Freak Out! Levitt and Dubner Teach You to Outwit Yourself

Freakonomics was a very popular and entertaining book a few years ago that drew some pretty controversial conclusions about social problems from statistical analysis, and is classified under "Economics." The authors wrote a follow-up called Superfreakonomics, which I have not read, and have now issued Think Like a Freak, wherein they explicitly try to teach us how to ask different questions in order to get better answers. Their style remains light, entertaining, and long on memorable anecdotes rather than abstract theorizing, and they make 6 main points which are quite adequately summarized on their own website and in this Forbes article.

This book makes a great compare-and-contrast with David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell's latest, about which I wrote here. The tone is much more light-hearted, but the goal is the same: how can we get our minds out of the boxes we normally keep them in and solve some problems? They made a lot of sort of theoretically interesting points that might help me if I wanted to eat a lot of hot dogs or identify terrorists or maybe even weed out a large pool of job applicants, but the chapter that really was directly applicable to my life right now was the last one, the one about quitting.

"Never give up! Never surrender!" says Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest, but in real life it turns out that quitting can really make you happier. I guess happiness isn't everything, but, all other things being equal, it sure beats the alternative. The authors give examples from their own lives and describe a highly unscientific experiment that is still running on their website here. Well, not so much of an experiment any more as a service-- I just tried it, and it's more of a Magic 8 Ball than anything else, as it doesn't harvest any follow-up data anymore. Anyway, the point is that based on the self-reported experiences of many people who did or didn't quit something, quitters do, in fact, sometimes win.

The reasons for this are many. One classy-sounding one is the opportunity cost of continuing what you're doing versus the sunk cost of having done it so far-- when you quit something, you suddenly free up all the resources that were going into it, and can pursue other new and different things that may be more rewarding. But then there's also the unknown possibility of giving up right before it gets good. And then there's just the emotional distaste many of us have for quitting!

To pick a simple example, say you are waiting in line for free Rita's Water Ice on the first day of Spring. The line is moving more slowly than you had expected. Do you keep waiting or ditch? Well, you've already spent x amount of time waiting, so if you bail, that time will be wasted. On the other hand, if you keep waiting, you will miss out on all the other Spring-like things you could be doing instead, such as gathering ye rosebuds or falling in love or whatnot. On the third hand, another counter could open up, and the line could start moving much faster. Yikes! Decisions, decisions! And that's not even a perfect example, because in many quitting situations, there is also some level of probability that you will never get what you want-- that, God forbid, Rita's will run out of water ice before you get there, in which case quitting would have been a much smarter move than holding.

Okay, so I think about this problem all the time. I think about it in my work, because I coach people working towards goals, students who have to decide whether they are done or want to keep trying. I am a firm believer that you gotta know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. There is a time to do one more step on a math problem and arrive at the answer, and there is a time to not waste one more second on a problem that will never love you back. There is a time to try the test again to see if you can improve still more, and there is a time to say that good enough is good enough and the probable return on investment just isn't high enough to justify the massive amount of effort involved.

I also think about it in my personal life with respect to different activities I am involved in. I think about it with this blog! I am always asking myself whether what I am doing is worth the time and effort, but then I don't want to allow myself to be a quitter. But at some point, if you keep adding new things and never quit any of the others, you can't physically do it all, so that's a consideration. I still have trouble with the concept that it could be okay to do some things just for a period of time, though, even though that's obviously sort of how life in the physical world just is. No one joins a bowling league with the idea that they will continue with it for the rest of their life, but somehow teaching Sunday school, for example, seems different. It seems like it's part of who you are and is not something you should just quit. Maybe that's why my favorite kind of activity is an ad-hoc project, with "quitting time" built in!

150-159: Tech Support for Your Brain

158, Applied Psychology, is a very popular call number and includes many 'self-help' books. Best of all, it's heavily represented in the audio section of my library, so while I am driving I can get a cognitive tune-up!

I just finished David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, which was really intense. He told story after story of folks who faced terrible adversity and from it acquired skills and strengths that enabled them to achieve great things. If I were writing an SAT essay about whether failure is part of success or some such uplifting thing, I could pretty much just summarize this book. Didn't I like it, you ask? Yes, if by "like" you mean "found interesting and thought-provoking." By "like" you probably don't mean "listened to while crying over the Irish Troubles and the London Blitz," though, so I can only recommend the book with reservations.

The most obvious question it makes one ask oneself is: "Do I have any weaknesses that are actually strengths?" One example in my case is my chronic low-grade depression. Before you rush to fix my brokenness, hear me out! Listening to this book reminded me that, although I would prefer not to have this condition and would never wish it on anyone else, it does give me a superpower: there are days where I just don't care. On some days, mind you, just some, I don't care what movie we see, because I'm not going to enjoy any of them. I don't care whether you hate me, because I hate myself. I don't care whether I live or die, because it's all the same to me. Therefore, I can be an unusually easy person to negotiate with, I can take all the blame for the problem at hand so we can move on to actually solving it, and I can take physical risks for causes I believe in. And I already know 3 or 4 pretty good ways to talk someone off the ledge, because I have that conversation with myself on a regular basis.

So, you see, I don't need to be repaired. I'd return this condition to sender in a flash if it were that easy, but I have figured out how to work around it. I appreciate the listening ears and encouraging words that have kept me going over the years, but ultimately my "desirable difficulty" has been like Paul's in the Bible. Gladwell quotes him as another David who defeated Goliaths: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." (2 Co 12:9)

Interlude: what I want

 I review because I care: I want you to read good books and avoid bad ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/books/review/is-book-reviewing-a-public-service-or-an-art.html?_r=0

I also want to record the flow of human knowledge as organized by a Dewey Decimal library, and, incidentally, I want to record the effect that being exposed to all these branches of inquiry is having on me personally.

I may not do all these jobs every time. I may not do any of them very well at any time. But I am determined to keep trying and to improve as I go. Thanks for coming with me.

Everyone's a Critic

Well, not everyone-- after all, most of the 130s was in praise of poltergeists and feng shui. But the critical book I chose, Exposed!: Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, turned out to be unreadable. Literally indecipherable in that there were sentences that just didn't convey any meaning to my mind. Maybe something was lost in the translation from the original French, but so much for that.

The redundantly titled 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True was slightly more readable, but it was in a different Dewey Decimal category for a reason. It really wasn't just about debunking specific beliefs, not just about the paranormal, but about various aspects of how people think the world works. It was really about exemplifying and promoting the philosophy of skepticism, which seems to me to be somewhat hollow. It's not so much a philosophy of life as an epistemology. All it has to offer is a certain way to approach knowledge, rather than a coherent body of thought, so I certainly wasn't going to read 50 essays, many of which boiled down to: "Here's a thing people think. I can't prove that it's true, so I won't believe it, which makes me smart!" The one where he pretended to be a psychic was pretty interesting, though. There he really did prove something: that it's not hard to convince someone that you are psychic even though you know you're not!

130-139: Everything Spooky! 140-149: All the Philosophies!

The paranormal in all its glory is the subject of the 130s. Ghosts, vampires, witches; feng shui, the I Ching, astrology, palm reading, and psychics; Nostradamus and 2012; it's all there. And I find it all pretty creepy. So this week I channelled my inner skeptic and only brought home Exposed! Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, by Henri Broch, which Amazon, btw, markets under the category of "Controversial Knowledge." Seems to me that's an oxymoron. I mean, knowledge sounds to me like facts, and facts can't be controversial. They just are. You might not like gravity-- it sure annoys me sometimes-- but it's not just a good idea, as the saying goes, it's the law.

(Anyway, at least the title of the book leaves something to the imagination, unlike another offering in the 140s: Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. For some reason, that title struck me as hilariously specific and uninviting to anyone (like myself) who doesn't have a dog or a particular interest in their admittedly admirable loyalty and affection.)

Speaking of unlikeable facts, or fictions, I also went into the 140s, where there is much less selection, and decided to stick with my theme of grumpy cynicism. I chose, mainly because of its absurd title, 50 Popular Beliefs that People Think Are True, by Guy P. Harrison. Is it just me, or is that sort of like 50 Philosophies that Are Ways of Looking at Things, or Cute Kitties that Are Felines? Well, I guess I am going to learn about popular beliefs that people think are true, as opposed to popular beliefs that people think are crap but still invite to parties, because I am in no frame of mind right now to read 500 pages on Romanticism or Humanism, which is what else I could do in the 140s.

Really I just want to get on with it and into the 150s, where 158 (applied psychology, or, unofficial tech support for your brain) is loaded with books I've been actually wanting to read, like Think Like a Freak (sequel to the very entertaining Freakonomics) and The 8th Habit (because 7 weren't enough and Stephen Covey does not come across like a flim-flam artist.) And they're available on audio, so I can get mental hacks in my car!

But first I have to debunk everything from dowsing to Area 51. I'll let you know if I turn up anything really interesting!

How to Be Human

I just finished The Most Human Human by Brian Christian, which is about computers simulating human conversation (one working definition of AI). You will get a detailed summary from this interview. Computer simulation of other supposedly exclusively human skills has been all over the news lately, too: moral and ethical improvisations in The New York Times, identification of emotions via facial expressions in the New Yorker.

AI is always all over the place. The IKEA chatbot, for example. It was programmed by a previous winner of the Loebner prize, but was completely unhelpful to me. I asked it if I could arrange for someone else to assemble my order, and it just referred me to generic web pages that did not contain the information I wanted. Then it asked whether its answer had been helpful. When I said No, it responded "Sorry. As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no.' " Well, that's adorable, but shuts down the conversation, doesn't it? As I learned from the book, a good conversationalist offers plenty of holds with her responses, instead of just saying, "That's not what I wanted to hear."

My favorite robots are the ones that don't pretend not to be, like the CVS prescription reorder system.  "Press or say 1," "The first three letters of the patient's last name are..." Okay, that's a conversation we can have. If I have any actual questions, I can press 2 for a real person.

So the topic of conversation simulation is interesting in itself, but the description of Christian's experiences as a Loebner Prize confederate went beyond interesting to inspiring. I even emailed the organizers about the possibility of participating next year! If nothing else, what a great excuse to take a trip to Bletchley Park!

120-129: Matters of Life and Death

The 120's encompass both what it means to be human and what happens afterwards: the most popular number is 129, which includes both Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates and, in the children's department, The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, by Leo Buscaglia, which is pretty much exactly as creepy as you might expect.  

Heidegger, of course, is the diametric opposite of creepy, but I just lost patience with it. One of their main points is that you are going to die and you probably are in denial about that, but not me! I am stunningly aware that my life is finite! That's why I'm only reading one book from each decade of the library, not every single book or even one from each number!

So I chose The Most Human Human, an engagingly-written combination stunt memoir and research paper about artificial intelligence and the Turing test, aka the Imitation Game. So far he has explained how he came to participate in the Loebner Prize as a human, and has gone on to discover that one essential element of human conversation is continuity, that it hangs together. Now he's talking about whether logic is overrated. I actually got this book because I thought my husband, who works in computing, would like it, but I think it's really interesting too.