Original Cin

Kind of weird: my diet log for yesterday shows that, without intending to, I ate foods in order of descending calorie count. There are 3.6 million different ways I could have eaten the exact same stuff!

I saw this video on Thinking on the Margin. It reminds me of my “the world is strange” idea.

Seen on The Economic Way of Thinking, the blog From ABBA to Led Zeppelin:

Based off of the James Hetfield lyricsin the song Master Of Puppets, describe why someone would continue to engage in behavior that is self-damaging, expensive, and time consuming.

My brain hurts, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the question posed.

Found on the blog of Seth Godin, some amazing predictions from 2002: “Predictions“

Robin Hanson, “Hated Because It Might Work,” on the always wonderful Overcoming Bias:

Saying you want to do something weird for value or symbolic belief reasons is far less threatening than saying you want to do something weird for instrumental reasons. Common social norms encourage acceptance of weird values and symbolic beliefs, as long as those don’t much effect ordinary behavior. But by saying your weird act is a much better way to achieve important ordinary goals, you are saying the rest of us are making a big mistake.

I don’t have a clue about what to do with a significant other that doesn’t want you to do weird things, but then again, I’m not married, either.

Corfam – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The 1966 Chilean issue of Reader’s Digest claimed that by 1983 there would not be enough leather from cows, demand exceeding supply by 30%.

Robin Hanson points to an interesting case of underconfidence on my favorite blog, Overcoming Bias.

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes “If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help” on Overcoming Bias:

Born into a world of science, they [fantasy fiction readers] did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don’t have the scientific attitude, that nothing is “mere” – the capacity to be interested in merely real things – how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren’t nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.

This is not exactly the same as my “the world is strange” principle, but it is very similar. Alas, I can’t remember where I read that a sense of wonder about the world makes someone more likely to be successful.

This tentative guideline to life is actually based on the title of one of the first blogs I encountered, The Skeptical Optimist. People think that there’s a contradiction between being skeptical and being an optimist, but it’s not true. I don’t think this actually goes far enough — I think it’s a good idea to be both cynical and optimistic.

Quite a long time ago, I was an avowed pessimist, and proud of it, thank you very much. I believed things were always getting worse, and virtually everyone who didn’t agree with me had an agenda of some sort.

I now believe that most people mean what they say. This isn’t because people are especially virtuous; it’s simply easier than lying. As economist Bryan Caplan puts it: “The legions of people who imagine that their opponents secretly agree with them are utterly deluded…. Sincerity is greatly overrated.” Also, on the subject of legions, there’s a legion of cognitive biases available to prop up your beliefs no matter what they are. So, people aren’t usually intentionally villainous, they’re just mostly self-interested and terribly biased.

But, none of that should get in the way of optimism. Often enough, people do the right thing, just because. Even if they didn’t, the result of the actions of greedy, myopic people can be something better than a dog-eat-dog train wreck, just because that’s the way society works.

Additionally, although you can’t change your personal circumstances, there is flexibility to your own choices which allows you to make the best of your own environment — if things are bad, make them better.

…it’s so important to observe how users actually behave versus the way they tell you they behave. People who do this professionally are called “economists” – Jeff Atwood, “Every User Lies“, Coding Horror

Inspired by running across my old (pen and paper) journal last night, and by this post at the Happiness Project, I decided to create a list of things I’ve learned (draft version):

• Be cynically optimistic.
• There is a cost to everything.
• Location, location, location — the physical world and its arrangement are still important
• Words are not weapons.
• Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. This goes double for advice, boasts, and what you’re thinking. Don’t believe everything you hear, no matter who says it or how confident they are. Even, especially, if they’ve made a living saying it. Beware cognitive bias.
• The world is strange. Cthulhu Mythos level strange. We just don’t notice because we’re used to it.
• Small things can have a big impact, but the most obvious example, compound interest, may be overrated.
• If something you want doesn’t exist, create it.
• Despite the fact that talk is cheap, the crowd may have a point when everyone is doing, or believes, something.
• We regret virtue more than vice. No, really.
• The cost of not buying something can often exceed its price.
• People are very important.

I’ll be going through each of these and evaluating and explaining them as I get time.

I was going through my bookmarks, and found this via Collision Detection, an article which has had quite an impact on my thinking on some matters:

While yielding to temptation can certainly be harmful, this article argues that overcontrol and excessive farsightedness (hyperopia) can also have negative long-term consequences. In particular, we propose that, with the passage of time, choices of virtue over vice (e.g., work over pleasure) evoke increasing regret.

- “Repenting Hyperopia“, Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan

I probably would not have gone to ACEN 2007 if I hadn’t read this. On the other hand, there are some things in the past that I wish I had worked harder at, as well as past tasks that I wish I had just completely neglected (case in point: I spent a lot of time, money, and effort deciding which college to attend. My friend Scott picked UIC mostly on the basis of its location, and partly at random. I think he made a better choice by far; I also probably would have gotten more out of the experience if I had done less homework and gone to some parties from time to time).

This ties in perfectly with that post a little while back:

Eighty percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills; the majority of workers rate their job performance above average; and the majority of motorists (even those who have been involved in accidents) rate their driving as safer than average.

- Seligman, Martin E.P., Authentic Happiness, 2002, 37. Citing Headey B. and Wearing A. (1989) “Personality, life events, and subjective well-being: Toward a dynamic equilibrium model.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 731-739.

Someone left a direct-mail “subscribe now” pamphlet for Ladies’ Home Journal lying around, and one of the stories mentioned in it caught my attention.

It has often been remarked that people consider themselves above average regardless of actual standing. Yet, in a normally distributed population, half the people have to be above the average, and half must be below. So, I was somewhat surprised by this “survey says” factoid:

26% [of women surveyed] said their sex life was above average and 22% said it was great!

In other words, as we would expect from a realistic evaluation of the quality of women’s sex lives, half said that they were above average. In fact, the total that said they were above average was actually slightly less than half (48%).

Now, mind you, there are all sorts of things this doesn’t tell us.

• This doesn’t tell us what men think of their sex lives, so no comparison is possible just from this.
• We don’t know anything about the sample size or how the survey was conducted. Given the publication, it probably wasn’t all that formal. Also, surveys about sex are famously prone to all sorts of biases.
• The survey included only Ladies’ Home Journal readers. They might be atypical in some way that would allow them to better compare their sex lives to those of other women (maybe they’re using LHJ itself as a reference to judge their own relationships – the back of the same mailing has “spice it up now” hints and tips).
• We don’t know (and probably can’t reasonably measure) how womens’ sex lives really compare to one another – that is, if Alice really has a better thing going for her with her husband Alfred than her friend Barbra has with her boyfriend Barry, or if Alice just thinks her relationship is better.

Back in college, I knew a person named Kyle (I think) who was absolutely crazy about history. Lies My Teacher Told Me was his favorite book. He thought that history was something everyone should know forward and backwards. I think he knew the exact year that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. When I asked him why history was so important, his answer came shockingly close to the aphorism that “people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”.*

There is a problem with this reason to study history – it is a falsifiable statement. If we accept that a knowledge of past events allows one to draw parallels with present situations and make better decisions as a result, then we should observe that historians are better decision-makers and make better predictions about the future than the rest of us. A quick search of Google Scholar reveals that someone has, in fact, done exactly that, although no full articles appear to be available online. I intend to look further into this, and see what people have actually found.

*I suspect that this saying is to history as Keynes’s quote about people being “…the slaves of some defunct economist” is to economics. It sounds really neat, but it’s actually pretty dumb.

I like Splenda in my tea, but I don’t like what the company behind Spenda seems to be up to lately. Not that it’s evil, just stupid. Found via the blog of Seth Godin is a story about Spenda’s marketing buying up negative domain names related to the sweetener.

Godin sarcastically asks “Is there enough money in the world to buy enough domain names to keep a determined person from saying something nasty about Splenda?” For those of you not familiar with how domains work, the answer is an obvious no – Bill Gates and Warren Buffet working together, liquidating all resources at their disposal, could not accomplish such a feat.

Actually, there are all sort of negative Splenda domains still available. Consider the following, taken from a registrar as of this writing:

badsplenda.com AVAILABLE
badsplenda.net AVAILABLE
badsplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendablows.com AVAILABLE
splendablows.net AVAILABLE
splendablows.org AVAILABLE
splendaisevil.com AVAILABLE
splendaisevil.net AVAILABLE
splendaisevil.org AVAILABLE
saynotospenda.com AVAILABLE
saynotospenda.net AVAILABLE
saynotospenda.org AVAILABLE
deathbysplenda.com Make Offer
deathbysplenda.net AVAILABLE
deathbysplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendacancer.com AVAILABLE
splendacancer.net AVAILABLE
splendacancer.org AVAILABLE
splendasick.com AVAILABLE
splendasick.net AVAILABLE
splendasick.org AVAILABLE
waronsplenda.com AVAILABLE
waronsplenda.net AVAILABLE
waronsplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendainformation.com AVAILABLE
splendainformation.net AVAILABLE
splendainformation.org AVAILABLE
splenda-addicts.com AVAILABLE
splenda-addicts.net AVAILABLE
splenda-addicts.org AVAILABLE
splendaboycott.com AVAILABLE
splendaboycott.net AVAILABLE
splendaboycott.org AVAILABLE
boycottsplenda.com AVAILABLE
boycottsplenda.net AVAILABLE
boycottsplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendacensors.com AVAILABLE
splendacensors.net AVAILABLE
splendacensors.org AVAILABLE
splendabastards.com AVAILABLE
splendabastards.net AVAILABLE
splendabastards.org AVAILABLE

All those domain names that I came up with off the top of my head, and only one of them is taken! Those Splenda people didn’t do a very thorough job at all. Tsk, tsk. You didn’t even think of blows as a synonym for sucks. I’m sure Urban Dictionary has some good ones too (Oh, splendawack.com is also available). The examples may be taken by someone shortly, but the search space for negative domain names for Splenda is so large that finding them all before someone else does is a futile task.

Disregarding all that about domain names, there’s another problem for people trying to squash negative speech about this product. Already, their actions have been interpreted as an implicit admission of guilt, as seen in the Sustainable is Good link. I’ll admit, first and foremost, that I don’t know how ideas die or how to kill them, except that it’s very, very tough. Shouting the opposite idea from the rooftops, however, rarely works. Implicit in each and every single domain registration no matter where it may be redirected to is the idea that sucralose is a dangerous product, and that there is a conspiracy to make Splenda look good.