Measuring the dependency of different variables
December 22nd, 2009 — Uncategorized
What’s wrong with people? The movie is just awful.
I hadn’t expected an excellent film, but it’s just boring.
As someone in my party commented they spent so much money on the visuals that they couldn’t afford creativity, a plot, or characters that weren’t paper thin.
December 21st, 2009 — Uncategorized
Since Greece does not control its currency (which is controlled by a country [Germany], which is interested in keeping it strong), is it fair to say that it is on a sort of Gold Standard?
If so, what do its current budget troubles say about the ability of a gold standard to push governments towards balanced budgets?
For extra credit: Is California on a Gold Standard?
December 21st, 2009 — Uncategorized
I read about this book in Less Wrong and immediately added it to my queue (a mental queue at this point).
The book is really good and its flaws are of the I wish he would tell me more type.
Most of the book is a recollection of experiments performed by the author or his associates, where people were asked to perform as if they were dictators of a small country/village/city/factory/… or simply having to set a thermostat in a room (many failed at this task!).
Some of the examples are eerie in their resemblance to real events, like the player who introduced worker’s ownership and later, when the factory wasn’t producing enough, proposed to shoot any worker who wasn’t producing his quota. In fact, this is one of those examples that seems to fit almost too perfectly. Other examples show the intellectual knots that people get themselves into:
In one of our planning games, people were asked to shape a country’s [policies]. [...] One participant found himself threatened on the foreign-policy front while at the same time he needed to cope with vast unemployment at home. The solution he hit on to deal with both these problems was to introduce universal military service. [...] However, he recalled that only a few hours earlier he had announced decisively that the government should do nothing to strengthen the military and should certainly not introduce any forced measures to that end. [...] What did he do? He introduced *voluntary conscription*, commenting as he did so, “Everybody will surely understand the need for this.”
Brilliant. As is the fact that many people seem to start distrusting the experiment when their hare-brained ideas cause problems.
Also interesting is the discussion on how teaching people some introduction into the problem field will make them feel much more confident while still performing poorly, while actual experience in the field helps much more (which should temper the hubris of the educated fool).
Many little examples such as this abound in the book. They are held together by the common themes of human folly so that it is not simply another management book of anecdotes. Also, unlike anecdote books, this one comes with numbers that show that not everyone does poorly and that there are significant differences between how those that do poorly and those that do smartly behave.
On the negative side, there is a tendency to spell out tables of numbers that is sort of annoying. I suppose someone told the author that (non-technical) people are too stupid to understand a table of numbers so the author sometimes seems to spell them out: “30% of users of type 1, fell into category 1, 40% into category 2, …” in a way that is tedious. Also, many of the references are just given in German, which makes them a bit harder to look for.
