Gladwell

I haven't read anything by Gladwell in a few months. He's my favorite author, along with Jonah Lehrer, and I stumbled on four new articles he's posted in his archive since the last time I check. All of them are good as always but I liked "Drinking Games" in particular.

Jonah Lehrer also wrote a good article on stress last month. I'm not sure if I linked to it.

Post-code lotteries: should you play?

Tim Harford writes two great columns and I can't recommend them enough. I also recommend his book, The Undercover Economist, because (I think) it's one of the best introductions to be big ideas in neoclassical economics.

But in this advice column I think he skips over an important point. Normal lottery tickets are a waste of money because (1) they tend not to make winners happy and (2) you expect to lose money on them. Post-code lotteries are different, though. They work by giving everyone in a given ZIP code a prize (tens of thousands of dollars). This point is important because research suggests not buying a lottery ticket could make you sad becuase you'll feel poor compared to your neighbors if you don't win. Ben Bernanke summarized the research:

If I live in a country in which most people have only one cow, and I have three cows, then I will have lots of social status and self-esteem and will thus feel happy. But if everyone around me has a luxury car, and I am hung up on status, I won't feel very special unless I have both a luxury car and an SUV. This relative-wealth hypothesis can explain why rich people are happier than poor people in the same country, but also why people in richer countries are not on average much happier than people in poorer countries. It's the big fish in a little pond phenomenon.

So you can think of the ticket as insurance again feeling worse if your ZIP code wins. I still don't know if it's worth it, but postal-code lotteries might be a worthwhile form of insurance.

Stupid Questions

They say there are no stupid questions, yet this is a story about a stupid question.

My friends and I were talking about Rotten Tomatoes, which is a review aggregator for movies. They read all the reviews and decide if they're positive or negative, then report the percentage of positive reviews. If it's over 65% or so they certify the movie as "fresh."

I was explaining that the number RT reports is biased if it's meant to predict which movies are "good." Now I didn't specify what I mean by good but I think the intuitive definition is something like "most (American) people liked it" and you could estimate the percentage p that do/did by forcing N random people to watch the movie and vote thumbs up or down. Critics aren't like typical movie-goers, they tend to systemically have different tastes, so the RT number is a biased estimator of p.

The counterpoint is that, although it's rarely clearly stated, is that what makes things good or bad are some objective structural properties, things like complexity, pacing, lighting, or narrative structure. Critics are important because they're good at understanding these things, and the Academy Awards isn't done by a poll of the country because only the Academy actually knows good from bad. If that doesn't sound stupid then try to articulate some structural properties and then explain why they're the right ones (I'll return with an analogy later).

One of my friends asked "well, isn't there just good and bad music, so why not with films?" I quickly noted that "no, there isn't just good and bad music." He didn't that was a good enough answer, because I "don't know enough about music." (Implicitly I think the assumption here is that if you study music for long enough you'll understand, by divine revaluation, "the" structural properties and, well presumably then craft the perfect song possible. No, that is not meant to have a mocking tone.) A friend who played in the high school band explained that . . . well he didn't, he just talked about what kind of music he likes. I guess God just revealed to him one day that whatever he likes is also the right preference for everyone else.

After a while a light-bulb went on and everyone admitted that RT is a bad predictor (relative to say Yahoo! Movies, Netflix or Flixster) of what movies everyone likes because of selection bias. But no one informed Flixster as, ironically, they print only the RT rating when you search movies on their app, and you have to click each one-by-one to see the Flixster ratings (which is a somewhat biased version of the poll described above).

Now we return to the structural properties question. You actually can articulate a lot of properties that make any kind of art good. You can do the same for properties that make people attractive, which is illustrative. We know height makes men more attractive (up until about 6'2'' in the U.S.) and high cheek bones make women attractive (obviously likewise up to a point), and symmetric faces make both sexes more attractive. But how do we know that? Because we asked people to rate faces and those traits are correlated with higher ratings. You see, the structural approach gets things backwards.

Quote of the Day: Chinese Edition

I read this in a novel, it's attributed to Confucious:

An educated woman is a useless woman.

I  searched for that quote on the Internet and couldn't find it. I did find a treasure trove of misogynistic Neo-confucian quotes here.

Of course, no one believes that stuff anymore, do they?

Maybe. Ray Fisman's research, summarized in Blink and here:

Fisman's study shows that men do like smart, ambitious women as long as they are not smarter and more ambitious than they are. . . . What about other women? How do they feel about extremely intelligent women? For the most part, unless they are also very intelligent, they tend to either be jealous or feel inferior and not want to associate with them.

Achievement

This was in the drafts folder for a long time. I didn't have time to turn the notes I jotted down into anything polished.

How do we decide what we're impressed by? And how much of it do we even get to decide?

Some factors are probably:

1. how hard did someone try?

2. how unique is the skill vis a vis a reference point?

3. how much does our culture respect people who can do it?

I ranked them according to what our intuition probably says is most important. We respect effort first and foremost, and are most impressed by achievements people invest years of their lives in.

But is that true? Would you be more impressed by someone eating 100 sticks of butter in 15 minutes or someone composing the best music on the best selling classical CD this year? I don't think anyone can actually do the former. It far and away more difficult, but if someone did I doubt they'd do it to much fanfare. We just aren't impressed by unusual talents like that. How much is that a product of acculturation and how much is it a product of not understanding?

It could be the later. After all, I don't know anything about competitive eating. That sounds like a lot of butter, but maybe it's common to eat that much on the circuit. Maybe it wouldn't even be that hard if you trained for a year. But to compose a best selling CD? You could train for decades and never accomplish that, right? We're more impressed by things we understand because we can put the achievement in context--how hard did they have to work? (I'm putting aside the issue of natural talent here.)

But I think that factor isn't as important as we think. Here is a thought experiment I like to use. Whose accomplishments are more impressive, Michael Jordan's or Mozart's? I'm pretty sure most people will say Mozart as a snap answer. But most of those people don't know much about composing. They don't have any idea how much people actually like Mozart (do you? Classical music makes up < 2.5% of total album sales). Most people know a little more about Jordan, if only because he's still alive. He won 6 championships and he's far and away the best basketball player of all time. We know roughly how old basketball is (100 years) and how many people play (tens of millions) in the U.S. A lot more people play sports than compose classical music, and a lot more people are alive today then hundreds of years ago. If Mozart was one of the best composers in an era when few people composed and fewer people lived, doesn't that add up to an best guess that there are a lot more Mozarts out there than Jordans? If our judgements were driven primarily by praising what we understand we should be more impressed with Jordan. But we aren't.

So the question is whether everyone is impressed by Picaso's paintings and Shakespeare's plays because everyone likes them, or because everyone told them they're impressive for so long?

Note: This didn't fit in, but it's a nice dig on Cambridge elites. I've noticed the same people who tend to claim the most interest in diversity are the least accepting of these kinds of ideas. They have the strongest commitment to traditional views about what makes good art and what constitutes "success." Isn't it time they opened our eyes to the diversity of human achievement? Like eating 4.5 lbs of steak in 7 minutes.

Narcissism

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

from an otherwise horrible column by David Brooks. He notes this with disdain, but I wonder if it's such a bad thing. What makes some people important and others not?

Unconscious intelligence

A very good blog post on two types of intelligence.

Experiments about touch

Discover Blogs reports on some experiments at MIT:

Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.

Think of how you can use this to get a steal in negotiations. You start with a handshake and smooth hands prime the salesman to view you are friendly. Maybe you tell a joke. At the same time, the soft touch primes them to be more flexible with their offers. Then you hammer away. Of course, you need soft, smooth hands like these for it to work:

 

"What to Say"

I noticed someone who I think is pretty smart sometimes writes in "netspeak" and asked a mutal friend what the deal is with that? They didn't seem to think it's a problem. I agree, "to each his own," but doesn't it send a bad signal?

Well, the evidence is in and its clear: "netspeak = fail"

Other not so shocking findings:

1. Don't be shallow (e.g. focus on her appearence)

2. Mention some specific (mutual?) interest

3. Show you read her profile

The one finding that contradicts the conventional wisdom is that it's good for guys to be self-effacing. I think this makes sense if you consider the forum. Confidence is a good thing, but it's conveyed by posture and tone. If you try to say or write the same message it's understood as arrogance. That theory doesn't have much explanatory power for this case though.

Note: I used feminine pronouns based on an assumption based on no evidence whatsoever that men, by tradition, send most of the messages. It's probably false.