Seth's Blog

• Reclamations. Essays by University of California students about the harm done by student loans.  Via Boing Boing. Being taught “how to think” (as many college professors claim they do because the details of their class are obviously useless) is fine when it’s a choice. (I support the study of esoteric seemingly-useless stuff — when it’s a choice.) When it’s required (to get a decent job) and very expensive (due to tuition), there’s a problem.
• The Cobblestone Conservative: How Jane Jacobs saved New York City’s soul.
• Robin Hanson surveys his students. “[Their] opinions [about "random policy questions"] strongly tend to support the status quo – mostly whatever is, is assumed good.” Same thing at Berkeley. Most of my students, for better or worse, were very conformist. My conclusion, which I imagine Robin agrees with, is that the reasons we give for our beliefs have roughly zero correlation with the actual reasons and shouldn’t be taken seriously (e.g., argued with). Professors who claim to teach their students “how to think” (e.g., lines of argument) are shutting their eyes to what Robin shows is right in front of them: the lack of importance of “thinking” in the determination of belief.
• Edward Jay Epstein on Michael Milken. Great journalism.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday. If you send me a link that I post I am happy to link to your blog or website.

How did air-breathing evolve? In The Nature of Economies (p. 87), Jane Jacobs uses it to illustrate the developmental pattern she calls “bifurcation” (air-breathing isn’t a refinement of water-breathing). She speculates on how it started:

Lungfish had both gills and a primitive lung, suggesting that their habitat was swampland. The earliest to take to dry land may have inhabited swamps subject to severe droughts or perhaps they were escaping fearsomely-jawed predators who couldn’t follow them to dry land.

According to Steve Yegge’s already-famous “psst, Googlers” memo, something much like this was why Amazon started selling web computing services, which wasn’t a refinement of their earlier business (selling books, toys, etc.):

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS [Amazon Web Services], in hindsight.

People say necessity is the mother of invention. That isn’t even close to true. Trial and error is the mother of true, profound invention. The Bezos story, and Jacobs’s generalization of it, suggest what is actually true: necessity is the mother of development. Necessity pushes people to use, and thereby develop, inventions they had ignored.

Chapter 1 of The Nature of Economies.

The Nobel Prizes awarded each year resemble a kind of report card where each prize-worthy discipline (Physics, Chemistry, etc.) gets a grade that depends on the prize-winning research. If the prize-winning research is useful and surprising, the grade is high. If not the grade is low. More generally, at least to me, the intellectual history of the prize winners sheds light on the whole profession. Perhaps some biologists were unaware of the behavior of Eric Kandel described in Explorers of the Black Box when he was awarded the biology prize. Kandel, I hasten to add, is an unusual case.

Thomas Sargent is one of the winners of this year’s Economics prize. In 2007, he gave a graduation speech at Berkeley to economics majors (via Marginal Revolution). In the speech, Sargent called economics “organized common sense”. He went on to list 12 common-sense ideas, such as “Individuals and communities face trade-offs” and “governments and voters respond to incentives” that economists believe. The reasons for their belief weren’t stated.

When I started as a professor (at Berkeley) I did many experiments with rats and, to my annoyance, discovered an inconvenient truth: I understood rats less well than I thought. Even in a heavily-controlled heavily-studied situation (Skinner box), my rats often did not do what I expected. My common sense was often wrong, in other words. This experience made me considerably more skeptical of other people’s “common sense”.

To me, and I think to most scientists, science begins with common sense. Experimental psychology certainly does. I used common sense to design my experiments. Had I not done those experiments, I would not have learned that my common sense was wrong. So relying on common sense was helpful — as a place to start. As a way to begin to understand. You begin with common-sense ideas and you test them. That common sense is often wrong is a theme of Freakonomics, in agreement with my experience. Yet Sargent seemed content (he called economics “our beautiful subject”) to end with common sense, perhaps tidied up.

This is really unfortunate because economics, beautiful or not, is so important. If you ignore data, the answer to every hard question is the same: the most powerful people are right. That way lies stagnation (problems build up unsolved because powerful people prefer the status quo) and collapse (when the problems become overwhelming). Alan Greenspan’s faith-based belief in free markets and the 2008 financial crisis — after Sargent’s speech — is an example. In 2009, Sargent’s speech might have been less well-received.

In the Frontiers of Psychology class I teach at Tsinghua (Monday 3:20-4:55, Teaching Building 6, Room A113, visitors welcome) , the students will give several presentations each class period. So I decided to assemble a list of advice. I came up with Items 1-3, the students came up with the rest.

1. Give a presentation that you would like to hear. Don’t worry about following a formula.
2. Make your points by telling stories. Don’t just say “X is true”. Tell a story that will make your listeners think that X is true.
3. Stay within the allotted time (e.g., 5 minutes). In real life — presentations at scientific conferences, for example — most presentations are too long. Listeners rarely like this. They think the speaker is selfish. If one person speaks too long, this usually means that other speakers will have less time to speak.
4. Don’t read your talk.
5. Use simple, spoken English. Don’t speak fast
6. Smile and use body language to connect with the audience.
7. Pause before the most important points.
8. Ask questions to attract attention.
9. Show the big structure of your talk.
10. When telling a story, don’t go far from the point of the story (e.g., with unnecessary details)

To me, the most interesting item is #7 (ask questions). For example, instead of saying “Let us begin” I can say “Shall we begin?” Which is certainly an improvement over coughing, which is what one student said was the usual way officials began talks.

For example, which phrasing works better? :

Why does question-asking work? I asked my students.

I asked my students why question-asking works.

The first way (“Why does”) grabs my attention more than the second (“I asked”). I did ask my students why it works. One said that when you hear a question you automatically try to answer it.  I cannot do better than that. I suppose we notice questions much like we notice loud noises.

On Boing Boing  a post by me tell about a man who cured himself of Crohn’s Disease mainly by following what is called The Specific Carbohydrate Diet. He got the idea from his grandmother, who heard about it on the radio. The diet is about eighty years old. The version he used appeared in a book published in 1994 — 17 years ago. Still no clinical trial.

As I’ve said, if you have managed to cure yourself of a serious medical condition please let me know. I would like to learn from your experience and help others learn from it.