Month: April 2008

More about Never Enough

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From Never Enough by Joe McGinniss, which I blogged about:

One day she noticed that Michael wasn’t wearing the [$7000] watch [she’d given him]. He was embarrassed to tell her why. Finally, he said he’d told his brother Lance about the affair but Lance had been born again and told Michael he was immoral. More to the point, he told Michael he was fired. They argued. Finally, Lance said that Michael could keep his job in return for the watch.

Shades of the indulgences that upset Martin Luther! You don’t find this sort of detail in other books.

How Things Begin (conference-call classes about Indian philosophy)

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Waiting for a BART train I met Krishna Kashyap, a San Diego businessman, who teaches classes on Indian philosophy by conference call. He was born in India and studied philosophy there before he came to America.

There are many such classes. About 15 years ago, a Berkeley student named Mani Varadarajan started a listserv called bhaktilist, which allowed people who were interested in Vaishnava Vedanta to contact each other and exchange ideas. This is how the conference-call classes began. Bhaktilist no longer exists, but many lists came from it, including srirangasri@yahoogroups.com and oppiliappan@yahoogroups.com. There are several thousand people on these lists.

Kashyap himself recently stopped teaching classes so that he would have more time to learn. He is now taking classes with a teacher named K. S. Varadachar. He dials his number in India at a particular time. Other people can dial in as well. They listen and ask questions. “I got isolated from my community when I came to this country 20 years ago,” Kashya said. “Reading books is not enough. There wasn’t any other way to communicate [besides the conference calls]. When I wanted to learn I had to get teachers from India.”

Now there are 4 or 5 classes simultaneously; they meet by phone once/week, using freeconferencecall.com. The Indian lecturers don’t get paid or at least such is the convention. They are given an end-of-term “gift,” called sambhavana, that is $200-$1000.

A vast amount about Indian philosophies is here.

How different from American higher education! People learn easily, without coercion, without threats, without punishments, without external rewards, if they see their teacher as a guru. The American term for guru, of course, is motivational speaker.

More about Acne

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The highlight of my recent trip to New York was a talk I gave at Landmark High School, a public high school near Columbus Circle. The students paid close attention. Afterwards, a student named John Cortez told me what he’d figured out about what causes his acne. His skin was clear so I had to believe he knew what he was talking about.

He has three rules: 1. Eat less greasy food. 2. Work out hard. 3. Wash face extremely well, especially after working out. The last rule is surprising because one of Allen Neuringer’s students found that acne got better when she stopped washing her face. John explained his reasoning like this:

When I was little I got something because of the lack of hand washing. Nothing serious — it went away — but it caused me to become sort of a neat freak. When i started to get pimples I thought it was because i didn’t wash my face well. When i started to wash my face better, my acne stopped getting worse. One day i got lazy and from there on I stopped washing. Then I noticed that I was almost covered with pimples. When I got in a gym I realized that when i sweat and as soon as possible, washed my face got less pimples and prevented those nasty huge acne.

Amount JC figured out about acne while in high school: A lot. Amount SR figured about acne while in high school: Zero.

Addendum. Another unexpected aftereffect of my talk was that Shangri-La Diet forum traffic went way up. That evening, at one point there were 307 people simultaneously reading the forums, a new record. The average daily maximum during the days just before was about 150. There were about 50 people at my talk. Go figure.

How Things Begin (Reading the OED)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Maybe this post should be titled How Books Get Written. A curious feature of the book industry is that it gets almost all of its key ingredient — book manuscripts — from amateurs. No other big industry is like this. If our economy is a giant experiment, this point is an outlier. A huge outlier. What does it mean?

To find out, it would help to look at specific cases. I asked Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED (forthcoming), how he managed to write it. He replied:

The advance was plenty for me to live on for a year, which is approximately how long the book took. However, I live cheap. I moved in with my girlfriend, who owns her own apartment, and so the rent, or maintenance costs, are low. We cook at home, tend to not buy things that we don’t need, and our idea of excitement is to go to a new library.

I had wanted to read the OED for quite some time, but knew that I didn’t have the leisure to spend ten hours a day doing so. I wrote the book proposal to see if I could convince some publisher to, in effect, subsidize my hobby.

I’ve worked as either a musician or a furniture mover for most of the past twenty years – both are occupations which allow a certain freedom; freedom from both responsibility and security. Taking off time was not so much of a problem. In terms of circulating the proposal I had my agent send it out. He’s the same one that I had when I wrote several other books, some eight or ten years ago.

Ammon’s editor is the same as mine (Marian Lizzi), which is why I knew about his book. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21730 Pages (= 60 pages/day) will be published in August.

Self-Experimentation, Dogged and Useful

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Studying himself, Piotr Wozniak, a Polish computer programmer, learned some useful things:

In 1985, he divided his database into three equal sets and created schedules for studying each of them. One of the sets he studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the third at expanding intervals, increasing the period between study sessions each time he got the answers right. This experiment proved that Wozniak’s first hunch was too simple. On none of the tests did his recall show significant improvement over the naive methods of study he normally used. But he was not discouraged and continued making ever more elaborate investigations of study intervals, changing the second interval to two days, then four days, then six days, and so on. Then he changed the third interval, then the fourth, and continued to test and measure, measure and test, for nearly a decade.

Based on his results he created a popular program called SuperMemo.

Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. . . . Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.

Thanks to John Kounios, Robert Simmons, and Navanit Arakeri.

Glimpse of the Future: Dim Sum?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The most surprising finding of my self-experimentation was that we need to see faces in the morning — every morning for most of us — to be in a good mood during the day. Morning faces push an oscillator that controls our mood. During the Stone Age, this need was fulfilled by talking to your neighbors. The function of this oscillator was to synchronize the moods of people who live together. It greased the wheels of cooperation. It’s much easier to work with someone in a good mood than someone in a bad mood.

Since I discovered this, I’ve wondered: What will this mean for everyday life? Will people chat via videophones? Watch YouTube videos (“This is my response to . . . “)? Look in a mirror? Gather in cafes? Or what? You need a community to make this work, since you need to see one or more faces for a half hour or more.

Last night at Teance, at a Slow Food event, I learned of two modern communities where people manage to get the needed face time. One is in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong Province, China. Every morning retired people get together and drink tea. Where do they meet? I asked. “Anywhere,” I was told. They may meet in a park, for example. In Guangdong they drink more tea than anywhere else in China and, I was told, have better health than the rest of China.

The other community are those Cantonese, both in Hong Kong and in Guangdong Province, who eat dim sum every day for breakfast. They gather in restaurants that serve dim sum. You can come whenever you like but the the restaurants open around 5 am and the whole thing may last four hours. (My results imply that the face-to-face conversation should happen during the first hours or so after you get up. Wait till 10 am and there won’t be any effect.) You might have three business meetings during that time. You can stretch out eating dim sum in a way you can’t easily stretch out eating breakfast that appears all on one plate at once. So it lends itself to longer meals. The longer everyone spends at the dim sum restaurant, the easier it becomes to meet there.

Never Enough by Joe McGinniss

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I am reading Never Enough, Joe McGinniss‘s latest book. I was browsing at the Berkeley Public Library and there it was! It was a little like discovering a painting by Jackson Pollack in a thrift store. The typical book I want to read at BPL has 15 holds on it.

I am trying to read it as slowly as possible so that it will last as long as possible. It is surely the best book I have read this year. It is one of the best books I have read since I read The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (1999) by McGinniss, which was also incredibly good. That was another book hard to stop reading. In both books, the characters are bathed in a golden authorial light. Events are described with a beautiful simplicity, as if in a story for children, except what happens is intricate, meandering, morally complex, and true. In Miracle, McGinniss falls in love with the soccer team of a little town only to have his heart broken when they throw their last game. In Never Enough, a man is murdered — and then his brother, half a world away, is also murdered. (Which happened while McGinniss was writing about the first murder.) Surely the murders are unconnected yet how could they not be connected?

What Do Jobs Need to Be Good?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I’ve always wondered what makes a job satisfying. Yeah, it varies from person to person. What about features that are true for everyone? What about this, for example?

For a while at Amazon, I was the Manager of Website Performance and Availability. . . . Whenever something went wrong, and some chunk of the site got slow, I tracked down why and got people to fix it. Each week I wrote a report summarizing everything that went wrong in excruciating detail, and presented it to a room of directors and VPs in a weekly metrics meeting. It was as sisyphean a task as any you can possibly imagine. In a software system as large, complex and constantly changing as amazon.com, something is always going wrong. . . . My job was to make a list of irritating things each week, and I was widely regarded as having done it as well as anyone ever had. . . .I found this job to be the most soul-crushing work I’ve ever done. I totally burned out in a year, as did the person who held the job before me.

I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things.

Related research. The writing cure.