Seth's Blog

Just as addictive as everyone said. It reminds me of racquetball, which I could play for hours. But racquetball required going to the gym, getting dressed, finding someone to play with, waiting for an empty court, coming home. It might be possible to use my DDR scores as a measure of something.

They’re just like us!

In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like “excellent” more often for the Grand Cru, and “unbalanced,” and “flat” more often for the table wine.

Whether a wine wins a medal in a competition appears to be pure chance:

Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you’d get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

In a Shanghai apartment, the phone rings. A friend of the occupant answers the phone. “It’s someone from a rural area,” he shouts to the occupant. (Shanghai and other dialects are quite different.) “I’m from Beijing,” says the person on the line. “It’s someone from Rural Beijing,” the friend shouts.

This joke is told by people who are from neither Shanghai nor Beijing.

Here’s part of a speech that Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, gave in New York in February:

There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is built on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never alter. First, there is the Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect. Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about its goal. That’s a given. It’s fact.

Whereas here’s what a friend of mine living in Amsterdam sees:

Disenfranchised immigrants who were summoned here to do low skilled jobs, aspire to integrate into Dutch society, but are often systematically excluded by Dutch people.  A lot of them don’t have much formal education. That doesn’t help.

Even 2nd and 3rd generation Moroccan immigrants, many of whom are nice people and speak perfect Dutch, get treated like underclass by native Dutch people.  It angers and depresses the parents, who feel shut out, and their kids suffer also.

I find it terribly sad to think that the kids I fix bikes with have such a disadvantage due to their origin. Many of them are quite smart. It strikes me as such a waste of human potential.

There are some nice Dutch people who get along fine with the immigrants, but not very many.

They’re describing the same thing!

For exercise (Dance Dance Revolution) and self-tracking, I decided to buy a Wii. My first attempt, I was scammed. It arrived in August. With difficulty, I took it and accessories unopened to China. That was hard. It was even harder — for no obvious reason — to install it in China. The box sat unopened next to my TV, easily visible, for two months.

Finally I opened the box, took out the parts, put them together, added batteries, plugged it into the TV in my apartment. And nothing happened! Was my TV at fault? Or the Wii? Wii’s aren’t sold in China. I imagined bringing it back to America to get the problem fixed. After a few days, I tested my TV using video output from a neighbor’s Apple computer. My TV worked. After the test, my Wii also worked. When I replaced the Apple input with the Wii input I saw the Wii input for the first time. I don’t understand it, but that’s what happened.

In my experience, this is how science works. It is much harder than expected, then it pays off in ways that defy understanding. The concept of self-experimentation is simple: I will measure X (sleep, productivity) about myself. I will test different ways to improve X, learn what works, and thereby improve X. The reality is different. For years I measured my sleep and tried to improve it. It was hard to deal with the data. Even worse, every idea I had was wrong. That seemed like a huge obstacle — like my Wii needing repair. But I kept plugging away, because it was better than doing nothing, and . . . got somewhere. Out of nowhere and nothing. Not only did I improve my sleep, I arrived at a broader idea about health that turned out to be very helpful (that our bodies are designed for Stone-Age conditions and self-experimentation can help determine those conditions, which aren’t obvious). Just as we overvalue big steps (e.g., well-funded prestigious research), we undervalue small ones (e.g., cheap research with no prestige).

Science is basically a bunch of little steps. Many little experiments that explore cause-effect space. If you find a new example of cause and effect, the payoff is unpredictably large. Scientists don’t like thinking of themselves as wandering ants. But that’s how they are most effective. This goes against human psychology because wandering (Nassim Taleb calls it “tinkering”) is low status and lonely. The payoff is too rare and too unclear. It isn’t supported by powerful institutions, such as research universities and medical schools. Imagine an ant who says “I know where food is!” This is a way to get many ants to follow him, to feel important, to have high status, to get support from his employer. That’s why he does it. But he doesn’t know. The effect on the rest of us, the potential beneficiaries of progress, is that instead of having a thousand ants wandering everywhere, we have a thousand ants following one ant who doesn’t know what he’s doing.