| Endowment Effect |
[Jul. 6th, 2008|02:42 am] |
"From basketball tickets to waterfowl-hunting rights to classic albums, once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it - an observation first called “the endowment effect”. [...]
The endowment effect has been seen in hundreds of experiments, the most famous of which found that students were surprisingly reluctant to trade a coffee mug they had been given for a bar of chocolate, even though they did not prefer coffee mugs to chocolate when given a straight choice between the two."
From It's mine, I tell you
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| Plutoids |
[Jun. 21st, 2008|03:28 pm] |
Pluto is now classified as neither a planet or an asteroid, but rather a class of object in between the two: a plutoid.
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| Health Savings Accounts |
[Jun. 19th, 2008|03:47 am] |
Health insurance is seriously fucked up in the US. This supposed "free market" system is actually a perverted mockery of everything a true capitalist holds dear. And the link between health insurance and your employer is stupid beyond fathoming.
Normally I show my dissatisfaction with a bad system via a simple, quiet, and effective manner: non-participation. I vote with my feet, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, going without health insurance is a very bad idea, so in this particular case that option is closed.
But there's an option that, while not a complete panacea, has the potential to go a long way to improve things. That option is called health savings accounts, or HSAs. An HSA is exactly like a normal bank account, except that it's designated only for use on medical expenses, and the money you put into it is not taxed.
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| Phrases That Don't Mean Anything |
[Jun. 7th, 2008|04:01 pm] |
Keep an eye out for filler phrases in your writing and speech. They dilute your message without adding anything. Here's a few common ones:
- "so to speak"
- "in a sense"
- "at the end of the day"
- "to be honest"
- "for all intents and purposes"
- "without further ado"
- "at this point in time"
- "if you will"
None of these phrases really mean anything. How can you tell? By cutting them out of a sentence, the meaning of the sentence doesn't change:
"The garden out back was, in a sense, Jane's sanctuary from the world." → "The garden out back was Jane's sanctuary from the world."
"Without further ado, I'm pleased to present tonight's speaker, John Smith." → "I'm pleased to present tonight's speaker, John Smith."
"We don't have any more tickets to give away at this point in time." → "We don't have any more tickets to give away."
As always, omitting needless words makes your message more forceful.
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| Math Class |
[May. 10th, 2008|03:57 pm] |
"...if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right."
From A Mathematician's Lament, by way of BetterExplained
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| Web 2.0 |
[May. 7th, 2008|02:31 am] |
Web 2.0 seems to be trickling down to corporate America. I went to OfficeMax's site today, and found myself kind of stunned when the page loaded up. Reasonable use of whitespace, decent typography, gradients, rounded corners. None of this would be out of the ordinary, except that I don't think I've ever seen it on a big company's website before. I normally expect a style more like Staples or Office Depot: small, ugly type; cluttered layout; distracting banner ad-style graphics - in short, Web 1.0.
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| Cognitive Surplus |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|12:33 am] |
"If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.
[...]
I was being interviewed by a TV producer [who asked about Wikipedia]. 'Where do people find the time?' That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, 'No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years.'"
From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky
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| Schools |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|11:02 pm] |
I always enjoy Bob Cringley's articles, but when he speaks of how schools are outdated, I'm especially impressed. Paul Graham has said that high schools are basically prisons, and I agree with that, but Cringley takes it further: all schools, from kindergarden straight up through med school, follow a model that is increasingly out of sync with the modern world. He gives some compelling arguments as to why schools, as we know them today, will be gone completely in the next decade or so.
One of his key points is that "we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy." This is a pithy and less threatening way of stating the hard truth: that values held dear by traditional education are no longer useful. This is going to be very hard for people to let go of. Expect a lot of bitterness and fighting from those with their identities, lives, and possibly paychecks intimately tied to the industry and culture of traditional education.
But I for one couldn't be happier to see scholastic institutions fade away. I didn't get a lick of value from my time spent in school, other than social side-effects like learning how to deal with the schoolyard bully or how to pass notes in class undetected. Only once school ended was my time freed up to spend on actual learning. I can only imagine how much further along I would be in life now if I could have started learning 20 years earlier.
Cringely's article has two subsequent followups that expand on his ideas, and all three are also available as podcasts. Highly recommended.
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| Honk If You Hate Honking |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|11:21 pm] |
People around here love to honk. I used to honk, very occasionally, while driving in LA. In almost all cases it was to alert someone that they were causing an obstruction, if it seemed like they were unaware of it. This is not supposed to be unfriendly. I think we've all done it - you're digging around under the seat for something at a red light, the light turns green, and you fail to notice. After a brief waiting period (say, 5 or 10 seconds), a honk to alert you to the situation from the driver behind you is, to my mind, perfectly reasonable.
Since coming to SF, I've stopped using my horn altogether, as a backlash to what to me seems to be massively gratuitous use.
The use of honking here seems similar to my former purpose: alerting someone to an obstacle that they are causing. But the thing is, streets here are a veritable obstacle course nearly all of the time. Taxis pulling over to pick up fares. Riders on bikes and motorcycles. Lots of pedestrians, and rarely do they pay much attention to traffic signals. People looking for parking, or trying to parallel park in a space that's just a tad too small (and they all are). Delivery trucks pulled over with their hazards on, because there's no place to park them while making the delivery. Muni buses, tour buses, cable cars, and trains. And here and there, a newbie to driving in the city, who finds themselves constantly confused by the labyrinthine tangle of one-way streets and no-turn intersections. (e.g., me about eight months ago.)
In this environment, honking rarely serves a useful purpose. There's cars and people and buses and bikes everywhere you look, all weaving in and out between one another; so when someone honks, it's pretty much impossible to tell what they are honking about, if it is directed at you, and if so what you should do. It just adds more distractions to the chaotic mess. Which leads me to believe that in fact it isn't about obstruction alerts anymore, but is just a way for people to vent.
This city has many charms, but this little bit of the local culture is really quite unpleasant.
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| Programmed For Scarcity |
[Apr. 10th, 2008|02:55 am] |
Humans are so prone to becoming information junkies:
"Because at one time we never knew when the next saber-toothed tiger might come along for food, it made sense to pack on the calories whenever we chanced upon them. That's not much help in today's world of snack aisles and super sizes. [...] We are programmed for scarcity and can't dial back when something is abundant."
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| Creating Economic Value |
[Mar. 30th, 2008|04:46 pm] |
You know what really bugs me? Activities which don't create economic value.
Almost everything human beings ever do create economic value - in the broad sense of value equals happiness. Watching a movie, helping your child with their homework, even reorganizing your sock drawer (if you enjoy well-organized socks) all create economic value. This, of course, is in addition to the more common things we'd think of in association with that term, like doing some work for an employer or a client.
But some activities create no economic value, or worse, destroy it. Take the upcoming economic stimulus package. Put aside for the moment whether you think that taxes are too high, too low, or just right. Also put aside whether economic stimulus packages work (though I recommend this podcast if you're interested in the historical evidence on both sides of that argument).
Instead, ask this: what is achieved by having the federal government take several thousand dollars of your income, shuffle it around between a bureaucrats for the better part of a year, and then mailing you back a check for $600 at the end of it all?
No economic value is created by this activity. You might think - hey, the government employees who shuffled all the money around got paid, how about that? But that would be just another version of the broken window fallacy. Those people could have been paid to do something else - something useful, that creates happiness for others in the world.
When you witness a process in action - business, government, or an activity of your own - take a moment to consider: does this create economic value? And to answer that question, you have to ask: is someone made happy by this? Happier than they could be made by putting those same resources to some other use?
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| Institutions |
[Mar. 27th, 2008|01:29 am] |
Up-and-comers challenge the status quo. They offer increased speed, or productivity, or enjoyment, or whatever - over the standard. If the difference is big enough, it spreads out and soon everyone knows about it or uses it. Slowly it transforms from an upstart into an institution.
Institutions are part of the fabric of our lives, or society, or the economy, or all of the above. They are defenders of the status quo. More: they are the status quo itself.
Some recent upstarts-become-institutions include Wikipedia, Google, cell phones, and the internet. All of these things still have traces of their shiny newness, and upstart spirit from the recent past, hanging about them like a halo. But in a decade we'll be cursing them for being curmudgeonous, slow to adapt, out of step with the times. And it will be hard to remember when they felt like the hip newcomers.
The infinite series of societal progress is the appearance of these up-and-comers; their apparent uphill battle to gain traction; and once a tipping point is crossed they quickly and systematically obliterate the previous approach. And now there is a new status quo, awaiting a new challenger to do it all over again.
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