Why it's important to like (not just love) your partner

When you like someone -- that is, when you want to be emotionally close to them -- you stake out complementary roles unconsciously. You literally change your preferences to accommodate the other person.

When couples are emotionally close, Tesser found they automatically and unconsciously stake out complementary domains. It is almost as though, recognizing the potential threat that competitiveness poses to an intimate relationship, the unconscious brain nudges people toward complementarity.

Tesser found that if one partner has a strong preference to do task A over task B, but the other partner has an even stronger preference for task A, the first person unconsciously switches preferences and says he actually prefers task B.

That's from Shankar Vedantam's The Hidden Brain.

How you rated yourselves

Two weeks ago I asked people to rate themselves on various skills and traits, and the results (raw data here) are fascinating.

In the correlations below, I have marked in red the ones that I found most interesting.



Here are the box plots (showing from top to bottom max, 3Q, median, 1Q, and min) for each variable, ordered by average response.



And here are the average responses for each person.



Thoughts / Observations / Surprises:

-- I doubt it is a general truth that people think of themselves as highly curious or highly intelligent (compared to the other variables in this survey) -- I think this blog just happens to have readers who are highly curious and intelligent (for which I am grateful!).

-- I find it puzzling that people rate themselves so high on integrity while at the same time so low on empathy and willpower.

-- One of the most frightening assertions I have heard is that curiosity fades with age. Reassuringly, at least in this sample, it's just the opposite.

-- The correlation I was most interested in before doing this survey was between "as a student" and "as an employee". Turns out there is only a slight positive correlation, which I take to be evidence that, if the goal of education is to prepare people for the workplace, it's not working.

-- [People who think they are] good employees, apparently, tend to be less curious and less mindful.

-- Women think they are better spouses. (They are probably right.)

-- Good parents are good listeners, and good spouses are good friends?

-- The person with the lowest average response? Well, that's me. I guess I am not a very confident person, but I don't consider myself very humble either. This worries me because rating yourself close to average is one of the things that characterizes people with depression. On the other hand, it seems perfectly reasonable that one could not think highly of themselves while at the same time being fairly "happy". I do not feel plagued with sadness -- I just happen to think I am pretty average in most ways.

Squibs from my trip to Florida

The trip taught me that, if you are focused, there is a lot you can do in a day. I did nearly every trail and stop in the Everglades in about 5 hours, and I wasn't rushing. To borrow a quote from Mr. RW Emerson, "We are all dying of miscellany."

Maybe the biggest advantage of traveling solo is that there is no negotiation. With only two people, much of a trip is spent deciding. And it's not because they're indecisive; a small inclination toward courtesy will do it. Next non-solo trip I go on, I am going to make a rule that, each day, one designated person makes all decisions. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad approach to everyday married life either.

The sight of beautiful tiled roofs, their extravagantly landscaped exteriors, and a line of sparkling white vessels lining the canal feels simultaneously beautiful and nauseating. Maybe my envy is just showing itself in a backwards way, but despite my Stosselesque sensibilities about the rich, I couldn't help repeatedly thinking that it was an extraordinarily inefficient use of resources. What is a yacht if not a signaling device? An appreciation of fine craftsmanship?

Think about how much fuss one could be saved by switching to an intended social network of people who scorn (or at least don't positively acknowledge) status signals.



I have added to my list of "things worth paying extra for" hiking boots. Previous entries include q-tips, toilet paper, and olive oil.

I have added to my list of "things not worth paying extra for" rental cars. I had a Toyota Yaris for $26 a day and it was perfection. (With more than two people though, go bigger.)

From now on, I plan to use a digital recorder rather than a camera as my primary handheld traveling device. Recording sound captures the essence of a place much more richly and meaningfully than visual snapshots. I’d say recording sound is even better than recording video because audio collects all the unexpected events within range, whereas video's aiming quality creates a window of biased distraction. (Here is a 4:40 recording of some primate-sounding waterfowl in the Everglades.)

Pardon my eccentricity, but I cannot understand why national parks don’t do more to preserve soundscapes. They take incredible precautions to prevent visual blemishes – why not at least devote sections of the enormous park as a no fly zone and no drive zone?

It depends on circumstances, of course, but typically I think the best way to plan a trip is to research things that sound interesting, note them, and then once you're there, follow impulse. The key is not to get attached to your prior ideas.

We'll see if this holds, but right now the most memorable part of the trip for me was standing in the lawn of the Gator Park tourist zoo and watching hypnotically as a peacock and peahen stopped their grass pecking, stood with their heads a couple of inches apart, their bodies in opposite directions, adjusting and tilting their necks at regular intervals, but their eye never straying from the other's. I was sure some dino-humping was about to go down, but it never did. After awhile, they went back to pecking.

Obvious business advice: If you ever want to attract lots of people, throw a chocolate festival. Also a safe bet: Peppermint milkshakes.

I had my first encounter with Square at a taco truck. I signed electronically using their smart phone, the receipt was sent to me via text message, and it worked beautifully. I believe Jack Dorsey has struck gold again.

I know that Schelling's chessboard explains a lot about how people locate themselves, but I am always astounded by how a place can go from absurdly rich to extremely poor in a single block.

Wedding-speak has this starry-eyed quality that makes the whole ordeal seem overromantacized and hence not serious.

Weddings, on the whole, seem like an oppressively archaic tradition with an injection of modern romanticism. What I love, though, is seeing all the generations dressed in their finest clothes dancing like no one will remember this night.

When I am Patriarch Justin, I am going to order that my family hold an annual dance party at which I will not dance, but will look on with a smile.

I don't come from a family of great dancers. I’m okay with that. We’re good at other things.

I read somewhere the idea that dancing and singing and even listening to music is best kept as a private experience. I get that now.

I want to see what a sober dance party looks like again. For anyone over the age of 12, or under the age of 65, the awkwardness must be deliciously unbearable.

If all else fails, operating a motel called Winwood's Motor Lodge and spending Monday nights drinking and playing cards with buddies might not be a bad gig.



I was reminded about the enormous potential influence of a small kind gesture. If the Motor Lodge guy had just sent me to my room after I signed the receipt, I probably would have resented the place. But since he went out of his way to locate and direct me to the rental car place, I perceived the experience to be more like an awesome Big Lebowski retreat.

Bathroom behavior

In Poop Culture, Praeger has a brilliant (and hilarious, and long) section describing the various pooping routines that we all so unconsciously assume. (I had no idea people did some of these things.) Here is a sampling...

Scrunch vs. Fold:

To ameliorate the fragility of the paper, users fractalize the surface, folding or scrunching to add a dimension of thickness and create an adequate buffer between one's fingers and one's filth. Scrunchers bunch the toilet paper to create a thick surface; folders take their time to neatly achieve the same effect.

Angle of Approach:

The anus is located in the butt; to access it, you have to either reach around your waist or between your legs. Reaching around requires a somewhat ungainly contortion of the body; reaching between runs the risk of contaminating your thighs with the used paper on the way out. Both problems, however, pose little risk to the experienced pooper.

For reasons of symmetry, reaching between is probably the more aesthetically pleasing choice. (For whatever that's worth -- in the bathroom, aesthetics are rarely the primary consideration.)

Direction of Wipe:

Centering the paper on the taint, you press and wipe up, scrubbing and collating and snowplowing all the filth onto the paper, exiting the area via the valley of the ass cheeks.

Or perhaps not. It's similarly popular to go sphincter spelunking, starting at daylight and moving downward, beginning at the pole and working your way south.

Most women choose to start down and move up and out, for obvious reasons. Among men, up vs. down is usually contingent on between vs. behind, vector of wipe following from angle of approach. Practically speaking, behind-and-up is the same as between-and-down: both are pulling the mess into a collection point. The converse is pushing, which is harder to control. Although pushing methods are not without adherents, they're also not without peril.

Saving the best for last, The Look Back:

With your anus clean, your poop is over. If you're not standing already, physiology dictates that you now do so. Society dictates that you flush. But for many, psychology intercedes, encouraging a look back.

Some look at their poop for signs of colonic dysfunction. Others look out of guilty curiosity, to see what horror their body has wrought. But for many, perhaps even most, the look is to take pride in their creation. In the afterglow of a successful movement, these proud poopers turn and face their demon -- once their tormentor, now their vanquished foe. If it's abnormally big, they feel pride; if it's unusually small, they feel disappointment; if it's terribly messy, they feel artistic. Whatever the case, seeing the poop is closure. The struggle has ended.

It seems contradictory that waste, which is by definition something the body used up or rejected, should engender pride. Poop is an amalgamation of the substances most useless to us. While it poses no threat to the person who created it, and thus should not be viewed negatively, why view is positively? Why should one not view it as a neutral fact of life, no more worthy of comment than breathing?

The simplest explanation of why people like to look at poop stems from the first duality of poop: the more it hurt to hold it in, the better it feels to let it out. To those for whom this feeling is positive, it's only natural to learn to associate the sight of poop with the euphoria.

You are (Very) Predictable

Albert-László Barabási's book Bursts takes a long and winding approach to make two main points: (1) Pretty much everything follows a power law distribution (rather than Poisson as historically assumed), and (2) People are surprisingly predictable (at least in where they locate themselves).

Using cell phone data, he found that if you know where a person is in the morning, you can predict their whereabouts the rest of the day about 93% of the time. And even the most unpredictable people can be pinned down at least 80% of the time.

I thought the most compelling paragraph of the book was this one on the surprising uniformity of our routines:

We tend to exaggerate the differences among us, believing that we are much less or far more regular than our friends and neighbors. The truth is, however, that you might be a cool artista, a rocker, an accountant, or a CEO of a major corporation, but when it comes to quantifying your daily movements, your predictability is likely to be only a few percentage points different from that guy next door. As far as our predictability is concerned, we are back to the familiar word of Poisson and Gauss, in which everyone is similar, everything is "normal". You may cover hundreds of miles each day while I cover only three, but you are just as much a prisoner of your habits as I am of mine. The never-ceasing thrill of spontaneity is a mirage at best. Instead, a deeply comforting regularity drives our whereabouts, to a much higher degree than we are willing to acknowledge.

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As interesting as the above paragraph is, I would not highly recommend the book unless you are into reading about crusades n' shit. I like my books to be straight to the point, and this one was anything but. Dear authors who are going to skirt the main point for hundreds of pages: Could you please throw a reader a note or something? Like "hey, skip to page 180 if you'd rather not donate 5 hours of your life to reading about Belgrade's 16th Century knights"?

I rated it a 3 on enjoyment, 5 on value/insight, and 3 on well-written. You can view my ratings for all books here.

The world before [and after] toilet paper

This is the third post in the Poop Mondays series. Quotes are from Dave Praeger's Poop Culture.

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How did people manage before TP?:

The body predates both toilets and toilet paper, and is intended to function without either. Before toilet paper, many people simply used a hand; others used leaves, discarded sheep's wool, coconut shells, and even snow. Sitting's historical exclusivity implies that the masses usually squatted, and that wiping was more common among the sitting classes. History is littered with the extravagencies of the wealthy wiper: lace, wool and rosewater, and even the downy neck of a duck.

Wikipedia adds more pre-TP options:

Wealthy people wiped with wool, lace or hemp, while less wealthy people used their hand when defecating into rivers, or cleaned themselves with various materials such as rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stone, sand, moss, water, snow, maize, ferns, may apple plant husks, fruit skins, or seashells, and corn cobs, depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs. In Ancient Rome, a sponge on a stick was commonly used, and, after usage, placed back in a bucket of saltwater.

I am a little jealous of the downy neck of duck, but grateful to be living in the golden age of quilted, scented, perforated, medicated, multi-ply, etc.

Whom do we have to thank for this lovely invention?

As sitting became more common, so too did the messes left behind, and so too did the economic reward for providing comfortable, affordable wiping products. A decade before Thomas Twyford made the toilet easier to clean by encasing it in porcelain, the Gayetty firm of New Jersey produced the first modern toilet paper to provide that same ease of cleaning to our beleaguered bungholes. For fifty cents, users purchased five hundred sheets of Gayetty's aloe-soaked "Therapeutic Paper" for their cleaning comfort. In 1890, the Scott Paper Company became the first company to manufacture toilet paper on a roll.

[I checked and $0.50 in 1857 = $11.38 today (for 500 sheets).]

Because of the shame and embarrassment surrounding pooping, TP's early adoption was slow and awkward:

Victorian-mandated sitting toilets created much of the demand for toilet paper, but Victorian etiquette in America wouldn't allow anyone to talk about it. With no national ad campaign and no newspaper articles, nothing gave Americans a uniform introduction to the product. Discussions about the new product and techniques for its use took place only among intimates, if at all. As time went on, the brands did begin advertising, but euphemistically and vaguely to avoid directly confronting the taboos.

And it's still awkward today:

Teddy bears and fluffy clouds abound, but straightforward discussion of the product's functionality is still conspicuously absent.

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Is this, as I said, the Golden Age of wiping, or are we still in the Stone Age?

I'd say maybe the latter, because when you think about it, it seems odd and inefficient that we are still using paper which requires contortions, effort, and messiness, and only serves to smear. Why not instead use water? Plenty of our Europeans friends already do in the form of "bidets":

There are two different kinds of bidets, vertical and horizontal. The vertical bidet creates a small fountain in the middle of the bowl; the horizontal shoots water across it. In either case, the user, while facing the appliance, sits or squats to maneuver the contaminated area into the stream. Drying with toilet paper or a towel follows, and you're on your way.

Moreover, cleaning up with paper instead of water is inconsistent with general hygienic practice.

Given an American obsession with cleanliness that far exceeds most European standards, it's odd that we haven't embraced bidets wholeheartedly. It is inconsistent with general practice: if you poop on your arm, you'd wash it off, not smear it off. And yet, for the butt, we're content to smear.

Praeger adds this jab/marketing-tip:

Probably "bidet" sounds too much like "ballet" -- too effeminate (or too French) for Americans to latch on. Market it as a "buttsink" and watch bidet sales soar.

Even bidets may eventually look ancient when you compare them to potential technologies to come:

A trip to Japan reveals a toilet that may portend the future of pooping: toilet seats that heat up automatically; nozzles that push out, spray you with warm water, and retract; and toilets with speakers to mimic the sound of flushing water to hide the sound of your splatters. On the drawing board are plumbing that recycles water from sinks and showers into the toilet tank, toilet seats that flow in the dark, lids that lift after an infrared sensor detects an approaching user, and a toilet that can measure weight, body fact, blood pressure, and urine and stool content, and email the results to your doctor.

The Dungeon Test

Imagine that you are forced to live out the rest of your life in a dungeon. You will be alone in this dungeon, and you will never be allowed out, and no one will ever be allowed to visit you. It’s just you – that’s it, no way around it – but you do have one option. Before you enter the dungeon, you must choose between one of the following two options:

Option 1: Consumption Only

With this option, you have unlimited access to everything that anyone ever created and you can consume to your heart’s content with the one little qualifier that nothing you ever do can or will affect anyone else.

Examples of things you can do: You can live in LeBron James’ mansion and take baths in melted chocolate. You can drench yourself in the finest books, films, or music ever produced. You can introspect all through the night and come to great personal epiphanies. You can write the Great American Novel, or become the world's best pogo sticker.

Option 2: Production Only

This is the opposite of Option 1. With this option, your actions have the potential to affect others (just as they do in normal life). Moreover, you have unlimited capacity to produce. The qualifier is that you cannot consume anything that anyone else produces. This means you must rely on your memories of past experiences in order to create your works, and it means that you cannot get feedback on how your works were received. (For the sake of the thought experiment, assume that your basic food needs are met.)


Which do you choose?

[Dear people who think this is a worthwhile and/or interesting question: Because these surveys typically only receive 20ish responses, I’d encourage you to ask this to your roommate or nephew or guy next to you on the subway or whomever and enter a line for them, too.]



I'll post the results next week.

"The Boy with the Incredible Brain"

Daniel Tammet is one of the world's 30 or so "savants". He has proven capable of memorizing Pi to over 22,000 digits, learning a language (Icelandic!) in a week, and performing other mental feats that don't seem possible. He also happens to be articulate, which is a rarity among savants, even writing for a living.

I added his book Embracing the Wide Sky to my queue after reading his Q&A with Jonah Lehrer back in early 2009. I finally got around to picking up a copy recently, and it did not disappoint. It is a delicious mix of philosophy, science, autiobiography, and practical advice. It has chapters on intelligence, language, perception, and creativity among others.

Here, for example, is advice on how to think:

Use your imagination as much as possible, especially in "thought experiments" that force you to think about the consequences of something being true.

Perhaps most important, treat each new piece of information you read or watch or hear as a potential piece in a puzzle, rather than simply as an end in itself. Acquiring information is not the same as learning, or thinking, or living for that matter. Bits of information are what we use to build reflections, evaluations and understanding in our minds. Like each one of us, these dots of data make most sense when they contribute to something greater than themselves.

For an outside (and somewhat clichéd) perspective on Tammet, check out the 48 minute documentary "The Boy with the Incredible Brain" or this 60 Minutes profile. But you really must pick up the book to get a richer, more personal perspective of how his mind works.

How would you rate yourself?

There have been plenty of psychology experiments like this testing for overconfidence, but I am not terribly interested in that. I am mostly interested in the correlations between responses.

Thanks for your response! Results will be posted next week.

Best uses of my time this week

Reading Samuel Gladding's Counseling: A Comprehensive Profession.

Randy Garutti's Gel Talk on Shake Shack.

Using Mnemosyne to remember things that seem worth remembering.

Hanging with P, including the Table Tennis Death Match. (Obviously, I survived.)

Stephanie Coontz Pop!Tech presentation "On Marriage". (My brief takeaways here.)

Blogging.

Emailing with Rick.

James Geary's TED Talk "Metaphorically Speaking".

Kathryn Schulz Pop!Tech presentation on "Being Wrong". (Only 7% of people remember accurately where they were on 9/11.)

Antonio Dimasio IT Conversation on emotions and consciousness.

Just sitting in bed with my notebook thinking.

Reading Daniel Tammet's Embracing the Wide Sky.

Scott Adams on the illusion of confidence and willpower.

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More things that inspire me can be found on my Tumblr, which I started using pretty regularly since getting a new laptop.

The trajectory of science and such

In his book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, Albert-László Barabási makes the point that just about everything follows a power law distribution. And when you know that, you can describe the movements of, e.g., animals, science, dollar bills, and viruses:

In 1996 Sergey and his collaborators reported that albatrosses follow a Lévy trajectory. The finding inspired an avalanche of research concluding that a wide range of animal species, from monkeys to bumblebees, all move following Lévy patterns. ...

Science itself often follows a Lévy pattern -- a huge jump ahead is trailed by many small, localized steps that appear to take us nowhere, or perhaps even backward in some instances. These are not wasted moves, however, but necessary to testing the boundaries of the new paradigm.

In 2006, Brockmann found that dollar bills follow a Lévy trajectory, suggesting that when it comes to our daily wanderings we are not so different from albatrosses or monkeys. ... The widely different jumps of the dollar bills capture an extreme population heterogeneity that affects everything, from the spread of the viruses to resource management in cities.

He goes on to say that people's movements do not follow this path exactly because rather than drifting over long distances, we always return home.

This pattern, of course, can relate to many more things. Seth Godin, for example, relates it to consumer behavior:

Someone finds your restaurant. They love it. They return with friends. They hang out and become regulars for a while. Then they get bored and start browsing again.

Adding the Lévy flight to your understanding is a much more nuanced representation of consumer behavior than solely thinking about the ideas of brand loyalty or random web surfing.

Not everything follows this trajectory. Wikipedia notes, for example, that sharks and other ocean predators follow Brownian motion by default and only abandon it in favor of Lévy flight if they cannot find food. It would probably even be too simplistic to say that nearly everything follows this trajectory, but if you have no idea, it's probably a good first guess.

How to poop: The proper posture

If you're like most Americans, you're pooping wrong.

When you're standing, the rectal baffles are fully extended; when you're squatting, they're fully retracted. When you're sitting, they're open about halfway. Feces can pass through, but impeded. That's why pooping can be such a struggle.

Squatting leads to full, timely, and stress-free elimination, and helps relieve hemorrhoids. But squatting takes a strong pair of legs, sitting is more comfortable, and our infrastructure is clearly biased -- even if you wanted to squat, the toilets we've got don't make it easy.

Some historical perspective illustrates that, as usual, the Victorians and globalization are to blame:

Examples of close-stools and privies designed for sitting have been found as far back as the Roman and Sumerian civilizations. To have a sitter, all you need is the money to build one and a place to put it; still, since real estate has always been precious and holes have always been cheaper than chairs with holes, sitting facilities were historically more of a luxury than a standard convenience. We can blame the Victorians for creating a social requirement that all households dedicate both the space and money to a sitting-based pooping infrastructure.

Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the western shores of England were the last frontier of proper pooping. The further east of that line one traveled, the greater the likelihood of coming across squatting-based facilities. But the ratio of squatters to sitters has dramatically declined as globalization has spread Western facilities wherever tourists and businessmen travel. Consequently, Americans are much less likely to return from Eastern countries with horror stories of primitive toilets; Easterners are, however, much more likely now to tell horror stories of colon disease.

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Quotes are from Dave Praeger's Poop Culture. This is the second post in the Poop Mondays series.

And the world's #1 vacation spot is...

I love my city. I think it would be fair to say that I am one of Durham's biggest fans. But as a travel destination? #35 NYT pick and #1 reader pick?! In the WORLD!?! I suspect fraud. But even if Durham can be considered one of the top vacation spots, that's kind of depressing.

If you wanted to travel to Durham, I wouldn't really know what to tell you to do that you couldn't do other places. I have a list of my favorite spots in and around town, but again, they are not unique enough that I would advise anyone to book a flight.

As a place to live, though, definitely consider Durham.

For clues as to why the NYT is so high on Durham, check out my friend Kevin's synopsis.

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In other travel news, in a couple of weeks I will be traveling to Southern Florida for a wedding. After the wedding I plan to take the first solo vacation of my life, and I have never been so excited about a trip. I will be touring Miami and then camping deep within the Everglades. If, for some reason, you are curious to see where I will be going, you can check out my map.

Michael Lewis on the reality of fatherhood

Lewis's book Home Game is a punch-in-the-gutly honest description of his experiences as a father. Sometimes the honesty makes for hilarity, and other times, like in the passage below, it's disturbing:

The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel. Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred. I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with Quinn squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn't against the law to hurl her off of it. I also recall convincing myself that official statistics dramatically overstated the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome—when an infant dies for no apparent reason in her crib—because most of them were probably murder. The reason we all must be so appalled by parents who murder their infants is that it is so easy and even natural to do. Maternal love may be instinctive, but paternal love is learned behavior.

This book along with this radio show on the impressive outcomes of orphanages (related thoughts here) make me seriously doubt the nuclear family as optimal child-rearing unit.

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Here is Michael Lewis talking about the book with Charlie Rose.

Similar sentiments come from a recent (and damn good) TED Talk called "Let's talk parenting taboos".

Malcolm Gladwell called Michael Lewis one of our time's greatest storytellers, and I think he is right. I rated the book as 9 on enjoyment, 5 on value/insight, and 9 on well-written. It took me about 5 hours to read. (My ratings for all books are here.)

A Criticism of Criticism

In 1914, John Alexander Smith, Oxford Professor of Moral Philosophy, said this:

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.

Craig Newmark added this line from Hemingway: "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector."

While I agree that criticism is crucial to being able to effectively think, “criticism” might carry too narrow of a meaning to describe what is truly important to effective thinking. Maybe “discernment” is a better word. Criticism, to me, implies finding fault, and there is a serious danger in fault-finding, and that is that you are spending your best energy on finding faults instead of finding whatever the opposite of “faults” is.

Probably one of the blog posts that has influenced me the most is Seth Roberts’ post on “appreciative thinking”:

To learn appreciative thinking is to learn to appreciate, to learn to see the value of things. More or less the opposite of critical thinking.

That I had to make up a phrase shows the problem. I have complained many times about an overemphasis on critical thinking at universities.

When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help students see such aspects of a paper as:

1. What can we learn from it? What new ideas does it suggest? What already-existing plausible ideas does it make more plausible or less plausible?



2. How is it an improvement over previous work? Does it use new methods? Does it use old methods in a new way? Does it show a better way to do something?



3. Did the authors show good taste in their choice of problem? Is this a problem both important and possibly solvable?



4. Are details done well? Is it well-written? Is the context of the work made clear? Are the data well-analyzed? Does it make good use of graphs? Is the discussion imaginative rather than formulaic?



5. What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?

That sort of thing. In my experience few papers are worthless. But I’ve heard lots of papers called worthless.

Squibs

With deep introspection, you might be able to get a glimpse of your intentions, but who we really are is not our intentions but the choices we’ve made. The choices we make in the future will be influenced by the choices we’ve made in the past, and who we will be in life is the sum of our choices. So to find out who “you” are, focus not on your intentions but on how to interpret your behaviors. -Paraphrasing Sheena Iyengar

Art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. -Seth Godin

Any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression.

The danger of optimization is that you’re spending your best energy on optimization, not creation. The office is designed for “work”, not productivity. Work can be defined as “anything you’d rather not be doing.” Productivity is a different matter. –Scott Adams

Marketers must choose to either try to make the customer smarter or dumber.

Avoid terms like “honestly”, “truthfully”, or “if I were you”—they almost always have the opposite of the intended effect.

The single most important diagnostic question for creativity in an organization is ‘what happens when people fail?’

We currently measure intelligence by excluding the vast majority of information processing taking place on an implicit level.

I suspect that things like flow and structure are less important in writing than we think. Readers don’t need to have a clear picture of the author’s logical structure. Rather, they just need to have taken away some scattered insights. (Kind of like these posts.)

Worldviews are shaped by, Economics is about, and Life is made interesting by...

Can you guess the answer?

Xan, a second year economics PhD student at the University of Chicago, opened my eyes to the crucial roles played by constraints.

First, he illustrates how they shape worldviews:

A lot of people's politics and worldview can be explained by what constraints they allow to operate when they are proposing a solution to a given problem. But constraints are part of the definition of a problem, so different constraints actually correspond to different problems, with different solutions. A lot of disagreements come directly from the fact that the parties are actually solving different problems but giving it the same name. If people realized this, the debate would go to the important question of which constraints we should be allowing to characterize the problem.

The answer to that depends on what reality is really like, and what question we are really trying to answer. I'm always happy to entertain different assumptions for theoretical purposes, but when it's time to solve the problem of What Should I Actually Do, then my goal is to realize which features of reality I can control, and respect the ones I can't. In particular, I am constrained by what I can get other people to do.

Frequently, people believe that different constraints are operating in reality, without explicitly saying so. People who realize and focus on this are much better at cutting through what others are saying and getting to the source of their position. For example, here is Tyler Cowen explaining the *fundamental* reason Paul Krugman is a liberal:

Many of Krugman's current false (modal) predictions stem from his claims that if left-wing politicians would "get tough" and take their case directly to the public, good progressive results will follow. I view that claim as a move into a non-scientific mode of thought. While it is sometimes true, usually it is not, and there is plenty of political science literature on how hard it is to form a winning political strategy through rhetoric.

Without such a view, however, Krugman would have to entertain the possibility that moderate outcomes, or sometimes observed outcomes, are more likely second-, third-, or fourth-best efficient than he would like to admit. If you took away this one rather weak prop of his worldview, he could quite readily turn into a conservative, of course in the literal rather than the right-wing partisan sense.

And then he illustrates their crucial in economics and life more generally:

I think the perspective falls right out of economics once you dig deep enough, if you are the kind of person who likes to step back (which not every economist is). I think one of the major differences between undergrad and grad econ for me has been the overwhelming emphasis on constrained optimization. In some sense that's really what economics is about. It's sort of a generalization of "optimal resource allocation in the face of scarcity," recognizing that not all constraints necessarily come from some sort of scarcity. Maybe you just don't want to do what I want you to do. That constrains me too.

Undergrad econ has stuff like "max utility subject to having only $1,000". Grad econ has budget constraints, but also feasibility constraints, information constraints, "incentive compatibility constraints"....really anything that keeps you from just having things the way you'd really like them. Constraints are ubiquitous in real life, where we rarely get to have things just the way we'd like them. Constraints are also what make problems (and hence real life) interesting.

Pooping Shamefully

The following is a mashup of quotes (some slightly re-worded) from a chapter in Dave Praeger's Poop Culture.

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A definition:

For the shameful shitter, it's more important to poop in the right place than to poop at the right time. Thus shameful shitters lead their lives holding it in.

Historical background:

Until the private toilet spread across Western civilization, pooping was often a semi-public experience. People did it in neighborhood privies or on the side of the road, sitting or squatting, knowing that at any moment a neighbor or stranger might walk in and say "hi" and complain about how much taxpayer money was spent on that damned Louisiana Purchase. On cold nights, people would squat over the chamber pot, in full view of spouses and children, who wouldn't care, because pooping was unremarkable. The shared privy and the unhidden chamber pot were culturally approved.

Why shame?:

Just as every poop is a unique snowflake, so too vary the causes and manifestations of shameful shitting. But the shame has two main causes. The first is the Victorian ideological design of the bathroom and the toilet to deny that poop exists. The second is the widespread misinterpretation of instinctive fecal aversion. (Your own poop cannot hurt you.)

The path to shamelessness:

We all agree on pooping's place, but we're forced to determine for ourselves the acceptability of the sights, sounds, and smells that accompany it. When the conflict between the shameful and the shameless is finally resolved, pooping will be unworthy of angst, meriting as little ceremony as eating or drinking. That's what it means to be a shameless shitter. You aren't an exhibitionist or a pervert -- you simply feel the urge to poop, and you do it, and you feel better. If it sounds easy to you, then you're not a shameful shitter -- because for the shameful shitter, this simple act is fraught with psychological trauma.

Only when we understand the toilet as a sanitary, not ideological, apparatus, and poop as a physical, not moral, threat, will society be freed from the tyranny of the bowel.

Introducing Poop Mondays

This blog has been too stuffy lately. Hopefully talking about poop once a week will lighten the air.

I just finished reading Dave Praeger's 2007 book Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product, and there are too many nuggets (pun intended) to include in just one post.

Hope you enjoy.

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The book took me about 7.6 hours to read, and I rated it an 8 on enjoyment, 7.4 on insightfulness, and 7 on well-written. (My ratings for all books are here.)

How would you change someone's life in an hour?

I do not expect many responses to this because I know it is a tough question, but even a few responses would be delicious.

(Feel free to respond either by the survey form or by the comments section.)



Current responses are viewable here.