Bus fare is 1 yuan — 15 cents. If you buy a card the fare goes down to 0.6 yuan.
ME How long does the reduction last?
FRIEND Forever.
Month: October 2008
The Neglected Importance of Diversity
In The Black Swan (2006), Nassim Taleb wrote:
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.
To me, this sounds Jacobian. Jane Jacobs disliked calls for reduced family size (e.g., Bill McKibben) not merely because she was a third child but because she disliked reducing the diversity of family ecology. In public health, it’s called the dangers of monoculture. The Irish potato famine (which “dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow” — William Butler) is a dietary example of Taleb’s point. When one (potato) crop failed, they all failed.
Self-experimentation is a more positive example of the broad point. Self-experimentation derives its power from two things: 1. Motivation. You are more motivated to solve your own problems than other people’s problems. 2. Diversity. The self-experimenter can do anything — change anything, measure anything. Other scientists cannot. For people with serious problems, such as depression, reduced diversity of the associated science (e.g., the science of what causes depression) is a long slow catastrophe when the associated science, because of its restricted nature, cannot find the best solutions (as I believe is the case with depression).
My animal-learning research also centers on this point. It is about what controls variation in behavior. Dave Stahlman (UCLA), Aaron Blaisdell (UCLA), and I will soon finish a paper about this. With too little variation, catastrophe is too likely, as Taleb says. So mechanisms to produce diversity have evolved. Just as the importance of diversity has been neglected by financiers, it has been neglected by research psychologists.
Proposed Book: How to Lie with Experimental Design
From ABC News:
Angelo Tremblay [a professor at Laval University] noticed something odd every time he worked up a grant application for his research program in a Quebec university. He had a craving for chocolate chip cookies.
Professor Tremblay wondered if this meant that thinking makes you fat — which is curious, because it implies that the rest of his job didn’t involve thinking, or at least less of it. More likely is that anxiety makes you crave pleasure-producing food (such as chocolate-chip cookies) to dull the pain; there is a term for it, emotional eating. Grant writing is anxiety-producing, of course: You worry about not getting the grant. Yet — to his credit — Tremblay did experiments to test his idea. And these experiments, he believes, supported his idea that thinking alone can cause obesity, which I’m pretty sure is wrong. It makes me want to write a book: How to Lie With Experimental Design (although I’m sure Tremblay wasn’t trying to deceive anyone). Its predecessor, How to Lie with Statistics, was a big success.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
More From a documentary about Ranjit Chandra:
In the Nestle and Mead Johnson studies, Chandra concluded that those company’s products helped reduce the risk of allergies, while the Ross formula which was virtually the same did nothing.
Masor says he asked, “‘Dr. Chandra, how can you explain that we didn’t see anything with our study and you did with the Nestle study?’ And he said, ‘Well, the study really wasn’t designed right.’
“I said: ‘Dr. Chandra we designed the study with you. You designed it. That’s why we went to you, so you would be able to do it correctly.’ And he said, ’Well, you didn’t really pay me enough money to do it correctly.’”
An extreme case.
My Pleasantly-Strange Trip to Beijing
I am now in Beijing. On the way (12 hours nonstop from San Francisco):
- Without asking, my seat was switched to one of the best seats in economy: aisle of the bulkhead row.
- Boarding was last rows first. So rational, so easy, no special equipment or software required. I have never before encountered this. Good work, Air China.
- A riveting movie, which I’d never heard of, was shown: The Children of Huang Shi, which is a Chinese Schindler’s List. In both Chinese and English, with Chinese subtitles when the characters were speaking Chinese. The best movie I’ve seen on a plane.
- The plane was old. Well-maintained, yes, but the film was VHS, the headphone jacks were double-pronged, and my supplied headset was broken. Maybe this is why the price was surprisingly low (about 40% less than the competition).
- Midflight, a fly alighted on my book (Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt).
- Three times I did my one-legged standing. Seeing me, two others started stretching. For the first time on one of these long flights, I had no trouble sleeping in my seat. (In the past, I’ve been able to sleep well only on the floor.)
- The flight was 78 minutes early. I didn’t know such a thing was possible — like the fly.
- The Beijing terminal (Terminal 3 at the airport), which opened six months ago, must be the biggest in the world. Nicely decorated with bamboo plants. At debarkation, a sign said we were 10 minutes from Customs. No line at Customs. After Customs, we took a shuttle train to luggage pickup. The ride — within one terminal — seemed about a mile long. I look forward to spending more time there, to study the 72 restaurants, for example.
- The trunk of my taxi was perfectly clean.
- During the taxi ride, I saw a bike rider. He was about to go from the on-ramp onto the freeway, apparently to ride on the line between lanes. It was a normal unclogged highway, with cars going 60 or 70 mph. I didn’t know such a thing was possible.