Letters Remain

  • Richard Dawkins and Hugh Hewitt Interview

    The former Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and founder of the Foundation for Reason and Science, Richard Dawkins, was recently invited to appear on The Hugh Hewitt Show where the two discussed religion, Rome, evolution and much more.

    One particular exchange (the Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine? incident) has been quoted widely, but what follows is my favourite exchange from the interview.

    Richard Dawkins (RD): […]You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely. That’s a pretty good, not exactly a final conclusion, but it’s certainly worth saying.
    Hugh Hewitt (HH): Isn’t the universe itself unlikely, though?
    RD: Well, but it’s there, isn’t it? And we’re in it, so we can see what we see. We find ourselves in a universe. So however unlikely, it clearly did happen.
    HH: And so that’s what [David Berlinski’s] argument is, is that you can’t say yes, we have to accept the universe as unlikely, but we can accept that God is unlikely, just because the one unlikely event is visible to us, and the other unlikely event isn’t.
    RD: I think there is a difference there. I mean, for the universe to come into existence, physicists are working on understanding that. And the beginning of the universe, as physicists would now understand, it would be a supremely simple event. And admittedly, it’s still something that requires a lot of understanding. It’s a very difficult thing to understand. But for God to exist, a God capable of developing the laws of physics, a God capable of answering prayers and forgiving sins, and reading our thoughts, and all that kind of thing, that requires, that’s an immensely complicated entity. That’s the kind of entity which we now explain by evolution, that’s the kind of entity that comes into being as a result of a long, slow, gradual process, long after the beginning of the universe.
    HH: But the universe is itself awfully complicated, Professor Dawkins. Where did it come from?
    RD: Well, the universe is not awfully complicated at the beginning. It has become very complicated through such processes as evolution by natural selection.
    HH: No, I’m talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?
    RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It’s a simple process.
    HH: And what preceded the big bang?
    RD: Well, physicists won’t answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.
    HH: What do you think?
    RD: I’m not enough of a physicist to understand what I’m saying, but I have to say that that’s what physicists say.
    HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
    RD: I don’t consider the question, because I recognize that it’s an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.

    via Pharyngula

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Gladwell on Education, Hiring, Journalism

    I haven’t read (m)any of Malcolm Gladwell‘s articles in the past 6 months as they’re all, well, a bit homogeneous. Plus, if there are any fascinating revelations that I really should hear about I’ll undoubtedly discover them (in a much-condensed form) in many other places rehashing his content.

    This interview with Malcolm Gladwell—where he discusses education, hiring and journalism—is typically Gladwellian and worth your time, however.

    On education:

    If I were [the United States Secretary of Education], I’d think of myself as a venture capitalist, fund as many wacky and inventive ideas as I could, and closely monitor them to see how they worked.

    I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. […] It’s not correct to say these schools are dysfunctional; they’re highly functional in certain areas. So I’ve always wondered about using the principles of sports in the classroom. Go same sex; do everything in teams; have teams compete with each other.

    On teaching and hiring practises:

    Certain kinds of predictions are impossible. If you want to find out if someone can do the job, you have to let them do the job. We should be experimenting with people too. I feel very strongly about the notion that if you want to find the best teachers, you let everybody into the profession, monitor them for two years, and then pick the 10% that are the best. That’s how you do it, and that’s completely the opposite of the way we do it now. Right now we’re acting out a fiction, which is that we can tell whether someone’s good at this enormously complex thing called teaching before they’ve ever taught.

    And the single piece of advice he would offer to young journalists?

    The issue is not writing. It’s what you write about. […] Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master’s in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that’s the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

    I particularly like that penultimate sentence: The role of the generalist is diminishing. It puts me in mind of this previous post on the end of the polymath and the downside of scientific progress (that I’ve just updated to include a link to the quoted post).

    via @sgourley

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Philosophy of Happiness

    In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, six “anxieties of everyday life” are tackled through the work of six philosophers—one for each chapter in the short book. A few years after publication the book was turned into a six-part documentary, Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness.

    While both the book and the series aren’t rigorous studies of philosophy, they are both extremely good introductions to a part of each philosopher’s canon and how one could apply their theories to modern life.

    Lucas Cantor has tracked down and embedded each of the six episodes of the documentary on his site but if, like me, you’re not a huge fan of embedded videos (especially if there are multiple), here they are separately along with each episode’s synopsis:

    Socrates on Self-Confidence (24:12). Why do so many people go along with the crowd and fail to stand up for what they truly believe? Partly because they are too easily swayed by other people’s opinions and partly because they don’t know when to have confidence in their own. (Socrates)

    Epicurus on Happiness (23:58). British philosopher Alain De Botton discusses the personal implications of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BCE) who was no epicurean glutton or wanton consumerist, but an advocate of “friends, freedom and thought” as the path to happiness.

    Seneca on Anger (24:13). Roman philosopher Lucious Annaeus Seneca (4BCE-65CE), the most famous and popular philosopher of his day, took the subject of anger seriously enough to dedicate a whole book to the subject. Seneca refused to see anger as an irrational outburst over which we have no control. Instead he saw it as a philosophical problem and amenable to treatment by philosophical argument. He thought anger arose from certain rationally held ideas about the world, and the problem with these ideas is that they are far too optimistic. Certain things are a predictable feature of life, and to get angry about them is to have unrealistic expectations.

    Montaigne on Self-Esteem (24:09). This episode looks at the problem of self-esteem from the perspective of Michel de Montaigne (16th Century), the French philosopher who singled out three main reasons for feeling bad about oneself – sexual inadequacy, failure to live up to social norms, and intellectual inferiority – and then offered practical solutions for overcoming them.

    Schopenhauer on Love (24:05). Alain De Botton surveys the 19th Century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who believed that love was the most important thing in life because of its powerful impulse towards ‘the will-to-life’.

    Nietzsche on Hardship (24:01). British philosopher Alain De Botton explores Friedrich Nietzsche‘s (1844-1900) dictum that any worthwhile achievements in life come from the experience of overcoming hardship. For him, any existence that is too comfortable is worthless, as are the twin refugees of drink or religion.

    You may also be interested in Alain de Botton’s TED Talk: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.

    Thanks and happy birthday, Andy!

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Online Dating Statistics: Ideal First Messages

    After looking at race and religion, the online dating site OkCupid turns its statistical eye toward the actual content of the messages sent between participants.

    It’s worth noting that the average response/reply rate is 32%.

    First up, what to say in a first message:

    1. Be literate. Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. The worst six words to use in a first message: ur, r, u, ya, cant and hit. Casual laughing is OK, however: haha, lol and, to a lesser extent, hehe appear to increase the response rate.
    2. Avoid physical compliments. Sexy, beautiful, hot and cutie give reply rates from 5–14% less than the average. An example to show this is in how the word pretty is used: as an adjective it results in a response rate 2–7% less than the average, while if it’s used as an adverb it results in an above average rate of response.
    3. Use an unusual greeting. Hi, hey, hello and holla all produced well below average replies. Yo, hola, howdy, what’s up and how’s it going fared much better. In fact, not even using a salutation was better than saying hi.
    4. Don’t try to take it outside. Attempting to move the conversation away from the relative anonymity of the site in a first message decreased the chances of a response (e.g. by providing phone numbers, email addresses, etc.).
    5. Bring up specific interests. Mentioning a specific passion of yours—anything from literature to video games, zombies to vegetarianism—increased the chances of receiving a reply. An especially good thing to do (obviously) is to mention one or more of the other person’s interests (i.e. read their profile and mention something from it).
    6. If you’re a guy, be self-effacing. Exuding confidence in initial messages didn’t seem to improve response rates. Instead, humbleness was what worked best. Although “be careful not to let the appearance of vulnerability become the appearance of sweaty desperation: please is on the negative list (22% reply rate), and in fact it is the only word that is actually worse for you than its netspeak equivalent (pls, 23%)!”
    7. Consider becoming an atheist. Mentioning religion improved response rates in almost all cases (apart from when one uses the generic term god), but mentioning you’re an atheist was the best of all; it correlated with a 10% increase in responses.

    Almost 16% of first messages are over 2000 characters (roughly 400 words) with the average lying around 740 characters. But what was the optimum message length?

    Now, our [data clearly show] that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer messages. But when we factor in the actual time it takes to compose a given message, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. likelihood of starting actually having a conversation, shorter is actually better.

    […] the ideal first message length is 200 characters, or 1 minute’s worth of typing for the average writer.

    If you’re the kind of person who spends a little more time reading a profile and thinking about your message, say, 10 minutes, then the optimal length goes up a few words (to 270 characters), but, still, short is better.

    Incredibly enough, the optimal first outreach from a woman to a man is just 50 characters long!

    After reading these posts I’ve become somewhat enamoured with OkCupid and now want to join just so that I can get my very own flowchart to my heart. Probably best to run this past my girlfriend first, though.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Online Dating Statistics: Religion and Race

    The online dating website OkCupid has a rather fascinating blog, OkTrends, written by two of the four mathematics majors who founded the site.

    Still in it’s infancy the blog has a few fascinating posts studying data gleamed from their expansive user base.

    Starting out with a brief look at their matching algorithm and the control group used for their studies, here’s data on how different religions ‘match’ on the site. Conclusions, taken verbatim from the post:

    • Jews and Agnostics get along better with people. Jewish men, in particular, have an above average match percentage with every religious group. They even match Muslim women better than Muslim men do.
    • Muslims of both sexes and Hindu men get along worse.
    • Catholics are more universally liked than Protestants.
    • The less serious you are about religion, the better liked you are, even by very religious people.

    The analysts also noted how Muslims and Protestants on the site tend to be more intense about their beliefs than other religions, and Jews and Agnostics are by far the least serious.

    Another sensitive issue tackled through the magic of online dating statistics is that of race and the reply rates between them. Some more observations:

    • Black women are […] the most likely to reply to your first message. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and overall black women reply about a quarter more often.
    • White men get more responses.
    • White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else.
    • Asian and Hispanic women prefer [white men] even more exclusively [than white women].
    • Men don’t write black women back [as] often than they should (statistically speaking, obviously).
    • Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.
    • Even though white males get the most replies, they respond about 20% less often than non-white males.
    • Between 2 and 7% of males and females of all races believe interracial marriage is a bad idea.
    • Around 20% of males and females of all races, except whites, have a racial background/skin colour preference.
    • 40% of white males and 54% of white females have this preference.

    It’s worth noting the following:

    Just because a group has low match percentages, even across the board, that does not mean they are bad people. It just means that they’re harder to please. The converse is also true. […] In any event, please keep in mind that each individual has designed his own matching criteria, so the poor-matching groups aren’t failing some outsider’s imposed system. Why, for example, Hindu men would match worst with Hindu women is a mystery.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Online Dating and OkCupid

    OkCupid, one of the biggest online dating websites around, has had a bit of an up and down history.

    Originally called SparkMatch, itself a by-product of the once popular TheSpark, the site was one of the first completely free dating websites that now abound online. Inc. Magazine looks at the history of OkCupid—it’s struggles and successes—paying close attention to the marketing strategy that eventually pushed the site into the mainstream.

    Now Yagan had set out to bring free to online dating, a growing market dominated by a number of, as Yagan saw them, expensive and unsatisfactory competitors like IAC’s Match.com. Yagan figured he could inflict serious damage on [his competitors] by using the same strategy he employed with SparkNotes. “Take an existing business,” he explains, “reduce the revenue that industry produces by offering a free product, and then claim the remaining revenue for yourself.”

    The above quote encapsulates what appears to be the founders’ business model, but it’s the Experts Weigh In section that I found most interesting. With advice from the CEO of the guerrilla marketing agency Interference (don’t depend on journalists to write about your company) and a partner at the private equity firm Accel (be more creative in monetisation), there’s also this from the founder of Match.com—their direct competition:

    Focus on women. A dating site can succeed only if it attracts a lot of women. […] For any dating site, women, not men, are the customers. Women don’t want a crazy blind date; they want safety and security, and they don’t want to feel embarrassed. I would take the money they’re spending on PR and put it toward affiliate marketing to women. Yagan and Coyne are clearly smart guys: They should start thinking about how to lower the cost of customer acquisition and build a differentiated audience.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Seven Wastes

    One of the principal goals of the Toyota Production System (TPS) is to identify steps that add value (and those which do not) and then design out waste.

    Muda is one of the three types of waste (the other two being muri and mura) and the one that has been given the most attention since the TPS has been widely studied. Of this type of waste, Taiichi Ohno further identified the seven wastes:

    1. Overproduction
    2. Transportation
    3. Inventory
    4. Motion
    5. Defects
    6. Over-Processing
    7. Waiting

    While reading this I also came across Mottainai — a Japanese term meaning “a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilized”. I like that.

    via @finiteattention

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Mysteries of Evolution and an Evolving Dawkins

    It is time to move away from anti-religious sentiment/philosophy and instead appeal to the logic of those who refute the theory of evolution. This appears to be the premise of Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, where he “traces the scientific investigation of biological change as if it were a crime-scene investigation – building up what he considers an ironclad case for evolution in action”.

    That quote comes from a recent Cosmic Log article in which Alan Boyle looks at and recapitulates Dawkins’ evolving philosophy before presenting a wide-ranging (and often amusing) interview.

    From that article, here are Richard Dawkins’ four favourite mysteries that still need to be solved:

    • The origin of life.
    • The origin of sex.
    • The origin of consciousness.
    • The rise of morality.

    Thanks, Alex

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Scheduling and Non-Hierarchical Management

    These two essays have been doing the rounds of late, and for good reason:

    Paul Graham’s comparison between the schedules of Managers and the schedules of Makers (creatives). The gist? A manager’s day is divided into hour-long blocks of time, makers work in much longer, relatively unconstrained and non-discrete units of time. The problem is in making these two work together.

    When you use [the manager’s schedule], it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done. […]

    When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

    With the philosophy that a manager is more servant than dictator, Aaron Swartz offers tips for non-hierarchical management (via Kottke). This is specifically for startups, he suggests, where the tradition ‘org chart’ is flipped upside down, but these tips seem sound no matter what the organisation:

    • Management is a (serious) job
      • Stay organised
    • Know your team
      • Hire people smarter than you
      • Be careful when hiring friends
      • Set boundaries
    • Go over the goals together
      • Build a community
    • Assign responsibility
      • Vary responsibilities
      • Delegate responsibly
    • Clear obstacles
      • Prioritize
      • Fight procrastination
    • Give feedback
      • Don’t micromanage
    • Don’t make decisions (unless you really have to)
    • Fire ineffective people
    • Give away the credit
    • Few people are cut out for this
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • On Good and Bad Managers

    Charisma, confidence and being vocal are key to being perceived as a leader, Time suggests after summarising some research on what makes people persuasive leaders.

    Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they’re talking about, but what if they don’t? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top?

    The short answer is Yes, so “watch them closely and make sure they know what they’re doing and where they’re going”.

    Reading about how we can be perceived as great managers simply by altering our external behaviour (rather than altering our internal behaviour or world view) reminded me of this piece, discussing reasons managers become great (via Kottke). Reasons included:

    • Enjoy helping people grow.
    • Love creating positive environments.
    • Care deeply about the success and well being of their team.
    • Succession mentality.
    • Practice of the golden rule: the ethic of reciprocity.
    • Self aware, including weaknesses.

    The above was written as a compliment to Scott Berkum’s other list, reasons managers become assholes:

    • A boss they admired was an asshole.
    • They are insecure in their role.
    • They prefer intimidation to leadership.
    • Their life sucks.
    • They lose their way.
    • Promotion chasing.
    • Their management chain is toxic.
    • The Peter Principle.
    • They’re not assholes, they’re just insensitive or oblivious.
    • Madly in love with themselves.
    • They always were assholes.
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    Lloyd Morgan