Many years ago, I was being driven to the airport and observed something stupid about myself. Then I used science (kind of). I remember this so clearly because it has symbolised other challenges since then.
I had a bag of snacks — Doritos or Chex Mix or something — sitting on my lap. I was eating them and talking with the driver. We were discussing business or something. I noticed I was eating the snacks rather quickly. Even after becoming aware of the speed, I found it hard to hold off on eating one for more than 10 seconds. (I probably ate a handful every ≤5 seconds.) The delicious taste of Chex Mix was in my mouth, making me want more.
As I thought about it, I was able to focus on the taste at least, and appreciate it, but I still found it hard to slow down.
I decided to do a little experiment on myself. I put the bag of Doritos at my feet instead of in between my legs. The next time I reached for the snacks I had a few more deciseconds to stay my hand—and it worked. The amount of time (or was it the effort?) it took to lean my torso forward gave me enough time (or was it inclination?) to think: “Do I really want another one yet?” and answer “No” more of the time. I started snacking more like every 30-60 seconds.
I decided to take the experiment one step further. (This is part of experimental science, right? You notice the beginnings of a trend and then you test more input values to see if the trend extrapolates.) I put the crisps (or squares, or whatever) behind my car seat. So, I needed to twist my torso, crane my neck, and put my arm into a fairly awkward position — costing more than a second and even more effort than leaning forward. That was enough to reduce my snacking to one every 2-5 minutes.
Certainly this is far from gold-standard science. But, I was satisfied with the findings (and until now, I didn’t publish them, so there was no-one else to satisfy.)
Years later Richard Thaler coined the wonderful phrase “libertarian paternalism” — and I thought, it doesn’t just have to be about governance. I can nudge myself as well. (Nudge is co-authored with Cass Sunstein, another hero.)
Here are some other tricks I’ve used to nudge myself into doing what I really want:
shutting my laptop when I leave it
putting my laptop in a drawer and closing it (both these give me more time to think: Is getting out the computer really what I want to do right now? What am I going to do on the computer? When am I going to be done?)
Standing at my desk improves my mood and energy and also makes me spend less time at the computer. (a key challenge is getting a monitor at eye level and a keyboard just below elbow level.)
Close my eyes if webpages take a long time to load. (why burn them out / hypnotise myself any more?)
If sitting at a computer with a monitor, I aperiodically stand up, walk away, and face away from the computer. (I face a wall, sitting or standing, or look outside, and think about what I actually need to accomplish on the computer.)
move email conversations quickly to phone call (in business)
send “to-read” Amazon previews to Kindle
I use the “Save for Later” extension for Chrome. (Even if I don’t actually read it later, I can believe that illusion for long enough to kick the tab out of my immediate view.)
If I open a new tab/window for goofing off when I really shouldn’t, I say the word “No” out loud so I can hear myself. That sometimes helps me close the tab and get back to work, only 2 seconds wasted.
Whenever I spend a lot of money on myself (electronics or a trip), I donate to charity. (I guess that’s more about habit formation as self-discipline rather than nudging myself into compliance.)
putting snacks / dessert higher up or behind cupboards
leaving a nice-looking knife & cutting board out in plain sight
leave vegetables and beans out in plain sight
Spend time organising my workspace so that more important things to do (or symbols of things I want to do) are in plain sight. For example, I might stack “to read” papers out of the way (I’ll find them when I’m bored). But if I decide I need to work out more I might clear my workspace and put my gym card or shorts in plain view.
I haven’t developed any really good tricks for avoiding procrastinating on the Internet.
Partly it’s because of blurred boundaries about what’s worth reading and what’s not. Partly it’s because with three keystrokes I can pop open a Twitter window or tumblr or reddit or facebook or … on-and-on … and make my “strategic” decision from there.
The word “Evolution” nowadays suggests “evolution of organisms by natural selection as per Darwin & modern population genetics”.
But what about other kinds of evolution? Any unary endomorphism from a system onto itself, applied over and over to generate “time”, could be considered a kind of “evolution”.
History evolves artificially … although no-one knows the mapping.
Art evolves artificially … again, no-one knows the mapping. (but we know there is cross-pollination. Could we call it “Art sex”?)
Proto-biological chemical compounds, like basic amino acids, “evolved” by a method similar to natural selection.
Businesses (and entrepreneurs) that grow through trial-and-error, evolve their ideas and their business processes by artificial selection.
Romantic relationships evolve. Any human relationship evolves. Sometimes “a” relationship can evolve with a group of people as-a-unit. But here I’ve found the selection to be more exogenous than endogenous. Friendships seem to pick up exactly where they left off γᵢ(Tᵢ) rather than be pitched to the dustbin of 0. Even romantic relationships seem to hang mostly where they were, even after a breakup. Perhaps the breakup zeroes the romantic part ⌊γᵢ⌋ᵣ, but everything else—sexual chemistry, personality dynamics, humour dynamics, and history—remains stubbornly unbudged by a breakup per se.
And like I said, any endomorphism, repeatedly applied to a system, could count as “evolution”. (An endomorphism draws both the input and the output from the same domain, i.e. ƒ: X→X.) If there is a throw-away criterion (mapping ↦ 0), we could call that “selection”. Any fixed point of the mapping ƒ(p)↦p is an endpoint of evolution.
In this video, John Baez talks about how the inherent interestingness of the number5 has made itself apparent to us through several processes:
artists (mosque designers) discovered it. God speaks to us in the language of mathematics, remember?
crystals and quasicrystals discovered 5 by evolution — but not the biological kind
soot and space dust found ⬟, also by natural non-bio evolution
BTW, unrelated but some Scots (perhaps Picts) carved some Platonic solids out of stone centuries before Plato … so perhaps they should be called Scottish solids.
the Pariacoto virus found ⬟ by biological evolution
Roger Penrose (a mathematical physicist) discovered & described 5-way symmetry in modern mathematical (group theoretic) terms
In each case, logic is the canvas. Art — nature — mathematicians are the painters.
02:30 If you look carefully at the entire built world, you can find little stories in every tiny thing.
If you recognise that every corner, every seam, every curve was a point of decision by a really deliberate — and probably very smart — person, you can recognise a story in every little thing.
The goal of the show—it’s worked on me—is to notice more things.
[T]he point of introducing L^p spaces in the first place is … to exploit … Banach space. For instance, if one has |ƒ − g| = 0, one would like to conclude that ƒ = g. But because of the equivalence class in the way, one can only conclude that ƒ is equal to g almost everywhere.
The Lebesgue philosophy is analogous to the “noise-tolerant” philosophy in modern signal progressing. If one is receiving a signal (e.g. a television signal) from a noisy source (e.g. a television station in the presence of electrical interference), then any individual component of that signal (e.g. a pixel of the television image) may be corrupted. But as long as the total number of corrupted data points is negligible, one can still get a good enough idea of the image to do things like distinguish foreground from background, compute the area of an object, or the mean intensity, etc.
Terence Tao
If you’re thinking about points in Euclidean space, then yes — if the distance between them is nil, they are in the exact same spot and therefore the same point.
But abstract mathematics opens up more possibilities.
Like TV signals. Like 2-D images or 2-D × time video clips.
04:30 Exogeneity and endogeneity. There’s always a tension in modelling, between deriving something and assuming it. There are values in both ways of going. If you start with a non-basic assumption, you’re closer to where you want to get; you can focus on the parts that you want. On the other hand, there is the risk that the underlying reasons might make what you do with the model unattractive.
03:30 When you’re thoroughly embedded in a theory [like Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium], you’re as aware of the shortcomings as you are of the successes.
06:15 The government may have an advantage or a disadvantage vis-à-vis private markets. For example governments have difficulty making commitments. (Private enterprise, having the government to enforce contracts, has less difficulty.) On the othe rhand, the government has the ability to do things like collect taxes, and so impact large numbers of people with very low administrative costs. So that goes either way.
06:45 A full-blown theorem by Geneakoplos & Polemarchakis (12345) stood the welfare theorem in the Arrow-Debreu model on its head. In incomplete markets, the equilibrium is never Pareto optimal.
(Diamond says “the government can do better” but I think he might mean an omnipotent social organiser could do better.)
15:00+ Talking about why he built his search model the way he did.
If you took out all of the typical “Keynesian” elements (sticky prices, …), could you still get a picture of aggregate demand that looks Keynesian? The answer is yes.
17:30 Uncertainty in economics is unlike quantum-mechanical uncertainty.
19:00 Increasing returns to scale throughout the circle of production. (Does this have anything to do with growth?)
24:00 Changes in unemployment are more complicated than just a two-way unemployed to employed and back. In fact there are 3² paths, including:
e → i. employed to out-of-the-labour-force. Long vacations, retirement, I’ve-saved-up-enough-and-don’t-want-to-work-for-a-while, I’m-going-to-quit-and-write-a-book.
i → u. inactive to unemployed. The unemployment rate of American men during the Great Recession was 2.3 percentage points higher than the unemployment rate of American women during the same period. The New York Fed says that’s partly because a lot of men who were comfortably out-of-the-labour-force lost wealth (in the stock market crash) and started looking for work again — but couldn’t find work. In other words, new men who hadn’t been looking for jobs before, started looking for them — and that raised the unemployment rate.
e→e. A lot of people change jobs without ever being unemployed. They may take a different job at the same company, or switch companies. What does that do to the unemployment rate?
i→e. ”I wasn’t actively looking for work, but then I got an offer and took it.” So the number of unemployed people stays the same, and one of the open positions has now been filled by someone who wasn’t even counted in the unemployment statistics.
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25:45 “Job availability is the small difference between two large flows.” (job destruction and job creation each dwarf the job availability numbers)
Did you know that Harvard & MIT professors are ideological opponents of the Minneapolis Fed?
24:24 Picture of employment inflows and outflows across countries. Macroeconomists think that higher turnover leads to a more efficient economy.
25:45 Picture of the breakdown of the job separation numbers. (Quits + Layoffs + Retirements + Other) Job separation != job destruction because about half of separating employees are soon replaced with other workers.
Beverage Curve. The jokes write themselves.
31:00 Sometimes a hiring occurs without a vacancy posted first. (This is like at 24:00 where he said that unemployment and employment numbers are more complicated than you might assume.) In fact, maybe 20% of jobs are filled without the statisticians noticing a vacancy ever existed — and another 20% of jobs are filled without a vacancy ever actually existing at all.
34:00 Maybe the high U.S. unemployment rate (unemployment above Okun’s Law) doesn’t signal a dysfunction of the economy. Maybe the sectoral pieces of the economy are behaving just as usual, but different sectors have different Okun’s Law parameters — and the sectors with higher Okun’s constants are experiencing the greater shocks. (Okun’s constant = 30% historically has related changes in GDP to changes in employment)
35:00 Aggregate numbers didn’t show anything was wrong with the capital markets after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. And the Minneapolis Fed got it wrong for that reason. But if you disaggregated, you would have noticed a problem.
Do [people] achieve the optimal allocation of [their] time…? My answer is no; people allocate a disproportionate amount of time to the pursuit of pecuniary rather than nonpecuniary objectives, as well as to “comfort” and positional goods, and shortchange goals that will have a more lasting effect on well-being[.]
This misallocation occurs because, in making decisions about how to use their time, individuals take their aspirations as fixed at their present levels,and fail to recognize that aspirations may change because of hedonic adaptation and social comparison. In particular, people make decisions assuming that more income, comfort, and positional goods will make them happier, failing to recognize that hedonic adaptation and social comparison will come into play, raise their aspirations to about the same extent as their actual gains, and leave them feeling no happier than before.
As a result, most individuals spend a disproportionate amount of their lives working to make money, and sacrifice family life and health, domains in which aspirations remain fairly constant as actual circumstances change, and where the attainment of one’s goals has a more lasting impact on happiness.
Hence, a reallocation of time in favor of family life and health would, on average, increase individual happiness.
Richard Easterlin, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Human Mathematics 