We generally associate rationality with wanting to know more about our biases. Generally we associate learning about human bias with learning more in general; rational people are truth seekers. However, there are some instances when ignorance is a rational strategy. Off the top of my head:

1) The placebo effect

2) The role of God in everyday life - people who pray and attend church are happier, at less risk of a major catastrophic health incidentthan those who don't.

3) What our spouse/significant other is thinking about, in real time

4) Whether or not we carry a Huntington's disease-type gene

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#1: Keep doing all of the good things I was doing last semester.

#2: If someone proposes a venture, plan, pickup game or trip, say "I'm in" every time. For this I turn to Paul Graham. "If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it."

#3: Learn how to cook. I used to be an extremely picky eater (the word extremely is a gross understatement). Now I eat most foods but I still avoid the kitchen when I can. I am going to meet with my good friend and outstanding chef Julia at Occidental, and she is going to help me whip up some delicious meals. I plan on living overseas over the summer - it would be great to achieve proficiency in cooking by that point.

#4: Spend less time around negative people and people I don't enjoy being with, and spend more time around fun people.

#5: Lengthen my attention span. I would rather do sequential tasks well than concurrent tasks poorly. This will mean printing out most long-form articles and reading them like books. It will also mean turning off the Internet and trying to have only one application running at a time.

#6: Various "number" goals, which I generally enjoy doing but don't find time for - hike at least once a month, lift weights four times a week, get at least one phone number a day, male or female. The idea is to leave conversations with something besides "goodbye." Plus, when you receive someone's phone number it's a small, positive signal of interest; a building block. I am friendly with many people at CMC but I generally fail to ask them for their phone number. I also want to visit at least two new countries in 2009.

My most important goal this semester: to acknowledge and maintain a positive impression of my own worth in the absence of feedback, and affirm it in the face of negative feedback.

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Nate Silver's speaking at Claremont McKenna in April. Nate invented PECOTA, the MLB player evaluation system, and runs the election blog FiveThirtyEight.com. I requested a few speakers last September and Nate was one of them. But I didn't know CMC had booked anyone until I saw the schedule a few hours ago.

So, this is pretty cool. Of course being able to do things like this entails significant cost - CMC is the 14th most expensive college in the country.

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Currently about 8 percent of people are left handed. Have levels of left-handedness always been this low or is right hand dominance a recent trend? In the Middle Ages left-handedness was a "sinister" sign, indicating that you were marked by the devil. Before machinery I can't see any advantage to conforming to a societal norm for handedness. We live in a left-brain dominated world which might help explain why there are so many righties out there.

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Nearly 95% of restaurants have menus that are too long. There are three problems with big menus:

1. Quantity hurts quality - the more dishes the restaurant will cook, the less likely the restaurant is good at cooking any of them.

2. In general people feel twice as much pain when losing something as they do joy at making a positive choice. Thus when more options are presented, the diner will feel more pain for all the items he didn't choose to eat. This increases the chances the diner won't enjoy his/her meal.

3. In general (by my own experience) people make selections based on the choices in front of them - obviously people pick a type of restaurant like Mexican or Chinese, but rarely fixate on a specific menu item. In fact, if the menu is shorter the odds of creating a memorable dish (and repeat customers) increases.When was the last time you remembered an item you picked from a menu of more than 40 items?

Putting more items on the menu may be an attempt to cast the net as wide as possible. But it's not a good idea; it increases diner anxiety and decreases the chances of making a memorable dish. In N Out has thrived with exactly three menu options: Hamburger, Cheeseburger, and Double-Double. Momofuku Ko opened with a focus on just one idea and one dish, making the best noodles in New York City.

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When giving talks to student crowds he likes to sum up his entire approach to life as a two-step process: “(1) Get started; (2) Keep going.”

From Study Hacks. There's no substitute for doing.

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I'm taking a course in macroeconomics this semester. The teacher began the class by taking roll and then asking everyone what they thought were some important issues in macroeconomics. Other students mentioned that market efficiency, GDP, and international trade were important issues. I wanted to raise my hand to say that determining whether macroeconomists know anything is an important issue in macroeconomics. But it was the first day of class, so I refrained.

Tyler Cowen told me that "You need to start somewhere" in learning about the global economy. I don't think that's a great answer and I'm skeptical about learning things from a group of people whose collective opinion on the subprime crisis and the 2008 economy was wildly incorrect.

Every macro class starts with a simple overarching model of the world, then explains why the model's wrong and looks at more complicated models. But from the beginning, macroeconomists are trying to explain every facet of the economy.

Contrast that with the field of robotics, which I'm starting today as well. First-time robotics students build small robots with limited abilities. Potential class projects include building a robot that's able to use an elevator, one that can navigate the hallways around the classroom by itself, or one that can pick up soda cans and deposit them into trash cans. Robot people have very lofty goals, however, including fielding a soccer team of 11 robots that could beat Brazil's best team, and replicating the human brain in computer software. But they're building from the bottom up; starting by solving low-level human functions and gradually making more complicated robots as we better understand the problems and ideas involved.

Macroeconomists want to understand the global economy; robot people want to understand the human brain. These are incredibly complicated systems but the approaches are totally different.

If macroeconomists were trying to understand how the human brain works, I feel like they would start by building a giant processor, giving it an initial set of instructions, then continually tinkering the instructions to make the processor more like a human. I estimate it would take around a thousand years of tinkering to produce something resembling the human brain.

If robot people were trying to understand the economy, they'd start by breaking down and trying to fully understand the components - each firm, the decisions facing each worker, and compiling those into a model of the economy as a whole. This would be a long process - but shorter than starting with the whole system and slowly tinkering.

Better to break a system into parts, understand the parts and build back up than to try to understand the whole system.

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In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely points out a basic flaw in the rational consumer model - for every good and every price, we'd either want to buy or sell that good (we'd value the money more than the good, or the good more than the money). However, there's something called the endowment effect - we place an irrationally high value on things we own, which skews this principle. Let's say we have a very nice bottle of wine and someone offers us $75 for the bottle - most people would refuse the offer. But presented with the opportunity to buy a bottle of the same wine for $75 we refuse to buy it. But we must either prefer $75 in pocket or the wine. So, know that you are likely to put too high a value on items you own relative to things in the world.

From Tim Harford's Logic of Life, an input-output theory of legislation: "Here's a surefire vote-winner: Take $1.9 billion from a large number of voters, distribute $1 billion to a small number of voters and throw away the rest." When you put it that way it really sounds silly. But this particular bill, a subsidy for the sugar industry, passes year after year. This is an example of a big problem with representative government - a small focused interest beats a widespread, unfocused one every time, to the detriment of the widespread. The arguments used are rarely logical, and largely irrelevant.

I went to Carmel last weekend, and saw a woman feeding squirrels literally one foot away from a sign begging visitors not to feed the squirrels and to let them find their own food. My brother asked her why she was feeding the squirrels. Her response: "Oh - well this food is from Whole Foods, so it's okay."

Finally, from the latest Battlestar Galactica episode title, from Ken Kesey's book Sometimes a Great Notion, from the song "Goodnight, Irene:"

Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in town,
Sometimes I have a great notion;
To jump in into the river and drown

The singer goes on to say, "Go home to your wife and your family" - focus on your relations with those that matter, and avoid vice where you can.

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In 2005 I walked right by Barack Obama.

I was on a plane to Washington D.C. to look at Georgetown and other East Coast schools. I was heading to my seat at the back of the plane when I saw Obama, sitting on the aisle, wearing a white shirt and looking really tired. From the looks of things I was the only one on the plane who recognized him.

I didn't say anything, shake his hand or write him a letter, although I contemplated doing all of those. It sounds stupid now, but I was worried it was a totally random guy. I thought Senators had escorts and people around them 24/7, especially since Obama was a potential presidential candidate.

As soon as we deplane he and a few other Congressmen were whisked away by a team of guys in suits. By that point of course it was too late.

Anyway, that's my Obama story.

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Remind ourselves the first principle of conservatism is not tax cuts or free trade or even smaller government. It is prudence, and prudence should be our guide.

Prudence dictates we take seriously the concerns of those who elect us and tailor our policy proposals to counter the government-mandate-heavy ideas bound to emerge from the other side.

Americans want something done about the 43 million of us who lack health care. The question is not: Should government care? It must. The question is: Do we get a top-down, Washington-knows-best, one-size-fits-all “solution” or a Massachusetts-style program that preserves choice for patients and discretion for doctors?

That's Tom Davis talking about how to get the Republican Party back on track. I hope the Republicans do get back on track - states and the federal government are spending more and more - while the private sector economy lost 500,000 jobs in December, state and local governments added 6,000. This spending is beyond our current means, which signals a generational transfer of wealth - the current generation is spending the youth generation's money, the equivalent of accumulating credit card debt and then passing the bill to your kids. Currently 9% or so of the federal budget goes toward interest on the national debt. The Republicans need to quickly find their place again, but the prospects don't look good.

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