Binary outcomes

We are not hardwired to judge outcomes using probabilities. We judge outcomes using success or failure.

For example, many of us have a gut feeling that Belichick made the wrong decision.

And when we pin our happiness on outcomes, it is prone to peaks and valleys.

I'm always reminding myself of this.

Options

Whenever I'm bummed about being the smallest fish in my new pond, I think:

just stay alive for another 30 years, and the singularity will be here.

Urban is green

"When a household moves from living 2 miles away from a city center to 10 miles away, gasoline consumption increases by more than 100 gallons annually."

Edward Glaeser on the carbon footprint of McMansions

"A 30-story farm that covered a city block could feed 50,000 people year-round."

Scientific American on urban farms

Friday evening

Friday evening. Eigenvalues, with Dogtoberfest.

Shallow wading

"One study says that email is more corrosive to your I.Q. than pot."

- New Yorker, Nov. 9 issue

The internet age has made the Inada condition applicable to the consumption of knowledge.

Why would I dig deep into a question when I can surf Wikipedia? It's much more enjoyable to read about something brand new for 15 minutes than to re-read Hegel for yet another 15 minutes. So we end up eating lots of candy-like trivial info bits and not so much of the meat and potatoes power ideas.

Taste testing: dark dark chocolate

Blind(ish) results. Tasting has been over the past month, here's the final ranking.

1) Green & Black's (85%)
2) Hachez (88%)
3) Scharffen Berger (82%)
4) Lindt (90%)

The Lindt Chili comes in at 1a) but it's really a different category.

The G&B is the most creamy. Which you can't say for the Lindt, which turns play-doh-ey in your mouth. The Hachez comes at you from a different angle with a nuttiness. The SB* is nothing special. I think it beats the Lindt only because 90% is just too high for me.

*SB was bought by Hershey's in 2005. Make a better product, guys!

Sloth

Big plans. Big expectations. Big dreams.

But they didn't build Rome in a day.

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired. - Robert Frost

Stats

You know when newspapers write health advice, "drinking tea with milk can reduce the effects of the calming agents in the tea by 27% because proteins in the milk bind with the calming agents so they aren't absorbed into the blood stream." You know that the 27% is a BS figure.

AP should change their style guides so that instead it is written, simply, "drinking tea with milk can reduce the effects of the calming agents in the tea" or maybe "by a percentage in the range of 0% to 50%".

Economies of scale and waste

I used to feel guilty about wasting foods. But I believe this sense of guilt, combined with the wonders of economies of scale, is at least partly to blame for the amount of obesity in our country. So recently, I have been teaching myself to enjoy wasting food or beverage when I know it would be overkill to eat or drink it all. For example, this morning, I dumped half a cup of coffee down the sink. (It was half-gleeful, still half cringe-ful, I admit.)
I guess they call this process of deliberately, consciously re-teaching what is "good" "cognitive behavioral therapy," and it can also be used, (like music), to close the gaps between tribes.

The brain

Saw my parents this weekend, which was fantastic. Them and my sister and brother-in-law, family.

This morning we got on the topic of alcohol and the brain. My sister told a story about Christopher Hitchens drinking two Johnnie Walker blues before a lunch lecture. Apparently he is famous for performing best with a little bit in him.

My dad pointed out that alcohol has a two-part effect on the brain. First it opens up blood vessels in the brain, and it's actually easier to remember things, which is part of why we get so talkative after a drink or two. Then later, the alcohol closes blood vessels, and that's why we shouldn't drink more than a couple drinks, and why hangovers make you dumbbb.

Expectations

Figuring out how to readjust my expectations for school performance. See the graphs.

Top graph. In college, I could get A's without too much effort. So I set my satisficing bar (the dotted line) at an A, and put in the effort required to pass that bar.

Bottom graph. In grad school, an A is no longer feasible. (Well maybe it could be, but that amount of effort is not feasible.) So the question becomes, where do I set the bar? Do I shoot for B's or shoot for C's? (I'm still figuring out how much effort is required to achieve different levels of results.)

Memory

Scents and memory.
In the middle of July, I spent my last day in Singapore at the botanical gardens. Not surprisingly, it was a humid day. Combine that with a plethora of plants, and my nose was inundated with scents from Singaporean plants and beyond. As I took in all the different smells, numerous joyful memories cascaded through my thoughts. It was really wonderful.
Memory without scents.
Meanwhile, today's grey sky got me thinking about the past, and I gained a general malaise. Not terribly wonderful. Not evoked by scent, either, just the grey sky. So I wonder, are memories evoked by scent better memories than memories evoked otherwise?

Math

"Math doesn’t depend on speed. It is about deep."

Manifold Destiny:
A legendary problem.

The part about the "math drama" is not terribly interesting, but the part about how a legendary conjecture was proven is delightfully interesting. Grigory Perelman is quite the character.

Conjecture

Back in June, I conjectured "Some would call it a pyramid scheme."

It's neat to see this supported by a real paper.

"Health 'Reform' Is Income Redistribution
Let's have an honest debate before we transfer more money from young to old." - WSJ

Math

Though economists have learned some lessons during the past year, math remains the focus of a graduate education in economics.

Math hasn't been this core to my daily existence since Mathcounts in 8th grade. And I am enjoying it. But I will always maintain an equal respect for intuition.

Respect

From Wikipedia:

The transpose respects addition.

Math. respect.

Food and Caveat Emptor

In a triumphant return to student life, I picked up a meal plan for this semester. It turned out to be a bit different than eating at Simmons Hall at Penn State.

The food was about the same quality, but the experience was not. There were no longer heaps of dorm floor mates milling about, and my stomach had lost some elasticity. So I decided to forget the original plan of one giant meal per day.

In cancelling the plan, I also found that it was quite expensive. I had signed up for $1,385 for 113 meals and $250 flex dollars (which were not very flexible). After I used about 8 meals and $10 flex dollars over the first two weeks of class, they returned me $1,200 upon cancellation. It works out to over $20 a meal!

Update: Turns out I can get the employee meal plan. This will cost under $6 a meal. Much better! And this is the last post titled "caveat emptor" or otherwise filled with mundane complaints.

Intuition

This is "intuition mountain." [1]
It is my attempt at a pictorial metaphor for the importance of intuition for scientific progress, and for decision-making in general.

You may know of the dichotomy between algorithmic, mechanistic science and intuition. [2]

Other names for this dichotomy include rational / romantic, thinking / feeling, logical / emotional. [3] [4]

In today's world, mechanistic science has the upper hand. Science has given us so much. So what good is intuition? It lets us see where science cannot. Take a look at this mountain viewed through the lenses of science and intuition. It's a metaphor for an equation that you are maximizing.

The central part of the mountain is drawn with a clear black line - here science explains the world in full detail. But the neighboring mountains are drawn with fuzzy dotted lines. There, science has not explored, so we rely upon intuition to get an idea of what is there, because intuition's lens casts a wider view.

Intuition lets us know that we, the anthill of humanity, should explore the snow-capped mountain on the right. Science? If it acted alone, it would probably lead us to explore the mountain on the left.

In addition to scientific exploration and progress, decision-making in general can be viewed through these two lenses. Ever make a gut decision? Impulsive decision-making is often looked down upon in our country, but there's more to it than we often realize.

Takeaway: we typically maximize locally, where algorithmic science delineates for us. But if we use our intuition, we can maximize more universally.


[1] The name is a bit of a misnomer, because only the left and right mountains are "intuitive." The central mountain is "scientific."

[2] The dichotomy's prevalence in our lives came to the forefront of my thinking when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which was published in 1974. Pirsig speaks of chem lab in college, and how easy it was for him to produce thousands of hypotheses, but how difficult it was for him to decide which hypothesis to test. For a precursor to Pirsig's discussion of the miscommunication between the two sides of the dichotomy, see the 1959 lecture "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow, who, in a sign of the times, argued that the humanities have much to learn from science.

[3] Kahneman breaks our thought processes into two types as follows. Perception and intuition are fast, parallel, automatic, effortless, associative, slow-learning, emotional. Reasoning is slow, serial, controlled, effortful, rule-governed, flexible, and neutral. Kahneman, Daniel. "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics." The American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 5. (2003), pp. 1449-1475.

[4] BusinessWeek calls the split male / female.

Music

Pump up music: Infinity 2008

Music

Pump up music: Tiesto

Prices

Here's a price question. I'll post the answer as a comment.

Two products. Chocolates: Toblerone. Cigarettes: Camel.

Two locations. Singapore airport duty-free. Frankfurt airport duty-free.

Countries of origin. Toblerone: Switzerland. Camel: Germany (this particular pack found in both duty-free shops).

Let Pts be the price of Toblerone in Singapore, Ptf Frankfurt. Let Pcs be the price of Camels in Singapore, Pcf Frankfurt.

Pts is 14.5, Ptf is 8.
If Pcs is 14, what is Pcf?

Health care

The attitude of some of my Malaysian friends toward preventative procedures is somewhat different than the attitude I'm used to.

Music

We are the world.

The passing of Michael Jackson united the front pages of newspapers around the world and has been uniting radio stations around the world for the past couple of weeks.
So his passing is creating that unity that his lyrics inspire us toward.

This unity was also inspired this past weekend as musicians from around the world united at the Rainforest World Music Festival.

In previous centuries, music was used for battle. But as warfare has been declining, music is more typically put to peaceful purposes. Rather than contributing to clashes, it is uniting.

At the rainforest music fest, members of different bands combined talents at jam sessions. As we sat and sweated in a dimly-lit longhouse in the mid-afternoon heat, I mockingly told my friend, “Music will bring peace on earth, man!” But I soon grew less sarcastic. Drummers from Malaysia, Chile, and Morocco thrummed together. Rather than calls to battle against each other, we in the crowd were called to chant together. Then, the Moroccans teamed up with Tanzanian drummers and dancers. The whole room was filled with friendly energy!

How is it that music can be used either for starting war and or for building community? I think it is a common thread of tribal vibes. Drumming inspires tribal emotions. I think we are hardwired with a motto of, “If you're in my tribe, I got your back. But if you're not in my tribe, watch your back.” And where once I would have viewed a Moroccan as coming from another tribe, at the festival we were in the same tribe. Music united us. Peace on earth, man!

Food post: #3

Linda introduced Rob and I to a durian, a spiky, melon-sized creature known as the "king of fruits." We ate all of it. The fun part was making fun of how anyone could like it (and they really like them here). It smells like an alley. It tastes like soap. It dries out your throat. It's fatty. And it gives you bad breath.

 

Invention

Here on the other side of the world, I see American brands everywhere.

What inventions will the coming years see?

Two cheers for America

Pictures

The Petronas Towers. Built with reinforced concrete because it was cheaper than steel. But I wonder at the electricity bill!

 

Food post: #2

Rob was getting a haircut so I plumped down at the local food court and sipped a beer. S$5.80 for a 630 mL bottle (For conversion to USD, about USD$4. For comparison to food, a plate of rice with 3 different curries spooned on top costs half of that, S$2.80.)

Two tables over, an older man also sipped a beer. (This is not him, but here is a picture to give you an image.)

I wondered if it was his daily ritual. And then I wondered, how much the beer cost when he was my age. I wondered, how he had reacted to beer taxes (light paternalism) [1] over the years. I wondered at all of the changes in his country during his lifetime. I wondered, what goes through his mind when he compares Singapore today to the Singapore of his youth?

[1] The excise tax on beer is S$3.50 per liter (it's S$70 per liter of pure alcohol). That's about USD$0.70 per 12-oz beer. There's also 7% GST (goods and services tax) and a customary 10% restaurant service charge.

Pictures

Sums up my impression of Singapore.

Pictures

Flying into Singapore, you can see container ships lazing about. No work for them at the moment.

 

Food post: #1

Check this off the life list: eating an entire animal in one sitting (next box after this is kill and eat an entire animal (after that is kill with bare hands or teeth and eat an entire animal)). Ordered a kabob stick called "small bird," thought I was getting some small pieces of chicken. Nope, I got a small bird, the entire thing, featherless and stretched over the skewers. Breaking off a leg was like eating a drumstick, except at 1/10th the ratio. Tasty meat, but .1 grams of protein. Getting the wing off was more trouble, though, and it had no meat on it. As I moved on to the breast, the head started looking at me. I tried to ignore it, to no avail, so I ripped the head off to get it out of my vision. But the little bugger still stared at me sadly from the plate as I put the rest of what little meat he had to offer into my stomach. At this point I started getting paranoid about diseases being carried in animals' nervous systems, and worried I'd eaten some of the spinal cord. It was hard to tell between the small bones and the thick spice rub seasoning. Blissfully the paranoia quickly passed after a moist towel, I felt clean. All in all, check that one off the list.

Daily question: #5

Complexity...Simplicity...

What do you prefer, simplicity or complexity?

What do you prefer, simplicity or complexity?

What a poignant question. I, for one, prefer simplicity.

What a poignant question. I, for one, prefer simplicity.

Simplicity...Complexity...

Daily vocation: #2

A sense of oneness, flow, in the zone.

A sense of oneness, flow, in the zone.

Daily question: #4

If all the people in the world are good, then where does evil come from?

If all the people in the world are good, then where does evil come from?

Philosophy

Google results, top of page one. Six links to cosmetics, one link to Wikipedia.

This is how I am thinking about Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty.

Daily vocation: #1

To make other men stronger.

To make other men stronger.

What is the World's Story about?

Burdens on the Youth

Back in the 1930s, FDR started up this thing called Social Security. Some would call it a pyramid scheme. And the pyramid is estimated to break in 2037 when there won't be enough youth to pay for the old.

Today, the news is filled with big plans for health care reform. With the federal budget already broken, any reform will have to pay for itself. Guess who is going to end up paying for it? Healthy people will be subsidizing the sick.*

Another burden on the youth. Call me a pessimist with a callous attitude toward the old and the sick.

* Two ways of financing the health care reform are a) taxing employer-sponsored benefits and b) mandating all citizens buy health insurance (Kennedy plan). The insurance companies appear likely to go along with a mandate for every citizen to buy health insurance. Needless to say, the above claim remains pure speculation on my part.

Daily question: #3

Sometimes, I look around and wonder, how do you know it hasn't all been a dream up to this very point? How do you really know?

Sometimes, I look around and wonder, how do you know it hasn't all been a dream up to this very point? How do you really know?

Daily question: #2

When you go on Wikipedia to look up some information, do you leave the website once you found what you wanted, or do you keep on clickin'?

When you go on Wikipedia to look up some information, do you leave the website once you found what you wanted, or do you keep on clickin'?

Daily question: #1

I wonder how many jokes George Washington used to tell?

I wonder how many jokes George Washington used to tell?

Letters

This one's for ellie.

"[t]he last of them," you think?

Theirs Truly: The Lowell-Bishop Letters

Macroeconomics

First I read this short report that furthered my sad perspective that economists are generally perceived as as useful as weathermen.

Justin Wolfers, "On the Failure of Macroeconomists"

Then I saw the below quote by Niall Ferguson.

"The prevailing Davos pessimism had been brilliantly summed up by Niall Ferguson... He called what we are going through not a Great Depression but a "Great Repression." ..."Our leaders," he said, "are in a state of denial, turning to a 1936 book [Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money] to save us.""

Are ideologies to blame for the apparent lack of any objective advice to offer upon the matters of the day?

"Service Stimulus"

For the past week, I've been lamenting the possibility of a failed opportunity. I've been sad that community service has gotten little lip service in discussions of the stimulus package. What's not to like about:

- the temporarily unemployed using their extra time to tutor kids
- the small-town values of "neighbors helping neighbors"

These types of activities can prevent a national depression from influencing Americans into mental depressions. It would pain me to learn years from now that the extra hours of the unemployed are being spent alone in front of the television.

So I am excited by the below passage in the NYT. I hadn't ever heard of Prof. Goldsmith until 5 minutes ago, but he expresses just what I had been thinking. This NYT post assembled experts to find faults with the $900 billion stimulus package. The package has been passed by the House and looks on track for Senate confirmation and the president's signature before President's Day. Then, hopefully, we can follow the implementation on recovery.org.

Anyways, Prof. Goldsmith has the below to say on "Service Stimulus".

"The stimulus package seeks to address the current economic crisis of our country, but we must not overlook the need for a “service stimulus.” Indeed, the bill should explicitly address how to support and leverage the spirit of volunteerism that exists in America.

For volunteers to be effective, they need support services from community organizations. If we are going to add jobs for the purpose of economic stimulus, we should do it in a way that produces broad support for Americans in difficult circumstances by neighbors helping neighbors. Therefore, the stimulus bill should provide for significant increases in AmeriCorps members who can rapidly deploy to community organizations and support volunteerism.

More Americans are struggling this year, yet millions are reaching out in record numbers to offer food, care and compassion. As this stimulus package recognizes, there are many areas of need across our communities. But these can be drastically improved by collaboration. Tutors and mentors can help school children succeed, volunteers can support displaced families as they move from shelters to more permanent housing and community assistance centers can assist by providing volunteers to aid those encountering substance abuse and depression.

We must renew our dedication to service and leverage the true strength of America through citizen action. The limiting factor is not American goodwill but rather the process by which we engage, recruit, train and deploy willing volunteers. By actively engaging in our communities and mobilizing efforts to aid those in need, we can rebuild society."