Letters Remain

  • Life Advice Through Management Theory and Business Strategy

    When Harvard Business School’s class of 2010 invited professor Clayton Christensen (expert on disruptive technology and innovation, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) to address them, they requested he talk on how to apply management theory principles to one’s personal life. Christensen responded by answering three questions:

    How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?

    One of the theories that gives great insight […] is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. […] My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

    I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

    How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?

    If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies. […]

    When people who have a high need for achievement […] have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. […] In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. […]

    If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most. […]

    Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

    How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

    We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do. […]

    Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. […] Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.” […]

    It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis […] you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

    The entire article is well worth a thorough read; it’s full of interesting insights and great advice.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure

    After discovering that he held the LRRK2 mutation on his twelfth chromosome (indicating that his lifetime risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is 30-75% rather than the typical 1%), Google co-founder Sergey Brin became one of the first philanthropists to fund research into a disease based on the results of a genetic test.

    In Thomas Goetz’s comprehensive profile of Brin and his fight against Parkinson’s disease and Parkinson’s science, we are shown how Sergey Brin wants to change how disease research is conducted:

    Most Parkinson’s research, like much of medical research, relies on the classic scientific method: hypothesis, analysis, peer review, publication. Brin proposes a different approach, one driven by computational muscle and staggeringly large data sets. It’s a method that draws on his algorithmic sensibility—and Google’s storied faith in computing power—with the aim of accelerating the pace and increasing the potential of scientific research. “Generally the pace of medical research is glacial compared to what I’m used to in the Internet,” Brin says. “We could be looking lots of places and collecting lots of information. And if we see a pattern, that could lead somewhere.’ […]

    In Brin’s way of thinking, each of our lives is a potential contribution to scientific insight. We all go about our days, making choices, eating things, taking medications, doing things—generating what is inelegantly called data exhaust. A century ago, of course, it would have been impossible to actually capture this information, particularly without a specific hypothesis to guide a researcher in what to look for. Not so today. With contemporary computing power, that data can be tracked and analyzed. “Any experience that we have or drug that we may take, all those things are individual pieces of information,” Brin says. “Individually, they’re worthless, they’re anecdotal. But taken together they can be very powerful.” […]

    “Even if any given individual’s information is not of that great quality, the quantity can make a big difference. Patterns can emerge.” […]

    This is what Jim Gray, the late Microsoft researcher and computer scientist, called the fourth paradigm of science, the inevitable evolution away from hypothesis and toward patterns. Gray predicted that an “exaflood” of data would overwhelm scientists in all disciplines, unless they reconceived their notion of the scientific process and applied massive computing tools to engage with the data. “The world of science has changed,” Gray said in a 2007 speech–from now on, the data would come first.

    The profile is notable for other reasons, too–particularly in showing how Brin has dealt with learning of his high risk of developing Parkinson’s in a very calculated way and how the idea that one’s genetic information is “toxic knowledge” is becoming a dated one.

    I was also intrigued to learn that this proposed method of science–large-scale personal tracking to create huge data sets in order to discover possible meaningful associations–is very similar to the topic of Brin’s unfinished Stanford PhD.

    Tags:
     / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Derek Sivers’ Book List

    Derek Sivers’ book recommendations continue to be some of the most well matched to my own tastes.

    Infrequently updated, Derek Sivers’ book list provides a tiny summary of his recent reads, followed by extensive notes he has taken from each: somewhat similar to my current process, now that Amazon’s Kindle has completely transformed my reading and note-taking habits.

    In addition to the extensive book list itself, Sivers lists eleven of his top recommendations (some that I would change, others that I’ve heard contradicting views on, but a great starting point nonetheless):

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Embodied Cognition and How Objects Influence Our Perceptions

    The physical properties of objects we interact with can substantially influence our opinion of unrelated items and people.

    Through a number of novel experiments, MIT’s Joshua Ackerman has clearly shown how the texture, weight, and other physical properties of objects we touch affect our judgements and decisions (neatly summarised by Ed Yong):

    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.

    These influences are not trivial – they can sway how people react in important ways, including how much money they part with, how cooperative they are with strangers, or how they judge an interview candidate. […]

    According to Ackerman, these effects happen because our understanding of abstract concepts is deeply rooted in physical experiences. Touch is the first of our senses to develop. In the earliest days of our lives, our ability to feel things like texture and temperature provides a tangible framework that we can use to understand more nebulous notions like importance or personal warmth. Eventually, the two become tied together, so that touching objects can activate the concepts that they are associated with.

    Ed Yong goes on to describe how this “embodied cognition” shows direct relationships with the metaphors and idioms of the English language, such as “heavy matters”, the “gravity of the situation”, a “rough day”, “coarse language”, a “hard-hearted” person and “being a rock”.

    Tags:
     / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • An Expert’s an Expert Only When We Agree

    In the face of information that is contradictory to our beliefs, not only do we reinforce our position, but we also question the credibility of the source itself.

    In a study showing that we only agree that there is scientific consensus if that consensus agrees with our viewpoint, researchers from the Cultural Cognition Project also found that if an expert’s opinion is antithetical to our own, we consider them to be objectively less knowledgeable, credible and trustworthy than their peers.

    It seems that expert opinion is only expert opinion when it agrees with our opinion. This study found that people more readily count someone as an expert when that person endorses a conclusion that fits their cultural predispositions. The study calls this cultural cognition — individuals tend to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce one or another idealized vision of how society should be organized. Thus, according to the study, generally speaking, persons who subscribe to individualistic values tend to dismiss claims of environmental risks, because acceptance of such claims implies the need to regulate markets, commerce, and other outlets for individual strivings.

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Corrections and When They Work

    A correction only serves its purpose (to correct our falsely-held beliefs) if we are predisposed to believe the correction itself. If we disagree with the correction, however, it instead acts to actually reinforce our incorrect beliefs (the “backfire effect”).

    That’s the conclusion drawn from research conducted by Brendan Nyhan, looking at how we avoid cognitive dissonance in the face of corrective information (pdf).

    Brendan’s research on cognitive dissonance and corrections has been nicely summarised by Ryan Sager in a couple of posts: one that looks briefly at the effect of corrections on misinformation, and another looking in great detail at the roots of the anti-vaccine movement.

    We find that responses to corrections in mock news articles differ significantly according to subjects’ ideological views.  As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases. […]

    Test subjects read mock news articles featuring misleading statements about well-known but ideologically contentious subjects such as the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. Half of their subjects read articles including only the misleading statements; half read articles that also included a correction.

    By comparing the two groups of respondents, [it was] determined that the ideology of the subjects tended to predict reactions. Efforts to correct misperceptions were more likely to succeed among those ideologically sympathetic to the correction, such as liberals to the notion that WMD were never found in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed. But the corrections tended to “boomerang” among those ideologically predisposed to believe the erroneous information. Thus, conservative subjects who had read the correction were even more.

    Every article Sager points to in these posts is worth reading, especially Is Health Care Turnaround a Bad Bet?, How Facts Backfire and Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Mundane Decisions and Premature Deaths

    Deaths in the United States resulting from “fairly mundane personal decisions” have risen from a rate of around 10% of all premature deaths a century ago to 44.5% today*. This shift suggests that by improving our decision-making abilities, we can dramatically reduce a main cause of premature death: ourselves.

    44.5% of all premature deaths in the US result from personal decisions – decisions that involving among others smoking, not exercising, criminality, drug and alcohol use, and unsafe sexual behavior. […]

    Using the same method to examine causes of death in 1900, [the researcher, Ralph Keeney] finds that during this time only around 10% of premature deaths were caused by personal decisions. Compared to our current 44.5% of premature deaths caused by personal decisions, it seems that on this measure of making decisions that kill ourselves we have “improved” (of course this means that we actually got much worse) dramatically over the years. And no, this is not because we’ve become a nation of binge-drinking, murderous smokers, it’s largely because the causes of death, like tuberculosis and pneumonia (the most common causes of death in the early 20th century) are far more rare these days, and the temptation and our ability to make erroneous decisions (think about driving while texting) has increased dramatically.

    What this analysis means is that instead of relying on external factors to keep us alive and healthy for longer, we can (and must) learn to rely on our decision-making skills in order to reduce the number of dumb and costly mistakes that we make.

    via @kylecameron

    *Looking exclusively at 15- to 64-year-olds, this becomes 5% in 1900 and 55% in 2000, according to Thomas Goetz.

    Tags:
     / / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Sedentary Lifestyle? Exercise Isn’t Helping

    A somewhat sedentary lifestyle combined with regular exercise is turning us into what physiologists are calling ‘active couch potatoes’–and that exercise, no matter how vigourous, doesn’t appear to be counteracting the negative effects of that sedentary lifestyle.

    In rats, this lifestyle was found to produce “unhealthy cellular changes in their muscles” and increase insulin resistance and fatty acid levels in their blood. In conclusion: a mostly sedentary lifestyle is bad for us, regardless of exercise habits.

    [Studies have shown] that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting. […]

    Decades ago, before the advent of computers, plasma TVs and Roombas, people spent more time completing ‘light-intensity activities’ […] Nowadays, few of us accumulate much light-intensity activity. We’ve replaced those hours with sitting.

    The physiological consequences are only slowly being untangled. […] Scientists believe the changes are caused by a lack of muscular contractions. If you sit for long hours, you experience no ‘isometric contraction of the antigravity (postural) muscles’. […] Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise.

    via Waxy

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Recognising Bad Advice and Expertise Failure

    Why do we blindly follow experts when their advice is so often so wrong*? How can we differentiate between good advice and bad? These are just two of the questions David Freedman attempts to answer in Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us (a book that sounds like it could be a nice complement to Kathryn Schulz’s book, mentioned previously).

    In an interview with Time, Freedman discusses topics related to his thesis, such as our reaction when confronted with experts, experts and the confirmation bias, the “Wizard of Oz” effect, how animal experiments help to advance science but don’t always provide suitable advice for humans, and what he knows about bad advice and how to recognise it:

    Bad advice tends to be simplistic. It tends to be definite, universal and certain. But, of course, that’s the advice we love to hear. The best advice tends to be less certain — those researchers who say, ‘I think maybe this is true in certain situations for some people.’ We should avoid the kind of advice that tends to resonate the most — it’s exciting, it’s a breakthrough, it’s going to solve your problems — and instead look at the advice that embraces complexity and uncertainty. […]

    It goes against our intuition, but we have to learn to force ourselves to accept, understand and even embrace that we live in a complex, very messy, very uncertain world.

    via @vaughanbell

    *Some depressing facts from Freedman’s book, as chosen by Time:

    About two-thirds of the findings published in the top medical journals are refuted within a few years. […] As much as 90% of physicians’ medical knowledge has been found to be substantially or completely wrong. In fact, there is a 1 in 12 chance that a doctor’s diagnosis will be so wrong that it causes the patient significant harm. And it’s not just medicine. Economists have found that all studies published in economics journals are likely to be wrong. Professionally prepared tax returns are more likely to contain significant errors than self-prepared returns. Half of all newspaper articles contain at least one factual error.

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Recognising Drowning and Surviving Cold Water

    Drowning does not look like drowning, and without flotation you will not live long enough to die from hypothermia if you fall into cold water. These are just two warnings from Mario Vittone–long-serving U.S. Navy and Coast Guard expert on maritime safety–writing in the maritime and offshore news site, gCaptain.

    In the first of two articles on water safety, Vittone discusses what drowning is really like, and how to recognise it:

    Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. […] Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

    The Instinctive Drowning Response […] is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect.

    In a follow-up to this article, Vittone then discusses the truth about cold water and how to survive it (recognise and attempt to manage the “significant physiological reactions that occur, in order, almost always”).

    This first of these article has been mentioned on a number of high–profile sites, and for good reason. It’s a must-read.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan