Author Archives: kevin

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Play up the difficulty of genius to preserve your own impressiveness

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Two podcasts I listened to on BART this morning both addressed the same topic: the differences between successful and 'average' people. On Radiolab, Malcolm Gladwell talked about how we're comfortable saying that there's some innate difference between average people and geniuses, but how it's very uncomfortable to say geniuses are just people that love what they're doing more than everyone else. He cited Gretzky, who watched hockey games when he was 2 and cried when they were over, as someone who was so passionate about the game that that was all he could think about, and that's what made him so good - he always wanted to practice more and try out new things, because hockey was his life. Then on This American Life this guy was discussing how we the people expect startups to have some mythical creation story and to be founded out of adversity. There's a lot of emphasis on building something out of a garage, or building a newer, better tool because getting something done, like uploading a video, was too hard before YouTube. While people should get excited to hear that there aren't vast differences between themselves and so-called geniuses, many people get very uncomfortable, because it makes their own lack of accomplishments even more unimpressive. That's especially grating when you've built a career around doing what you're doing, and you spend the majority of your waking hours working in that area.

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Have interesting conversations

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Solid advice from Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, on how to have interesting conversations:
As a general rule, the more dangerous or inappropriate the conversation, the more interesting it is. You'll have to use your judgment to know when you've crossed the line. Also as a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull. So steer toward topics that involve human perceptions and feelings, and away from objects and things. You also want to avoid any topic that falls into the "you had to be there" category. For example, if someone is describing a vacation, avoid asking about the food. Nothing is more boring than a description of food. Ask instead if the person answered email from the beach. That gets to how a person thinks, and how hard it is to release a habit. And it could provide an escape route to move the conversation to yet another place. Sometimes it takes two or three bounces to get someplace of mutual interest. You've heard of the Kevin Bacon game, where every actor is just a few connections away from Kevin Bacon. Likewise, you almost always have something interesting in common with every other person. The trick is to find it. As with the Kevin Bacon game, you'd be surprised at how few questions it takes to get there.

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Why do directors end movies ambiguously?

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Last night I watched A Serious Man, which ends with lots of loose ends that haven't been tied up. I was startled and annoyed at the ending. Why do filmmakers do it? 1) If you know you're not going to resolve the film's ending, as a director your incentives change. You can make it as complicated and then just leave everything for the viewer to figure out. 2) The filmmakers know how the story would end but just aren't telling us, which is condescending. 3) It's possible that I just don't like it because I'm not expecting it and if my expectations change I will like it more. 4) Not having the movie end is a device to allow filmgoers to signal their artyness, and also shut off the movie to the large majority of the population.

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Coaches at the World Cup: Conservative and stuck in their ways

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I’ve blogged before about how football coaches are risk-hating morons. The World Cup’s made me realize that soccer coaches can be moronic, too. Here are 4 examples of coaching stupidity.

1. Failing to adjust to high altitude conditions
Johannesburg is 5,500 feet above sea level. Pretoria, Polokwane and Rustenburg are all roughly 4000 feet above sea level. High altitude means that the oxygen in the air is more thinly spread, making it harder to recover and harder to sustain sprints than when you’re playing at sea level. It also takes time for the body to adjust to these conditions, which is part of the reason Mexico is so good when they play in the Azteca; it’s 6000 feet above sea level and visiting teams only have a few days to adjust before they have to play. Bolivia are horrible, but beat Brazil and Argentina in qualifying at their home stadium of La Paz, 11,000 feet above sea level.

Coaches knew about the altitude, and they knew what stadiums they were going to be playing in, including the US, who played every game at high altitude. Yet many still conducted their training camps at sea level, including the US, who held theirs in Princeton, despite the seeming availability of Colorado Springs (10,000 feet above), where every US Olympic athlete trains. To their credit, they arrived two weeks early, unlike some teams, who waited for a few days before their first game to show up in South Africa and undoubtedly suffered.

Another wasted high-altitude opportunity: Because of the altitude goalies were kicking the ball 20 yards further than at sea level. This meant that they were routinely landing the ball around the opponent’s penalty box. Why on earth did no one treat every single punt and goal kick as a scoring opportunity? Why were forwards routinely underestimating the distance the ball would travel, letting the opposing keeper gather it? When your goalie collects the ball, put six guys on the opponent’s penalty box, chuck the ball in there and who knows what could happen. The only reason the ball was previously going into midfield was because goalies couldn’t punt the ball further.

2. Horrible tactics
Coaches have been making horrible tactical decisions all tournament. It’s possible that they have been doing so in previous tournaments, but now thanks to sites like Zonal Marking, we can get the full measure of their incompetence. Germany are good, but they’re not good enough on paper to be beating other teams by 3 and 4 goals. But every team they’ve beaten for 4 has displayed tactical rigidity/incompetence, either failing to pick up Ozil, or packing the middle and leaving the wing backs open.

In the club game, if you don’t have a left-footed fullback, you go out and buy one. If your country doesn’t have one, you have to adjust and play different tactics. There have been more varied lineups in the World Cup than in club soccer and the majority of coaches haven’t been able to adjust. To his credit, Bob Bradley was one of the few who made tactical adjustments and whose teams looked much better in the second half than the first.

3. Not being aggressive enough
Going into the final group game, Algeria could have advanced, but needed to win by two goals. From a strategic perspective, they were completely indifferent between winning 1-0, tying 3-3 and losing 10-0. As an underdog needing a low-probability outcome, they should have employed a high-variability strategy – throwing players forward, committing everyone to the attack. Instead, they chose to pack it in, ensuring that they went home. Only in the 91st minute did they show any sort of tactical boldness, sending enough players forward to be vulnerable at the back. Of course this led to the US counterattack and goal, but you have to gamble to score, and as I mentioned above they should have been indifferent between a tie and a loss.

Also, when you’re down a goal, you have two considerations: A) scoring, and B) giving up a second goal and probably the game. A always dominates B, especially as the game winds down, but coaches will wait until the 90th minute to bring on a striker for a defender, throw players forward, or otherwise give themselves a chance to win. I’m amazed that teams aren’t trying crazy formations and waiting to bring the defenders/goalkeeper forward until the very last minutes. In this world cup, no teams have yet scored on an empty net, I don’t think, because the goalkeeper was trying to get forward into the attack. Risk losing in the 80th because you gambled and lost, instead of playing conservatively and losing because you only gave yourself three minutes to try and score.

4. Not having your goalkeeper wear bright colors
In one study, players were twenty percent more likely to miss penalty kicks when the goalkeeper was wearing red. It’s well known that people will focus on brightly colored moving objects. When an attacker has to focus on the movement of the ball, navigate through ranks of defenders, he might get one tenth of a second to look at the goal. In that brief snapshot, if you’re the defense, you’d love for the striker to aim at the brightly colored object – the goalkeeper. And yet, during the crucial elimination game against Ghana, Tim Howard was wearing – of all colors – BLACK. Which would have been fine if Ghana was really bad at soccer, or if this wasn’t the World Cup. When the stakes are this high and you’re passing up opportunities like this to improve your odds, you’re a moron.

5. High coaching turnover
Looking for a reason African teams underperformed at the World Cup? Nigeria and Ivory Coast replaced their managers within three months of the World Cup, and Cameroon and South Africa changed coaches less than a year before the tournament started. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re not familiar with the personnel, the culture, or the people who hired you, you’re going to find it extremely difficult to succeed. In their classic book Hard Facts, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton cite a study showing that it took about 15 years for studio heads to find the sweet spot on the job, and that virtually no one had instant success. Granted, running a soccer team is easier than a multibillion dollar company, but the principle applies. Football associations read too much into a game or tournament’s results – the US and Ghana were essentially neck and neck through 90 minutes, but the result is that one team had a wonderful tournament and the other didn’t meet expectations. Great coaches from medium teams might have a really tough group, lose two games and have an above-average tournament. There’s too much noise in the space of three or four games to get a feel for a coach, but they’re all expected to resign if they go out early.

Chalk another one up for the status quo bias. My hunch is that referee performance has improved more than coaching tactical performance at the World Cup; a coach from 1970 in the modern era would do better with his team than a ref from 1970 would do with his performance. An inept coach can still win against other inept coaches, but everyone notices when referees blow it.

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BART thoughts

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  • People have been asking me why I don't drive, which shows that they haven't considered the question. In dollar terms it's not that much more expensive than driving ($11 vs. $8 or so), and when I take BART I gain an hour and twenty minutes of Internet-free reading time. If my time's worth $17 an hour, then I'm gaining around $22 every day by riding BART. Plus I just don't have that many good podcasts and I hate sitting in traffic. I don't think people seriously consider the effects of having someone else drive you places; it frees up all of that time you would have spent behind the wheel. This is a reason for government-subsidized public transit that I hadn't considered before.
  • BART riders are amazingly literate; pretty much everyone reads books, newspapers or Kindle. The rest play games on a smartphone or text. Forget about asking whether Google will save newspapers, ask whether BART will. It's a great place to pick up girls.
  • If I make a website with really bad usability, like you can't even figure out where the "Add to Cart" button is or learn what the product does, then it'll hurt my bottom line, because users won't spend time trying to figure out how to use it, they'll just use a different website to get their shopping done. If the government makes something with bad usability, so that you're confused about what is and isn't legal, their profits go up, not down, because they get to fine everyone that didn't figure it out. This is onerous and gives the government totally perverse incentives; adding a usability-clarifying sign might cost them $200,000 in revenue. Avoid lock-in whenever you can.
  • When I'm parking I have a simple heuristic that gets me the best spot, every time: I go up and then park in the first available spot. Minimizing driving time is smarter than minimizing walking time. Plus it takes the stress out of trying to find a spot that's closest to the stairs. So from now on, simple rule; park in the first spot you see.
  • Also, always buy your ticket for the next day, or next week, when you're leaving BART at night. You're less stressed then than in the morning, and there's no crowd around the ticket machines.
Last but not least, never run for trains.

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What evidence would a person accept to change their mind about their religious beliefs?

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One of the core principles of rationality is an ability to update your beliefs based on new evidence. Thus a good heuristic for a person's intellectual honesty, or rigor, is whether they've stated conditions which would lead them to change their beliefs. A rational person in favor of social promotion, for instance, should be willing to change her mind if evidence shows that social promotion is damaging to the schools where it's practiced. Reading through Eliezer Yudkowsky's FAQ page today got me thinking about what evidence would convince someone to change his mind about religion. If I was an atheist I would consider the ability to read my thoughts or determine information that I've never shared with anyone as good evidence, but then it's possible that technology will develop to the point where we can read minds easily. Maybe the ability of a prospective deity to answer scientific or historical questions that we don't have answers to in a logically consistent way, or the ability to control nature, cleave a playing card with a thunderstrike or something. Those aren't great tests, and they're also vulnerable to a jump from, "I can't explain this event" to "an all-knowing or all-powerful being must have done it." What evidence would a rational religious person have to accept to believe that there is no god? I'm not really sure, as much of religious belief is based on faith. I suspect you could get a good answer by asking people why they believe in their god and not in, say, Thor or Zeus.

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How to give to homeless people

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From someone who has been homeless, a good discussion of the pros and cons of different ways of responding to beggars.
The problem with giving panhandlers money is severalfold. First, you provide economic incentive for panhandling. While I have long since gotten over my hatred of the homeless, I still hate people coming up to me every few minutes, interrupting my conversation to ask for money. It also enables an alcohol or drug habit that keeps that person complacent in their situation. I could go on about how our individual guilt adds up to an unacceptable, unofficial, welfare state, but let’s keep this to you and me. Second, giving money to the homeless is expensive. A dollar here, a dollar there—you’ll be out a hundred bucks by the time the week is over. Maybe you don’t mind the money, but you will mind the frustration, as the same person asks you for money night after night and you realize you’re not accomplishing anything worthwhile. Ignoring the homeless, or begging off, carries its own problems. For one thing, from the perspective of the panhandler, being ignored only confirms their hatred of humanity. Eventually a person who is ignored starts to escalate their behavior, just to get a reaction. Talking to them, learning their names, and explaining why you don’t have money for them just infuriates them more. It also takes a lot of time, worsening the interruption.
He recommends not giving food. The author has a good solution:
Here’s what you do: pick up a pack of the cheapest cigarettes you can find. You should be able to get a pack for less than $5—That’s 20 homeless encounters at less than 25¢ each. Make sure it’s a brand neither you nor anyone you know would smoke. This sets up a separate budget so you can give without worrying about your own needs. When someone asks you for money, say you don’t have any, then offer them a cigarette. In my experience, no homeless person has every not taken a cigarette, nor asked for money in addition to the cigarette. Most of the time they don’t even light it—saving it either to savor later, or as a kind of currency. Instead, they walk away and leave me alone, barely interrupting the conversation at all.
One of the toughest parts of living in India was finding a way to interact with beggars that didn't leave you feeling like shit for the rest of the day. I made donations instead.

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The data-driven approach is changing the world

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I was reading this profile of Esther Duflo in the New Yorker last night when I realized that rural development and the tech sector aren't too different in their approach to problems. In each one you're trying to convince the customer that what you're selling - immunizations, software - will make their lives better. Sometimes you're not reaching out to the customer that well, in which case you try experiments to make things better. In tech, this is pretty low cost - you segment the customer base, show the treatment group a revised page and then measure the differences. In development this is more expensive - you have to create a randomized controlled trial, divide your population in two and then measure the results later. The basic principles are the same, though. Most successful web designers and aid workers/economists believe the following: 1. We can be doing a better job selling our product 2. Our assumptions could be right or could be wrong, but we have no way to tell without testing them 3. Good data is essential 4. Opinions without data are meaningless 5. Experiment constantly to collect more data and find things that work The success of this approach has become so clear, and such a part of my approach to problems, over the past few years that it's hard to imagine doing things differently, or having a discussion with people that rely on their gut. Even having discussions with people is pointless, when you can go look up some papers or evidence that proves or disproves your point, but most people aren't willing to trust the data over their intuitions. There are two types of people who have opinions about social promotion in schools: people who have looked at the data and people who haven't. Overwhelmingly the people who look at the data are in favor of social promotion (as are school administrators). Institutions push back against the data-driven approach, however, because of its implications. Underlying the hierarchical system at most companies is a belief that the people at the top are better at making decisions, or their assumptions are somehow better than the people just starting. If we're trusting the data, then your guess as the CEO is just as good as mine, as the intern; the people at the top must be comfortable ceding power. Plus we have all these biases, like the ability to discern patterns out of random data and anchoring, and if you're not familiar with cognitive bias by this point go read this. In both the tech sector and in development, there are companies that - for the moment - aren't randomizing, and are still doing okay and collecting money. That's going to change, though, and soon, because relying on the data gives you such a clear advantage. Google's made billions with it. J-PAL's gaining on everyone else in development, only because their experiments are demonstrating results. If you've got nothing else to go on, evaluate the future success of an organization by how it makes decisions, and how open it is to change.

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One failure of globalization

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Earlier I wrote a post on the benefits of globalization and free trade. Here's a story about globalization gone wrong in Ladakh:
Most important of all, I have been able to witness first-hand the evolution of tensions between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority in Ladakh, or `Little Tibet', in the western Himalayas. For more than 600 years these two groups lived side by side with no recorded instance of conflict. They helped each other at harvest time, attended one another's religious festivals, even intermarried. But within a decade of the imposition of western-style `development', Buddhists and Muslims were engaged in pitched battles — including the bombing of each other's homes — that took many lives. Even mild-mannered grandmothers — who a decade earlier would have been drinking chang, eating tsampa and laughing with their Muslim neighbours — told me, “we have to kill all the Muslims or they will finish us off.”
Hat tip Jenny B.

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