Letters Remain

  • How We Decide

    One of my favourite science writers—the editor at large of Seed Magazine, Jonah Lehrer—has been interviewed by The Commonwealth Club about his forthcoming book, The Decisive Moment/How We Decide (UK/US titles, respectively).

    The video of the interview is full of excellent anecdotes (backed-up by peer reviewed research) on many topics ranging from emotional and rational decision making to the tip-of-the-tongue effect and the placebo effect.

    (For those of you who attended Ignite Cardiff last night, Lehrer discusses a study very similar to one I discussed in my talk that you may find interesting.)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Good Employees and Successful Entrepreneurs

     

    In an article profiling Google’s Marissa Meyer (employee number 20), there’s this quote on Meyer’s views with regard to hiring practices: 

    One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.”

    Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager’s expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn’t changed in several quarters.

    However serial entrepreneur Steve Blank says that aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t meet these standards shouldn’t be put off:

    What I remind [my students] is that great grades and successful founders / technology entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.) […]

    There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one.  You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Salads a Licence to Eat Unhealthily

    Think [generic fast food chain] have been pro-health by offering salads on their menu (calorific value of said salads aside)?

    Maybe not, says new research showing that if a salad is on a menu, many are more likely to choose the unhealthy option than if the healthy choice was absent.

    College students were given one of two menus. One menu featured French fries, chicken nuggets and a baked potato; the other included those same items as well as a salad. The French fries, widely perceived as the least healthful option, were three times as popular with students selecting from the menu that had the salad as they were with the other group.

    As Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) says,

    Once you see the salad, realize it’s better for you and know that it’s an option, your inner sense of self-satisfaction is triggered, and then… you let yourself order fries, just because you were oh-so-smart enough to think about the salad, if only fleetingly.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Behavioural Economics and Financial Policies

    The news that Obama had some of the leading behaviourists advising his campaign comes as no surprise to me, however I likely underestimated how much they influenced both the campaign and the voters.

    Time takes a look at this “behavioural dream team” and discusses how the Obama administration is using behavioural economics to guide its financial policies.

    The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

    President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country. Because when you know what makes people tick, it’s a lot easier to help them change.

    While I like this progressive move, I—like Mind Hacks‘ Vaughan—feel the need to ask, “Where are the sceptical voices?”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Ideology Getting in the Way of Evidence-Based Medicine

    Giving beta blockers to a person in the early stages of a heart attack makes sense: the drugs reduce oxygen consumption by calming and slowing the heart; something that is ideal during a heart attack.

    However despite evidence showing that beta blockers may actually increase heart failure, the practice of administering them continues. As Dr. David Newman states in The New York Times, medical ideology regularly triumphs over evidence-based research and non-working treatments are still given to patients because they should work.

    Other revelations from Dr Newman:

    • No cough remedies have ever been proven better than a placebo, either for adults or children. Yet their use is common.
    • Patients with ear infections are more likely to be harmed by antibiotics than helped. While the pills may cause a small decrease in symptoms (for which ear drops work better), the infections typically recede within days regardless of treatment. The same is true for bronchitis, sinusitis, and sore throats.
    • Back surgeries to relieve pain are, in the majority of cases, no better than nonsurgical treatment.
    • Arthroscopic surgery to correct osteoarthritis of the knee [is] no better than sham knee surgery, in which surgeons “pretend” to do surgery while the patient is under light anesthesia. It is also no better than much cheaper, and much less invasive, physical therapy.

    via Overcoming Bias

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Making a Significant Contribution

    Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?

    That was the question the noted mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming (he of Hamming Codes fame) asked and tried to answer in a talk he gave at Bell Labs in 1986. However his educational and inspiring talk, You and Your Research, went much deeper than that; offering advice on how we can make significant contributions to our own field, whatever that may be.

    Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant? I’m not going to define it – you know what I mean. I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, and I’ve been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to science.

    […] Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Poverty Education

    In an article where the somewhat controversial philosopher Peter Singer—author of Famine, Affluence and Morality—argues that the teaching of the issues surrounding world poverty should not be confined to specialist courses and should be an educational priority*, I was shocked by the clarification of something I’ve oft wondered about the definition of poverty:

    The World Bank defines extreme poverty as not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care, or education. One widely quoted statistic is that a billion people are living on less than one U.S. dollar per day. That was the World Bank’s poverty line until 2008, when better data led to a new poverty line of $1.25 per day. As a result, the number of people whose income puts them under the new poverty line is 1.4 billion.

    On hearing the “$1.25 a day” figure, the thought may cross your mind that in many developing countries it is possible to live much more cheaply than in industrialized nations. But the World Bank has already made that adjustment in purchasing power, so those it classifies as living in extreme poverty are existing on a daily total consumption of goods and services — whether earned or homegrown — comparable to the amount of goods and services that can be bought in the United States for $1.25.

    via Arts and Letters Daily

    The original article has, since posting this, gone behind a paywall. Similar information can be found in Random House’s excerpt of his Singer’s latest book, The Life You Can Save.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Risk Tolerance as a Competitive Weapon

    After Josh Kopelman sold Half.com to eBay in 2000 he stayed on with the company to witness eBay’s defeat by and eventual acquisition of PayPal—at the time a relatively small startup.

    Kopeland suggests that the main reason for PayPal’s success was their risk tolerance in a number of situations:

    Legal Risk

    Paypal’s product was widely seen as the better product […] Billpoint was clunky and forced the seller (and buyer) to go through several additional steps.  The conventional wisdom was that PayPal had a better product team and that eBay was clueless.

    From what I saw inside eBay, that wasn’t really the story.  I believe that eBay understood everything that was needed to build a great payments product.  They were just unable to do so given the risks involved.  Specifically, I believe that PayPal had a better product than Billpoint because they were willing/able to take risks that Billpoint/eBay was not.  For example, when PayPal first launched, it was pretty clear that their product violated the operating rules for Visa, Mastercard and American Express — and violated banking regulations is more than 40 different states.

    Financial Risk

    According to their financial filings with the SEC, PayPal spent over $15M in marketing fees in 2000 and lost over $169 Million that year.

    eBay, on the other hand,  was profitable in 2000 — with Net Income of $48M.  Given the pressures that Wall Street analysts put on the company, there was just no way that eBay could invest anywhere near as much in the payments space as PayPal.  If eBay decided to spend half as much as PayPal did, eBay would have shifted from a $48M profit to a $37M loss — a move which would have reduced eBay’s market capitalization by billions.

    […]  The fact that eBay was a publicly traded company forced them into a different risk profile when it came to financial investment.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Beauty as Human Reason

    Human reason and abstract thought are prerequisites for the appreciation of beauty, argues Roger Scruton in his latest book, Beauty. However in his review of Beauty, Sebastian Smee—art critic of the Boston Globe—finds himself disagreeing with the sentiment.

    [Scruton] is swayed by Plato’s idea that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but a call to renounce it. The idea sounds counterintuitive, but it chimes with the feeling we often have that the most beautiful things are somehow inviolate. Scruton argues that our inability to maintain the necessary distance and our failure to respect the sovereignty of the objects we consider beautiful have helped to bring about what he calls a “flight from beauty.” The phrase is resonant. Few who have registered developments in art, architecture and other aspects of life over the past 50 to 100 years could have failed to notice that beauty has suffered a demotion. From its position as a fundamental value in art, it has been reduced to a frivolous side issue or, worse, a carrier of tainted ideologies and clichés.

    via Arts and Letters Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Gluttony and Adultery

    Are our evolving social and cultural judgments about sex and food related? Mary Eberstadt, fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, believes so.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist George Will discusses Eberstadt’s theory, stating that nowadays we judge people more for their food choices than their sexual behaviours, whereas a generation ago these moral poles would have been reversed.

    In a Policy Review essay, Is Food the New Sex? — it has a section titled “Broccoli, pornography, and Kant” — she notes that for the first time ever, most people in advanced nations “are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want.” One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pursued with an ardor heedless of consequences, or that both would be subjected to analogous codes constraining consumption. The opposite has happened — mindful eating and mindless sex.

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    Lloyd Morgan