Letters Remain

  • Religion and Societal Dysfunction

    Dysfunctional societies and those under extreme stress rely on religion as a coping mechanism; it is “a natural invention of human minds in response to a defective habitat”.

    This is one conclusion from Gregory Paul who has released the findings from his research on the incidence of religious belief and how it affects the overall ‘health’ of a society.

    [Paul’s] earlier, 2005, research […] showed strong positive correlations between nations’ religious belief and levels of murder, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse and other indicators of dysfunction. It seemed to show, at the very least, that being religious does not necessarily make for a better society. […]

    In this latest research Paul measures “popular religiosity” for developed nations, and then compares it against the “successful societies scale” (SSS) which includes such things such as homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births and abortions, corruption, income inequality, and many others. In other words it is a way of summing up a society’s health.

    The results?

    The 1st world nations with the highest levels of belief in God, and the greatest religious observance are also the ones with all the signs of societal dysfunction. These correlations are truly stunning. They are not “barely significant” or marginal in any way. Many, such as those between popular religiosity and teenage abortions and STDs have correlation coefficients over 0.9 and the overall correlation with the SSS is 0.7 with the US included and 0.5 without. These are powerful relationships.

    As always.

    Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman wrote the essay Why the Gods are Not Winning for Edge.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Societal Value of Various Jobs

    The New Economics Foundation has released a report comparing various jobs in terms of the societal value they destroy or generate (pdf).

    The report was produced to start “a fundamental rethink of how the value of work is recognised and rewarded”—specifically by creating a relationship between jobs that create a benefit for society and the environment and their compensation.

    The BBC looks at the report and has produced a summary of the findings:

    • Waste workers: Create £12 of value for every £1 they are paid.
    • Hospital cleaners: Create over £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.
    • Childcare workers: Create £9.50 worth of benefits for every £1 they are paid.
    • City bankers: Destroy £7 of value for every £1 they generate.
    • Senior advertising executives: Destroy £11 of value for every £1 they generate.
    • Tax accountants: Destroy £47 for every £1 generated.

    In addition to these figures:

    • Advertising executives “create stress, […] dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption, […] high spending and indebtedness. [They also] create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress.”
    • Waste workers “promote recycling”.
    • Childcare workers “create net wealth to the country [by releasing] earnings potential by allowing parents to continue working”.

    I can’t help feeling that these results are largely swayed by the public opinion* and that the six jobs compared by NEF were chosen due to their potential for controversy (read: publicity) and incorrect interpretation.

    However I did like the ten myths of pay and value (further information in the report):

    1. The City of London is essential for the UK economy.
    2. Low paid jobs create a ladder for people to work their way up — opportunities to advance are open to all.
    3. Pay differentials don’t matter, so long as we eradicate poverty.
    4. We need to pay high salaries to attract and retain talent in the UK.
    5. Workers in highly paid jobs work harder.
    6. The private sector is more efficient than the public sector.
    7. If we tax the rich, they will take their money and run.
    8. The rich contribute more to society.
    9. Some jobs are more satisfying, so they require less pay.
    10. Pay always rewards underlying profitability.

    * I imagine the results would have been quite different a few years ago when we were in the midst of a bull market and MRSA infection rates were high and prominent in the news.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Penny/Dollar Auction Psychology (The Workings of Swoopo)

    I first heard of the bidding fee scheme/online auction site Swoopo in a Coding Horror post that takes a look at the company’s business plan, calling it “pure, distilled evil”. It’s also a pretty simple (or, as the post said, “brilliantly evil”) plan:

    It’s almost an exploit of human nature itself. Once you’ve bid on something a few times, you now have a vested financial interest in that product, a product someone else could end up winning, rendering your investment moot. This often leads to irrational decisionmaking — something called the endowment effect, which has even been observed in chimpanzees. So instead of doing the rational thing and walking away from a bad investment, you pour more money in, sending good money after bad.

    A few month later Mark Gimein produced a widely-shared (and frankly inferior) rehash of Atwood’s article, calling Swoopo “the crack cocaine of auction sites”.

    However my interest piqued again as Jonah Lehrer picked up on the neuroscience of bidding fee schemes, noting that the success of Swoopo isn’t just down to our irrationality toward apparent sunk costs and divestiture aversion, but also how our dopamine circuitry works.

    What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Our dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: if this, then that. They realize that the tone predicts the juice, or that betting on the laptop might get us a discounted reward. This means that our dopamine circuitry isn’t just titillated when we win the auction – those predictive cells are excited every time we bid, as they wait to see whether or not the reward will arrive. […]

    This, in a nutshell, is how Swoopo works. It’s one near-miss after another, as we bid and then bid again. The experience feels awful – we know we’re wasting money – and yet we can’t look away.

    As noted in a Mind Hacks post looking at dopamine functions during gambling tasks; “although near-misses were experienced as aversive they increased the desire to play the game”.

    Now behavioural economist Richard Thaler has produced a piece on dollar auctions and Swoopo that again reads like a poor rehash of Atwood’s article.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Optimum Starting Prices for Negotiations and Auctions (and Why)

    A high initial offer in negotiations is more likely to lead to a high final price, yet in auctions a low start price is more likely to lead to a high final price.

    These are the findings of a recent study that attempted to find the optimal starting prices for negotiations and auctions.

    In negotiations (where the number of actors is often predetermined), starting prices drive cognitive processes, leading individuals to selectively focus on information consistent with, and make valuations similar to, the starting value. Thus, starting high will often lead to ending high in negotiations. Conversely, in auctions (where the number of actors is determined during the course of the auction), low starting prices catalyze social processes that can lead to higher final prices: Low starting prices lower barriers to entry and increase the number of bidders; produce more sunk costs for early entrants; and lead participants to infer greater value from this increased bidding activity, resulting in herding behaviour.

    As Mind Hacks summarises: negotiation relies heavily on the anchoring effect (of which there are “few psychological phenomena as robust”), whereas in auctions “price rise [is] driven by social competition and so starting with a low entry point encourages more people to join in; once someone has bid, they have made a commitment which is likely to encourage them to continue; and finally, more bids leads us to infer that the item has a higher value”.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Dieter Rams Interview: Design as Art and the Need for Better Products

    Sustainable design and the need for more self-explanatory products are two topics discussed in this brief interview with the iconic industrial designer, Dieter Rams. In addition to not being a fan of celebrity designers–or ‘pop’ design–he also has a dislike for design being seen as a form of art:

    Design has nothing to do with art. Design can help to make the products we use everyday, to make them “less but better”. We have enough products. If you look at the market you have ten or 20 coffee makers that basically look all the same, doing all the same thing: they are making coffee. We don’t need 20 of these things, we need one good one. A lot of my colleagues are concentrated on making spectacular things—pieces of art they want to be art. It’s not good for the few companies in the world that take design seriously.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Statistics on Social Mobility and Belief Systems

    Careers in law, medicine and the media are become more exclusive, while citizens from deprived areas continue to be failed by education. New Statesman provides a summary of (some) social mobility issues in the U.K., including these somewhat startling statistics:

    • Privately educated candidates account for 7 per cent of the population, but occupy more than half of the top professional jobs.
    • 75 per cent of judges, 45 per cent of senior civil servants, and a third of MPs are privately educated.
    • More than 4 in 10 places and Oxford and Cambridge go to privately educated candidates.
    • 600,000 children take GCSEs annually. 360,000 do not get the five good grades required for university or employment (60 per cent).
    • 30 per cent of children on free school meals do not get good GCSEs.
    • Of students getting 3 As at A-Level, just 0.5 per cent were eligible for free school meals.

    I am reminded of another set of statistics–these from Foreign Policy on various belief systems in America:

    • Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55
    • Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39
    • Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36
    • Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34
    • Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34

    Additionally:

    • Percentage of Americans who believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP: 48
    • Percentage of Americans who believe in the existence of spells or witchcraft: 19
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Writing Tips for Non-Writers

    Multiple Hugo Award-winner and Stargate Universe creative consultant John Scalzi offers ten writing tips for non-professional writers:

    1. Speak what you write.
    2. Punctuate, damn you.
    3. With sentences, shorter is better than longer.
    4. Learn to friggin’ spell.
    5. Don’t use words you don’t really know.
    6. Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does.
    7. Front-load your point.
    8. Try to write well every single time you write.
    9. Read people who write well.
    10. When in doubt, simplify.

    This, from Try to write well every single time you write:

    I have friends who I know can write well who send me the most awful e-mail and IMs because they figure it doesn’t matter how many rules of grammar and spelling they stomp on because it’s just e-mail and IM. But if you actually want to be a better writer, you have to be a better writer every time you write. It won’t kill you to write a complete sentence in IM or e-mail, you know. The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it until it will actually be more difficult to write poorly in e-mail and IM than not.

    via @finiteattention

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Eliciting Quality Feedback

    Feedback is important, there’s no doubt, but obtaining quality feedback that is honest and of use can be difficult.

    After spending an evening with a person “oblivious to the social dynamics” of a situation, Ben Casnocha provides tips on obtaining honest feedback:

    • For feedback on specifics — such as your participation at a dinner or a piece of writing — […] proactively ask for it.
    • It’s harder to get feedback on more permanent personality traits or long-standing habits, so ask for “ideas” or, if appropriate, for feedback via the Nohari and Johari exercises.
    • If you give blunt feedback, you are actually less likely to get blunt feedback in return. The law of reciprocity does not apply.
    • Consider how close you are to a person who is providing feedback and how that will affect their response(s).

    Penelope Trunk offers some more advice on receiving… advice:

    • Pay attention to your critics.
    • Realise that our problems are not unique.
    • Less experience often means better advice.
    • Be wary of people whose lives look perfect.
    • Stick with people who give you bad advice.

    That first item from Trunk is identical to the one piece of ‘feedback advice’ that I’ve subscribed to since I heard it during Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture:

    • Listen to your critics. “When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up”.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Self-Awareness and the Importance of Feedback

    It comes as no surprise to hear that we are poor at perceiving how others view us and are poor at recognising the true personality traits of those we observe, but it’s the extent to which this is true and methods we can use to overcome these ‘personality blind spots’ that I find interesting.

    When people are asked how long they think their romantic relationship will last, they’re not very good at estimating the right answer. Their friends, it turns out, fare far better. But if you ask people how satisfied they are in a relationship, their ratings accurately predict how long they’ll stay together. In many cases, we have the necessary information to understand things as they are—but our blind spots don’t allow us to take it into account.

    After looking at some of our biases that make this so (e.g. the illusion of transparency and the spotlight effect) and what traits we are able to discern in ourselves and in others with some accuracy, the article goes on to suggest that the best way to learn more about ourselves is to solicit feedback.

    How you’re seen does matter. Social judgment forms the basis for social interaction itself. Almost every decision others make about you, from promotions to friendships to marriages, is based on how people see you. So even if you never learn what you’re really like, learning how others perceive you is a worthwhile goal.

    The solution is asking others what they see. The best way to do this is to solicit their opinions directly—though just asking your mom won’t cut it. You’ll need to get feedback from multiple people—your friends, coworkers, family, and, if you can, your enemies. Offer the cloak of anonymity without which they wouldn’t dare share the brutal truth.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Apple’s Strategy of Rejecting ‘Social Media’

    Apple’s ‘rejection’ of the practices pundits “always say you should do to succeed in the Internet economy” isn’t unique, but it does make for interesting reading:

    Apple doesn’t blog; it doesn’t Tweet; it does little on Facebook; it doesn’t engage with its customer base. It doesn’t ask the “community” for feedback or rapidly iterate based on any such feedback or even respond to criticism.

    It doesn’t give anything away for free, thank you very much—in fact, the company charges premium prices for just about everything. Its customer service is perfunctory. It engages in terribly consumer-unfriendly practices like making you buy a whole new device when the battery dies.

    And marketing? […] For the most part, Apple advertising is old media all the way.

    There are some important lessons for entrepreneurs in this strategy, says Jonathan Weber:

    • It’s the product, stupid! (“If in doubt, focus on the product.”)
    • Brand marketing still matters—a lot.
    • Engaging with your customers via the real-time Web is not, in fact, mandatory. (Don’t become influenced by “what the zeitgeist of the moment says you should be doing”.)
    • Continuously consider opportunity costs.

    via @alexjmann

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    Lloyd Morgan