved, waiting till elephant paths have been created spontaneously and then paving them. Then elephant paths are used to make path networks.

Random quote
It.is a curious thing that the public always hates its benefactors

Ronald Ross(1857-1932)

Highways and bypasses

Do you have to be an ethnologist to have an eye for the subtleties of daily life and for the subtle and small impact that social change has on daily life and on the way we live? It was the French ethnologist Marc Augé, for instance, who wrote that the names of metro stations in Paris reflect the time that these stations were built. I know that there is a Floppy Disk Road in a nearby Dutch town, and also in this case the name gives an indication about when the road was built. Floppy disks were magnetic disks for storing computer data and programs. They were developed in the 1960s and the production stopped in 2011. Once you know this, you can make a guess about when this road probably was built.
Augé is especially known for having developed the concept of non-place (non-lieu, in French), which I discussed in another blog (see here). He has drawn my attention also to a seemingly obvious phenomenon, which nevertheless had a very deep impact on society: the construction of ring roads and bypasses – bypasses, for short – around towns and villages. I grew up in a provincial capital with about 30,000 inhabitants and I can still remember that in those days all through traffic had to pass through the narrow streets in the centre. However, with the spectacularly growing numbers of cars and trucks in the 1960s this became a practically impossible situation. The solution was that the traffic was diverted around the city by building ring roads and bypasses. It goes without saying that this situation was not typical for the town where I grew up. Nearly all cities, towns and villages had the same problem, and the result is that nowadays main roads do not lead from town to town, from village to village and from village to town, but that they avoid populated areas and pass around them.
This reasonable and necessary change in the construction of road patterns was not without consequences for the now avoided cities, towns and villages. Roads that go through built-up areas, “penetrate the intimacy of daily life”, as Augé says it. Before bypasses were built, they crossed city centres, where people come together for all kinds of reasons, and they passed through residential areas where people live (who therefore screened themselves off from the often too curious eyes of passers-by). But travelling longer distances was then not as normal as it is today and as is possible today with the modern means of transport, like faster cars. Transport was slow and main roads had always been built through the towns and to the towns and villages, because you had to be there; because you wanted to go there to the market; because it was the administrative centre of your region; because your family and business relations lived there; etc. In case you didn’t need to be there, because your destination was farther away, you still had to go through the towns and villages, since there were no other roads. The traffic was not that heavy that it was necessary to build bypasses. In this way, passers-by learned about the local customs and about what was locally interesting. And many people enjoyed stopping at the local markets, taking a rest in a local café or spend the night in the city, for travelling was a slow affair anyway, and often you had to split up your travel into several stages.
This changed with the development of modern and faster means of transport and with the increasing number of people on the move. On the one hand, it became impossible to lead all traffic through built-up areas if not to speak of city centres any longer; on the other hand, people also became more in a hurry; they had no time to slow down and didn’t want to stop in intermediate places. Therefore, gradually, the main roads that went through those places were replaced by bypasses and highways that avoided them. The new main roads now passed the towns and villages; they passed around the towns and literally they became passages. Even more, modern highways often don’t connect places as such but begin and end somewhere near an important city or otherwise on the city’s edge. Intermediate places and the beginning and end of modern highways are connected with the highways by feeder roads, approach roads and exits. As a result, towns and villages which are passed by the highways are no longer meaningful market towns, historic towns, places worth stopping there on your trip etc., but they have become nothing but names on road signs from the viewpoint of the car drivers, even in case a highway happens to pass through a certain town. This is not only so for small towns and villages, but even so for metropolises. I have often been geographically in Paris, for the autoroute from the Netherlands to the south of France passes through the outskirts of Paris. Then you can even see the Eiffel Tower. Nevertheless, I have seldom really been there, for usually I didn’t turn off, and Paris was nothing more than a place to be passed for me, an insignificant town like any other place where I didn’t stop.
Because today main roads avoid intermediate places, their local markets, their local festivities, their historical buildings, etc. tend to be forgotten. Often only local people and people from the region still know them. They have kept a meaning only for local residents. Therefore, local authorities and tourist agencies place billboards along the highways with texts like: “Visit us, we are very interesting.” It is an attempt to rescue their towns or villages from oblivion. But most car drivers don’t stop; they don’t take the exits that lead to the temptations mentioned on the billboards. Once important and meaningful places have turned into quiet and forgotten local oddities.

Sources: Marc Augé, Un ethnologue dans le métro and Non-Lieux (here esp. pp. 122 ff.).

Random quote
War is sweet to those who haven’t experienced it.

Pindaros (c. 518 BC – c. 438 BC)

Why hawks win (and doves lose)

Kahneman is known for his contributions to psychology and especially to economic psychology. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for them. However, his work has a wider application. For example, it can be useful for the study of war and peace, as the article “Why Hawks Win” shows, which he has written with Jonathan Reshon. The authors argue that hawks usually get the upper hand over doves, when political decisions must be taken, although often wrongly. In this blog, I’ll follow Kahneman’s and Reshon’s article.
Hawks are people who “tend to favour coercive action, are more willing to use military force, and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions”. They think that enemies will “only understand the language of force”. Doves, on the other hand, doubt the usefulness of such means and prefer dialogue. Generally, there may be good arguments for both positions, but psychology suggests that politicians – and humans in general – have “a bias in favour of hawkish beliefs and preferences”, at the cost of dovish views. This is a consequence of a general human trait: to overestimate your capabilities and possibilities. Don’t most of us think that they are better drivers than the average driver? About 80% think so. Of course, that’s not possible, but “the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favourable estimates of the outcomes of war”, on both sides of a conflict, and this “is likely to produce a disaster.” The authors have listed 40 human biases and all of them appeared to favour hawks. They stress that this doesn’t mean that hawkish advisors are wrong, but they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be.
Below I present the main factors that lead to pro-hawkish behaviour in times of conflict, as discussed by Kahneman and Reshon.

- Vision problems. People ignore the context in which others speak and behave and ignore their constraints, even if they know them. However, they assume that the other side knows their own context and restraints and takes them into account. In an international conflict setting this means that “a policy maker or diplomat involved in a tense exchange with a foreign government is likely to observe a great deal of hostile behaviour by that country’s representatives.” The other side behaves from a deep hostility or a striving for power, they think, and they “explain away their own behaviour as a result of being ‘pushed into a corner’ by an adversary.” However, the adversary thinks the same of you. Each side sees what the other does as provocation and as more hostile than it actually is. “The effect of this failure in conflict situations can be pernicious.”
- Excessive optimism. Most people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success. (see the “planning fallacy in my blog last week). They also think that they can control the situation, while in fact this is not so. When politicians behave that way, it can have disastrous effects, especially if politicians are in the grip of this bias in the early phases of a conflict. “A hawk’s preference for military action over diplomatic measures is often built upon the assumption that victory will come easily and swiftly.” In August 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium on its way to France – which was the start of the First World War – both Germany and France thought that the war would end before Christmas. However, the war would last for more than four years instead of for four months.
- Underappreciating the proposals by others. In negotiations, proposals of the other side are seen as less valuable than the same or equal proposals done by yourself. There is an intuition that something is worth less simply because the other side has offered it. This makes “that a concession …  offered by somebody perceived as hostile undermines the content of the proposal.” And this makes that violent solutions (like war) are chosen, when dovish solutions are still open, since “this bias is a significant stumbling block in negotiations between adversaries.”
- Loss aversion. (also mentioned in my blog last week) People have a deep aversion against cutting their losses, and prefer to go on even if there is only a very small chance to gain, instead of accepting a reasonable or actually inevitable loss. Therefore, politicians prefer to go on with a war, even if the consequences are worse for the citizens they lead.

These factors, and many more, make that the approaches proposed by hawks in international conflicts are more easily accepted than those proposed by doves. Now it is so that, according to Kahneman and Reshon, as such a hawkish position towards an adversary need not be bad. Show your teeth, I would characterize this view; or show that you are not a softy. However, too often, so the authors, a hawkish approach wins since hawkish approaches are overvalued because of an innate bias in the mind, with all its dangerous if not fatal consequences. Understanding the human biases can help preventing them.

Random quote
The opposite of tolerance is not intolerance but fanaticism.

Kees Schuyt (1943-)

Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024)

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive

Two weeks ago, the Israelian-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman died. He was one of the most well-known psychologists of this time. He is especially known for his contributions to the theory of rationality. His studies had a deep impact on the development of the field of economic psychology, and therefore he was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics. To his mind, he should have shared it with his friend Amos Tversky, but Tversky had already died, when Kahneman received the Nobel Prize. Though some see him as the father of Economic Psychology, he sees himself as the grandfather, and his colleague and friend Richard Thaler as the person who really developed the field.
In my blogs, now and then I have paid attention to Kahneman’s studies. Here I’ll mention some of his main contributions to psychology.

- Many people believed that humans are rational beings and economists even have built their theories on this idea. However, they aren’t, or rather only for a part they are (compare the third point below). Kahneman and Tversky have shown that humans often display non-rational behaviour. One of their best-known studies showing this is what they call the “Asian disease problem”. In short it is this: An unusual Asian disease is expected to kill 600 people. There are two things you can do: If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved, while if program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that nobody will be saved. Most people prefer program A, so they prefer the certain option over the gamble. However, a second group of people has to choose between the next options: If program C is adopted, 400 people will die, and if program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die. Now most people prefer the second option (D), so they prefer the gamble over the certain option. However, option A vs. option B is exactly the same as C vs. D! What is different is the wording of the problem, but the consequences of programs A and C or B and D are identical. The choice is determined by the way the problem is framed and not by a rational choice based on the differences between the cases. Experts do not do better than lay people!
- Losses that people may suffer count by far more than possible gains. The loss aversion theory says that people do much more to avoid losses than to get gains, even if the gains may be more profitable. “Losses loom larger than gains”, so Kahneman and Tversky.
- Humans have two thinking systems in their minds for making decisions: System 1 and System 2. Although this is not a discovery of Kahneman (the terms “System 1 and System 2 come from Keith Stanovich and Richard West), the theory has been further developed and explained by him. Most of what we do is not rationally and consciously considered but we just do. We simply follow our intuition and feelings. If so, then we use System 1. It operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. However, it can happen that we must think actively and explicitly about what to do or decide, for example if our actions and decisions are not routine but complicated and require attention, or if we have the time. Then we use System 2. It allocates attention to effortful mental activities like complex computations.
- Taking part in a book writing project with others, Kahneman asked one of them, a planning expert, what was the chance that the project would fail and how long the project would yet last according to him. The answer was 40% and six years. If so, the participants would have stopped the project, but they thought that they could do it within two years. In the end, it took yet seven years and then nobody was interested in the book any longer. According to Kahneman, they had here “stumbled on a distinction between two profoundly different approaches to forecasting, which Amos [Tversky] and I later labelled the inside view and the outside view.” This distinction, so Kahneman, is important for avoiding the “planning fallacy”, a term coined by Tversky and Kahneman. It is the erroneous prediction of future task duration. Participants in a project or people doing individual tasks tend to underestimate the length and costs of the project or task, because they tend to overestimate their skills and capabilities and ignore possible risks and uncertainties, even if they know them. People who must estimate the success chances of their own work are usually simply too optimistic. They depend too much on the inside view. However, the planning fallacy is not unescapable. We can do something about it, or at least we can mitigate it by taking the outside view. This involves asking expert opinions about the likely costs and length of a project or task; comparing your project or task with historical cases; using objective criteria to judge whether your plan is realistic; etc. In short, do not use subjective inside information to judge your planning, but assess it objectively with the help of outside information in order to get a realistic idea how it will develop.

Kahneman did not keep his views for an inner circle of scholars and scientist but explained them in a way that everybody could understand. Everybody can easily learn about his views and profit by them by reading his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin Books, London, 2012). That is also a great merit of this eminent scholar.

Source: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow; my blogs (use the “Search this blog” search engine for finding the themes discussed in this blog).

Random quote
“Pallid” statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one’s personal impressions of a case. In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn’t stand a chance.

Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024)

On each other’s shoulders

Photo taken at Amstel Railway Station, Amsterdam

I think that many of us don’t realize how much we owe to others in what we have done and achieved, including to many we don’t know and whose work we do not build on and do not continue. I realized it again, when I was reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics, especially Book II.1, in which he says:
“The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but everyone says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.”
Here Aristotle says that much can be achieved only collectively and that, even in case the contribution of each of us is small, the overall result can be great. However, that we need others is not only true for collective results but also for individual results, so Aristotle:
“It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought. It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus. The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former.”
We stand on the shoulders of others, or as Isaac Newton said (see my blog): “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton stressed that that those on the top, like the best researchers and the best philosophers and everybody who is good if not excellent, build on the work of others, improve it etc. Everything we do could not have been done without what our predecessors have done before us. But Aristotle says here that those on whose shoulders we stand are also known because of those after them who used their ideas. That is certainly true as well. For instance, a composer who has been forgotten no longer counts, even if his music belongs to the best ever composed. Out of sight, out of mind.
However, there is more, I think. We stand not only on the shoulders of those whose work we use and continue, but also on the shoulders of those who made mistakes; who followed the wrong path, so that their work led to nothing; who are our contemporaries but whose work is inferior to ours; on the shoulders of those who simply participated in the discussion and did their work in their own ways without having any direct relation to what we are doing; etc.
Let me give an example. I my younger years, I participated in running competitions. My results were not bad, but they didn’t exceed the club level; good enough for being selected for the club team, but much below the national if not international level. Nevertheless, I always said: Without me, the top runners would not have been so good as they are now. I said it jokingly, but it was seriously meant. Without runners of my level and the levels below me (and also thanks to the few much better than me, of course), there wouldn’t be athletic clubs and there wouldn’t be competitions; there wouldn’t be national champions, international champions and Olympic champions. Good runners couldn’t prove that they were good and wouldn’t be selected. Of course, many people knew that they were good, but there wouldn’t be competitions, selections and championships. Or, if we think of other fields of activity, there wouldn’t be bad arguments that good philosophers could correct; there wouldn’t be scientists who would have to correct the mistakes of bad science, etc. Without an infrastructure built by the unknown and the anonymous there wouldn’t be scientific journals; those journals wouldn’t be printed etc. Need I go on? I think that the message is clear: Everyone who is good in his field owns a lot to bunglers and duffers and to those who do their work in silence.