Seth's Blog

I never considered taking a class to learn Chinese. Too boring, too time-consuming. I’ve tried hiring tutors and going through a textbook. Better but too close to taking a class. That didn’t last.

For maybe half a year I’ve used Anki (a flashcard program) to learn characters. This is better — at least it’s lasted half a year — but I don’t study it often enough.

A friend suggested labeling things in my apartment — put a card with the character for chair on a chair, for example. Another friend pointed out that there are children’s books with big characters (one per page). That suggested my latest idea: Put these pages on the walls of my apartment. So whenever I look at the wall it will be a kind of test. If I don’t remember the character, I can look on the underside of the card for the answer.

I’m excited about this: it might actually work, I now think. It doesn’t require being still, which I think reduces learning. It spaces learning (you learn in little bits throughout the day), which is surely better than massing it. It allows great amounts of repetition. And it takes advantage of natural curiosity (whenever I see Chinese — in a sign, for example — I wonder what it means) rather than requiring discipline. As far as I can tell it requires no discipline at all. If it doesn’t work I’ll learn something about education.

• butter tea. A easy way to consume butter
• teaching medical students concern for patients
• Why Amish businesses do well (book). I enjoyed the first pages.
• The diet to end all diets
• Chinese internet slang

Thanks to Robin Barooah, Paul Sas, and Brent Pottenger.

Nassim Taleb recently criticized the Nobel Prize in Economics:

According to Taleb, there are a number of mistaken ideas about forecasting and measuring risk, which all contribute to events like the 2008 global crisis. The Nobel prize, he says, has given them a stamp of approval, allowing them to propagate.

It isn’t just economics. As I’ve said before, the Nobel Prize in medicine was not given for the discovery that smoking causes lung cancer. It was not given for the discovery that lack of folate causes birth defects. Both enormously useful. It has been given for several discoveries, such as the connection between teleomeres and aging, with (so far) little or no practical value.

This is no mystery. The Nobel Prize must be prestigious, therefore must honor high-prestige research. Veblen argued long ago that in academia high prestige correlates with low practical value. Just today I told a friend Veblen’s idea that professors use jargon for the same reason men wear ties — to show off how useless they are. The economics research (“Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, Robert Engle, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller”) that Taleb is criticizing was high prestige. The so-far-useless biology that has received a Nobel Prize was high prestige; the highly-useful epidemiology that didn’t receive the prize was low prestige.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

In the latest New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell says Twitter and the like are less revolutionary than claimed.

A month ago a friend and I discussed Gladwell. The friend said that after Steven Pinker’s review of What the Dog Saw, he couldn’t look at Gladwell the same way.

I said that was a silly review. Sure, Gladwell has faults, but he also has strengths. He chooses interesting research to write about and writes about it in an accessible attractive way. An example is the Korean Airlines chapter in Outliers. It had little to do with the rest of the book but it was excellent journalism. Pinker barely mentioned these strengths but did point out spelling mistakes. It is silly to judge something by dwelling on what’s wrong with it. (Exhibit A: correlation does not equal causation.)

Gladwell’s latest piece is one of his best. It makes four points:

1. The strong-tie/weak-tie distinction in social networks. An old idea, but worth being reminded of.

2. Strong ties were behind the civil-rights lunch counter sit-ins. The movement they helped start was long and dangerous. Strong ties helped.

3. Twitter and other social media create weak ties. It isn’t clear they create strong ties. Donations based on weak ties were in several cases a few cents/person. Much less than the cost of participation in the civil-rights movement.

4. If you’re going to claim something is “revolutionary”, as Clay Shirky did about Twitter and the like, you should start your book with a better example than a rich guy getting his Sidekick back.

Perfectly good points, especially the last.

Tyler Cowen’s reaction.

At Tsinghua I am teaching a class called Frontiers of Psychology. The students are reading The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey. At one point Bailey mentions what is sometimes called the older brother effect: If a man has one older brother, he is more likely to be gay than if he has no older brothers, controlling for several things. This has been seen many times. In 1962 it was reported that gay men have more older siblings than other men but not until 1996 was it determined that this was due to more older brothers.

Bailey doesn’t mention the strength of the effect. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki is about research that found that non-experts can do an excellent job of estimating this or that number (such as the weight of a particular cow) even when they know little about it. Their answers are excellent in the sense that the average of their answers is very accurate. Perhaps my students, who had read two-thirds of Bailey’s book, could accurately estimate the strength of the effect.

I posed the question like this. Suppose that when a man has no older brothers, his chance of being gay is 2.0%. What is his chance of being gay if he has one older brother? I gathered an estimate from every student. The median of their estimates was 8%. The correct answer is 2.7%.