(That said, credits in World of Warcraft are valuable enough that Chinese prison guards reportedly force convicts to perform monotonous tasks within the game for 12-hour stretches at a time, building up credits which can then be sold for many times the guards’ official salary.)
That’s a parenthetical in Felix Salmon’s excellent discussion of the Bitcoin bubble and the future of currencies in general.
Scott Young wrote a good post about two types of progress when learning something new: logarithmic and exponential.
Anything you try to improve will have a growth curve. Imagine you ran everyday and you tracked your speed to finish a 5-mile course. Smoothing out the noise, over enough time you’d probably get a graph like this:
Here, improvement works on a logarithmic scale. As you get better, it gets harder and harder to improve. Elite athletes expend enormous effort to shave seconds off their best times. Novice athletes can shave minutes with just a little practice.
Logarithmic growth is the first type of growth. This is where you see a lot of progress in the beginning, but continuing progress is more difficult.
Now imagine a different graph. This time you’ve build a new website you update regularly and you’re measuring subscribers. This graph would likely look very different:
This is exponential growth, the second type of growth. Website traffic is often exponential because as a blog attracts more readers, there are more opportunities for word about the blog to spread. A blog with zero traffic also has zero word of mouth.
I’ve noticed most things tend to be either logarithmic or exponential growth. Despite this, linear progress is what most people expect. We tend to expect things to move in the same direction or rate as they have in the past. This violation of our expectation leads to some mistakes in how we set goals and act on them.
Scott later offers advice on how to tell whether a given activity is one or the other:
The easiest way to tell is to look at how other people have progressed in that field. Don’t pay attention to their rates, just pay attention to the shape of their growth trajectory. Is it the kind that slows down with mastery or speeds up?
I’ve written about related themes in the past. Here’s my post about efforts where you see continuous, ongoing improvement vs. quantum leaps. Here’s my post about how formal schooling is an information rich environment where you receive constant feedback on how you’re doing, whereas in the real world you sometimes have to go months without knowing if you’re on the right track.
I’m fascinated by the notion of regret. If you want to understand someone, you should understand their regrets. People are more honest and insightful when talking about regret than when sharing life experiences about which they have pride.
On the topic, I often invoke the Mark Twain line “We regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do.” In other words, looking back and wondering “I wonder what would have happened if I had done…” hurts more than looking back at something that didn’t work out and regretting having taken the action.
Vaughan Bell over at Mindhacks has a good post on a recent study of Americans’ regrets. The sources regret are predictable — romance, career, education, family. The interesting part has to do with whether inaction actually leads to more regret than action. Sounds like it depends whether you want short term and acute pain or softer, more lasting pain:
The study also found that regrets about things you haven’t done were equally as common as regrets about things you have, no matter how old the person.
The difference between the two is often a psychological one, because we can frame the same regret either way – as regret about an action: ‘If only I had not dropped out of school’; or as a regret about an inaction: ‘If only I had stayed in school’.
Despite the fact that they are practically equivalent, regrets framed as laments about actions were more common and more intense than regrets about inactions, although inaction regrets tended to be longer lasting.
So the question of whether it is better to regret something you haven’t done than regret something you have, might actually be answerable for some people, but we still don’t know how much choice we have over adopting the different views of regrets or whether this is largely determined by the situation.
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Here’s my post on regret aversion as a decision making framework. Here’s my post on the regrets of the dying. Here are the things various friends regret not doing when they turned 18.
Malcolm Gladwell, in an online exchange with Bill Simmons, had two noteworthy paragraphs. The first:
I was in the Orlando airport not long ago, waiting in one of those endless security queues, when I looked up and saw that the ticket agent was escorting someone to the head of the line. She takes him past at least a hundred people and inserts him right in front of the conveyer belt. He wasn’t in a hurry. In fact, the guy turned out to be on the same flight I was, which didn’t leave for another hour. Who was it? Ray Lewis. Two things. One — there is no way she does that for anyone but a sports star. She would have stopped Albert Einstein if his driver’s license looked a little fishy. Second — no one said anything. We all just kind of nodded and looked at each other and said, “Cool! Ray Lewis.” Here’s a man who makes millions of dollars for hitting people really hard and it somehow makes complete sense to the rest of us that he should be able to cut in ahead of teachers, salesmen, nurses, working moms, and hack writers. If you are someone like Ray Lewis and that kind of thing happens to you every single day of the year, how do you stay normal? Standing in line in airports and other everyday rituals of modern life are the kinds of things that civilize us: As annoying as they are, they remind us that we are all equal and they teach us patience, and they grant us a kind of ultimately useful anonymity. Ray Lewis and celebrities of his ilk never have the privilege of those moments. By the way, Lewis was wearing a daring ochre, Caribbean-style pantsuit that, at some future point, deserves its own Grantland exposé. So yes. It’s not easy being LeBron.
And the second, on the LeBron theme and on his taking his talents to South Beach:
A quick thought experiment on LeBron James. A young, white 22-year-old from a nice, preppy upper-middle class family graduates from Oberlin and goes to work for a small-market investment bank in downtown Cleveland. He quickly establishes himself as a brilliant trader, possessed of a freakish instinct for the markets. He makes his bank hundreds of millions of dollars. But he wants to take his talents to Wall Street, where he can be surrounded by other great traders and have access to global capital markets. When his contract is up in Cleveland, he shops around before agreeing to join the legendary trading desk at Goldman Sachs, at what turns out to be a slight cut in pay. On his first day on the job, he’s interviewed on CNBC about his “decision,” and he predicts that his skills in combination with the talent already at Goldman will earn billions of dollars for Goldman’s clients in the years to come. Is there a single person in the financial world who would raise even an eyebrow about that guy’s behavior?
How many of them are living in the moment? What’s the smartphone to digital camera ratio? How many people whip out their camera in a crowd because everyone around them is? Questions on a rainy Saturday evening…
How do you deal with feelings of intellectual inadequacy?
A high school student applying to MIT is struggling with these feelings. Here's one reply on this Reddit thread via Cal Newport:
The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out.
The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.
During my freshman year, I almost failed out of differential equations. I was able to recover and go on to be very successful in my studies. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.
You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.
So do it.
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I am hyperaware of situations where I feel intellectually outmatched. When I do, I don't think the solution is only "deciding" that I will improve myself to meet the challenge, per the comment excerpted above. That's necessary–and it's why surrounding yourself with people who push you to do this is key–but it's not enough.
Feeling intellectually outmached also forces me to think harder about my unique combination of abilities–where I have a comparative advantage in the specific situation. No one is smarter than you in every possible way. Smart is very context specific.
Someone at LessWrong transcribed Tyler Cowen's TEDx talk on the problem with stories and narrative–and how we let ourselves be governed by them. It's a good one, and faster to read than listen.
I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good vs. evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more….
One interesting thing about cognitive biases – they're the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudgebook, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don't these books tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like "I bought this book. I won't be Predictably Irrational." It's like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It's why there's such a market for pessimism. But to think that buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people that realize, "I don't know anything at all," that end up doing pretty well.
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The other week I hosted a storytelling night. Eight of us convened and each went around the room and told a story. My suggested theme to the group was travel. One person's said the following near the beginning of his story: "And then I embarked on a monthlong trip through the Bolvian highlands. I was all by myself, and I had plenty of time to think about Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Tyler Cowen." It was a fun evening.
All dating compatability tests end up testing for a simple question: "Will we laugh at the same shit?"
That's one nugget among many from the relatively recent New Yorker article on online dating.
Another nugget: the answer to the question "Do you like the taste of beer?" is more predictive than any other of whether you’re willing to have sex on a first date.
The always worthwhile Caitlin Flanagan recently penned a gushing essay about Oprah. Oprah possess remarkable range–in a single show she can interview a guest who was abused by her husband and then, later on in the program, do a segment on the wonders of a panini sandwich maker. There are few others who handle light and heavy topics with equal aplomb, Flanagan says.
Along these lines, the paragraph below from Flanagan caught my eye:
THERE ARE CERTAIN things about women that men will never understand, in part because they have no interest in understanding them. They will never know how deeply we care about our houses—what a large role they play in our dreams for ourselves, how unhappy their shortcomings make us. Men think they understand the way our physical beauty—or lack of it, or assaults on it from age or extra weight—preys on our minds, but they don’t fully grasp the significance these things have for us. Nor can they understand the way physical comforts or simple luxuries—the fresh towel or the fat new cake of soap—can lift our spirits. And they will never know how much our lives are shaped around the fear of bad men and the harm they can bring us if we’re not careful, if we’re not banded together, if we’re not telling each other what to watch out for, what we’ve learned. We need each other’s counsel, and oftentimes it comes when we’re talking about other things, when we seem not to have much important on our minds at all.
It's not that a woman's anxieties about body image might be equal to the delight of a new cake of soap; it's that to fully understand a person (woman or man) you need to know what keeps them up at night, yes, but you also need to know their favorite bike route, or ice cream flavor of choice, or the story behind the shirt they always wear on the weekends.
Oprah gets this. It's part of what makes her so successful.
Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind. Likewise, every Dutch child has to pass a bicycle safety exam at school. The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture.
Related:
Cyclists can’t carry six bags of groceries; bulk buying is almost nonexistent. Instead of shopping for a week, people stop at the market daily. So the need for processed loaves that will last for days is gone. A result: good bread.
