Last week an earthquake centered in Russia was strong enough to be noticed in Beijing. A friend of mine, a designer for Sony Ericsson, was on the 22nd floor of a 27-floor building. She felt the building sway. Everyone rushed downstairs. She was the only one carrying a laptop. Her colleagues told her she was stupid: The company owns that laptop.
Month: October 2011
Crazy-Spicing Coke Machine
Has someone been reading The Shangri-La Diet (2006)? In 2009, the Coca-Cola Company began offering new Coke machines (Coca-Cola Freestyle) that are close to what I proposed in the last chapter. They produce great diversity of flavor because you can mix many different flavors. Your soft drink, with or without sugar, can be different each time.
According to this curiously-worded article, they did not get the idea from me:
The self-serve fountains — which represent a complete departure from anything The Coca-Cola Company has offered previously — were in development for more than four years prior to launching in 2010.
In The Shangri-La Diet, I proposed adding random flavoring to your food so that it tastes different each time. Someone named this crazy spicing. Nose-clippng is much easier but less socially-acceptable.
Thanks to Phil Alexander.
More About The Willat Effect
The Willat Effect is the hedonic change produced by side-by-side comparisons of similar products — for example, two green teas. It happens in seconds: Suddenly the differences matter more. Some versions become more pleasant, other versions less pleasant. I first noticed it with limoncello that my friend Carl Willat offered me. Here are some reactions to my recent post about it:
1. A Facebook comment from a friend of Carl’s:
I too can confirm the existence of The Willat Effect. Example: I’ll look at a coat that feels and looks great, see the price and say I can’t afford this. Then I’ll try another on and it’s close to the first but not quite but it’s also 300 dollars less. I opt for the first, spending more. Carl’s taught me to never settle for second best. And he doesn’t make a bad limoncello either.
Yes to both. I recently went bike shopping in Beijing. I asked a Chinese friend who makes the best bikes: Giant, she said. A Taiwanese company. I found a Giant store. I chose the model I wanted. I test-drove it. Fine, except the seat was too short. This could not be fixed, they said. I didn’t like any other Giant model. I would have to buy a different make of bike. There were other bike stores nearby, all with cheaper bikes. (Giant bikes cost about 40% more than the next most costly.) I tested a few. The cheaper bikes were clearly worse than the Giant bike: less smooth ride. Too bad for me. I chose one to buy. The problem of too-short seat remained, but the seller said he could fix it. He brought out a longer neck that could be attached to a seat. I bought the longer neck, took it to the Giant store, and got my first-choice bike. I am especially pleased how smoothly it rides. In the Giant store (franchise), there was no bargaining — the sticker price was the actual price — and the employees were standoffish. In the other stores (non-franchise), you could bargain and the employees were friendly. This talk mentions the very smooth ride of a very expensive car.
2. A Boing Boing post about this linked to a side-by-side comparison of expensive cameras — that is, a side-by-side comparison of the pictures they take. As David Scrimshaw commented, this sh** is dangerous. It could make me dissatisfied with what was previously (and in other ways still is) perfectly acceptable.
3. I compared black tea steeped for 3 minutes with the same tea steeped for 5 minutes. I tasted them side by side. I have been drinking black tea for 10 years. For the first time I noticed that the 5-minute tea had a strong bitter note unnoticeable in the 3-minute tea. People had told me that if you steep black tea too long it becomes bitter. I thought they meant if you steep it for 8 minutes it becomes bitter. I routinely steeped black tea 5 minutes. I told someone about this and he said rinse the tea first. This made no sense (experienced tea drinkers rinse certain green teas, not black teas) but I tried it. I found that ten seconds of rinsing (add water, wait 10 seconds, discard water) didn’t eliminate the bitterness. There was no clear difference between rinsed and unrinsed tea.
4. I agree with commenters who said I should taste my tea “blind” — not knowing the price. That’s a good idea. During a tea-tasting tour of Beijing (which did not include side-by-side comparisons of similar teas and had little effect on my green tea consumption), I learned that at the wholesale level green tea leaves are priced lot by lot. The buyer tastes tea made from the tea leaves for sale and offers a price. If I notice a correlation for green tea between cost and how much I like it, it presumably reflects this earlier process. As far as I can tell in Beijing there is no advertising for different varieties of green tea. Tea stores usually sell it in bulk in identical bins. No packaging, no boasts or claims.
5. Does the effect happen because I knew the teas cost different prices? I doubt it. During the first example, with limoncello, I had no idea of the prices. The homemade limoncellos, which were not identified, had no price. I have noticed the effect with YouTube videos (different covers of one song), which are free. I have done side-by-side tastings of cheeses, wines, etc., that varied greatly in price countless times. No Willat Effect, presumably because they weren’t similar enough (e.g., the two wines came from different lines of grapes). But I agree it would be nice to eliminate the effect of price differences.
6. Wangston commented: “More expensive things taste better because rarity is delicious.” There is certainly pressure to say expensive things taste better. You/we are supposed to think that. Millions of advertisers would like us to think that. Surely the phrase the finer things in life came from an ad. Maybe ads are where the pressure comes from. In my experience, without side-by-side comparisons more expensive things usually do not taste better. For example, I have never done side-by-side comparisons of wine. And expensive wines ($30/bottle) taste no better than much cheaper wines ($10/bottle). Before I did side-by-side cheese tastings, $30/pound cheese tasted no better than $10/pound cheese. After side-by-side cheese tastings, only then did I notice and care about the difference. I started to pay much more for cheese. I wish I could make the cheap stuff taste better but every time (tea, cheese, orange marmalade, sake) the expensive stuff turns out to be what tastes better. Contradicting the “rational actor” assumption of economists.
7. Robin Barooah commented that with experience you form a mental map of the product space. He is “something of a coffee connoisseur” and has a mental map of the coffee space. This has allowed him to enjoy less-than-the-best coffees because they have their place and he enjoys brewing them in different ways. My limited experience entirely supports this. I have never gone far with these close comparisons. I am not a connoisseur of anything. But from my mere two weeks of close tea comparisons I feel the beginnings of a mental map. I hope, as Robin says, it will allow me to enjoy tea I can afford. In Beijing, the most expensive tea is insanely expensive — like $1000/pound.
Willat Effect Experiments With Tea
The Willat Effect is the hedonic change caused by side-by-side comparison of similar things. Your hedonic response to the things compared (e.g., two or more dark chocolates) expands in both directions. The “better” things become more pleasant and the “worse” things become less pleasant. In my experience, it’s a big change, easy to notice.
I discovered the Willat Effect when my friend Carl Willat offered me five different limoncellos side by side. Knowing that he likes it, his friends had given them to him. Perhaps three were homemade, two store-bought. I’d had plenty of limoncello before that, but always one version at a time. Within seconds of tasting the five versions side by side, I came to like two of them (with more complex flavors) more than the rest. One or two of them I started to dislike. When you put two similar things next to each other, of course you see their differences more clearly. What’s impressive is the hedonic change.
The Willat Effect supports my ideas about human evolution because it pushes people toward connoisseurship. (I predict it won’t occur with animals.) The fact that repeating elements are found in so many decorating schemes and patterns meant to be pretty (e.g., wallpapers, textile patterns, rugs, choreography) suggests that we get pleasure from putting similar things side by side — the very state that produces the Willat Effect. According to my theory of human evolution, connoisseurship evolved because it created demand for hard-to-make goods, which helped the most skilled artisans make a living. Carl’s limoncello tasting made me a mini-connoisseur of limoncello. I started buying it much more often and bought more expensive brands, thus helping the best limoncello makers make a living. Connoisseurs turn surplus into innovation by giving the most skilled artisans more time and freedom to innovate.
Does the Willat Effect have practical value? Could it improve my life? Recently I decided to see if it could make me a green tea connoisseur. Ever since I discovered the Shangri-La Diet (calories without smell), I’d been drinking tea (smell without calories) almost daily but I was no connoisseur. Nor had I done many side-by-side comparisons. At home, I had always made one cup at a time.
In Beijing, where I am now, I can easily buy many green teas. I got three identical tea pots (SAMA SAG-08) and three cheap green teas. I drink tea every morning. Instead of brewing one pot, I started making two or three pots at the same time and comparing the results. I compared different teas and the same tea brewed different lengths of time (Carl’s idea).
I’ve been doing this about two weeks. The results so far:
1. The cheapest tea became undrinkable. I decided to never buy it again and not to drink the rest of my purchase. I will use it for kombucha. Two of the three teas cost about twice the cheapest one. After a few side by side comparisons I liked the more expensive ones considerably more than the cheaper one. The two more expensive ones cost about the same but, weirdly, I liked the one that cost (slightly) more a little better than the one that cost less. (Tea is sold in bulk with no packaging or branding so the price I pay is closely related to what the grower was paid. The buyers taste it and decide what it’s worth.)
2. I decided to infuse the tea leaves only once. (Usual practice is to infuse green tea two or more times.) The quality of later infusions was too low, I decided. Before this, I had found second and later infusions had been acceptable.
The Willat Effect is working, in other words. After a decade of drinking tea, my practices suddenly changed. I will buy different teas and brew them differently. I will spend a lot more per cup since (a) each cup will require fresh tea, (b) I won’t buy the cheapest tea, and (c) I have become far more interested in green tea, partly because each cup tastes better, partly because I am curious if more expensive varieties taste better. When I bought the three varieties I have now I didn’t bother to learn their names; I identified them by price. In the future I will learn the names.
To get the Willat Effect, the things being compared must be quite similar. For example, comparing green tea with black tea does nothing. I have learned a methodological lesson: That tea is a great medium for studying this not only because it’s cheap but also because you can easily get similar tasting teas by brewing the same tea different lengths of time. I haven’t yet tried different water temperatures but that too might work.
I have done similar things before. I bought several versions of orange marmalade, did side-by-side tastings, and indeed became an orange marmalade connoisseur. After that I bought only expensive versions. After a few side-by-side comparisons of cheese that included expensive cheeses, I stopped buying cheap cheese. You could say I am still an orange marmalade and cheese connoisseur but this has no effect on my current life. Because I avoid sugar, I don’t eat orange marmalade. Because of all the butter I eat, I rarely eat cheese. My budding green tea connoisseurship, however, is making a difference because I drink tea every day.
Inside Chinese Higher Education: A Hidden Strength
China has hundreds of colleges. Tsinghua and Beijing University are at the top (top tier), followed by perhaps 20 colleges considered second-tier. A friend of mine attends a third-tier school. In all of her classes, class consists of the professor reading the textbook. Word for word. (Which, by the way, doesn’t happen at Tsinghua, I checked.)
Perhaps you grimace. I think this is a great thing. It means students can easily skip class — any sensible person would. Being able to skip class frees them to do internships, visit the National Museum, explore the off-campus world however they want. My friend took advantage of this to do three internships. At Berkeley I told students to take as few classes as possible and take as many internships as possible. I taught a class called Psychology and the Real World whose sole purpose was to help students learn off campus. When I was a freshman at Caltech, the school had an unintentionally similar feature: all freshman grades were pass/fail. This made it much easier to skip class, which I did most of the time. Even better than the Chinese system, I no longer had to study much. I used my abundant free time to explore my own interests, which included reading Veblen and Freud. I taught psychology to under-privileged eighth-graders. The freedom provided by pass/fail grading allowed me to explore my own interests and started me on the path to becoming an experimental psychologist. I am not kidding: this is a great hidden strength of Chinese higher education.
By the same twisted logic am I glad that American colleges are becoming insufferably expensive — because then fewer people will attend them? Not yet. I think most American high school students think not attending college is dangerous. Reading the textbook at home and doing an internship isn’t dangerous.
Assorted Links
- Reclamations. Essays by University of California students about the harm done by student loans. Via Boing Boing. Being taught “how to think” (as many college professors claim they do because the details of their class are obviously useless) is fine when it’s a choice. (I support the study of esoteric seemingly-useless stuff — when it’s a choice.) When it’s required (to get a decent job) and very expensive (due to tuition), there’s a problem.
- The Cobblestone Conservative: How Jane Jacobs saved New York City’s soul.
- Robin Hanson surveys his students. “[Their] opinions [about “random policy questions”] strongly tend to support the status quo – mostly whatever is, is assumed good.” Same thing at Berkeley. Most of my students, for better or worse, were very conformist. My conclusion, which I imagine Robin agrees with, is that the reasons we give for our beliefs have roughly zero correlation with the actual reasons and shouldn’t be taken seriously (e.g., argued with). Professors who claim to teach their students “how to think” (e.g., lines of argument) are shutting their eyes to what Robin shows is right in front of them: the lack of importance of “thinking” in the determination of belief.
- Edward Jay Epstein on Michael Milken. Great journalism.
Thanks to Ryan Holiday. If you send me a link that I post I am happy to link to your blog or website.
Jane Jacobs and Amazon.com
How did air-breathing evolve? In The Nature of Economies (p. 87), Jane Jacobs uses it to illustrate the developmental pattern she calls “bifurcation” (air-breathing isn’t a refinement of water-breathing). She speculates on how it started:
Lungfish had both gills and a primitive lung, suggesting that their habitat was swampland. The earliest to take to dry land may have inhabited swamps subject to severe droughts or perhaps they were escaping fearsomely-jawed predators who couldn’t follow them to dry land.
According to Steve Yegge’s already-famous “psst, Googlers” memo, something much like this was why Amazon started selling web computing services, which wasn’t a refinement of their earlier business (selling books, toys, etc.):
Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS [Amazon Web Services], in hindsight.
People say necessity is the mother of invention. That isn’t even close to true. Trial and error is the mother of true, profound invention. The Bezos story, and Jacobs’s generalization of it, suggest what is actually true: necessity is the mother of development. Necessity pushes people to use, and thereby develop, inventions they had ignored.
Nobel Prize Report Card: Economics
The Nobel Prizes awarded each year resemble a kind of report card where each prize-worthy discipline (Physics, Chemistry, etc.) gets a grade that depends on the prize-winning research. If the prize-winning research is useful and surprising, the grade is high. If not the grade is low. More generally, at least to me, the intellectual history of the prize winners sheds light on the whole profession. Perhaps some biologists were unaware of the behavior of Eric Kandel described in Explorers of the Black Box when he was awarded the biology prize. Kandel, I hasten to add, is an unusual case.
Thomas Sargent is one of the winners of this year’s Economics prize. In 2007, he gave a graduation speech at Berkeley to economics majors (via Marginal Revolution). In the speech, Sargent called economics “organized common sense”. He went on to list 12 common-sense ideas, such as “Individuals and communities face trade-offs” and “governments and voters respond to incentives” that economists believe. The reasons for their belief weren’t stated.
When I started as a professor (at Berkeley) I did many experiments with rats and, to my annoyance, discovered an inconvenient truth: I understood rats less well than I thought. Even in a heavily-controlled heavily-studied situation (Skinner box), my rats often did not do what I expected. My common sense was often wrong, in other words. This experience made me considerably more skeptical of other people’s “common sense”.
To me, and I think to most scientists, science begins with common sense. Experimental psychology certainly does. I used common sense to design my experiments. Had I not done those experiments, I would not have learned that my common sense was wrong. So relying on common sense was helpful — as a place to start. As a way to begin to understand. You begin with common-sense ideas and you test them. That common sense is often wrong is a theme of Freakonomics, in agreement with my experience. Yet Sargent seemed content (he called economics “our beautiful subject”) to end with common sense, perhaps tidied up.
This is really unfortunate because economics, beautiful or not, is so important. If you ignore data, the answer to every hard question is the same: the most powerful people are right. That way lies stagnation (problems build up unsolved because powerful people prefer the status quo) and collapse (when the problems become overwhelming). Alan Greenspan’s faith-based belief in free markets and the 2008 financial crisis — after Sargent’s speech — is an example. In 2009, Sargent’s speech might have been less well-received.
Public Speaking Advice From My Students
In the Frontiers of Psychology class I teach at Tsinghua (Monday 3:20-4:55, Teaching Building 6, Room A113, visitors welcome) , the students will give several presentations each class period. So I decided to assemble a list of advice. I came up with Items 1-3, the students came up with the rest.
- Give a presentation that you would like to hear. Don’t worry about following a formula.
- Make your points by telling stories. Don’t just say “X is true”. Tell a story that will make your listeners think that X is true.
- Stay within the allotted time (e.g., 5 minutes). In real life — presentations at scientific conferences, for example — most presentations are too long. Listeners rarely like this. They think the speaker is selfish. If one person speaks too long, this usually means that other speakers will have less time to speak.
- Don’t read your talk.
- Use simple, spoken English. Don’t speak fast
- Smile and use body language to connect with the audience.
- Pause before the most important points.
- Ask questions to attract attention.
- Show the big structure of your talk.
- When telling a story, don’t go far from the point of the story (e.g., with unnecessary details)
To me, the most interesting item is #8 (ask questions). For example, instead of saying “Let us begin” I can say “Shall we begin?” Which is certainly an improvement over coughing, which is what one student said was the usual way officials began talks.
For example, which phrasing works better?
Why does question-asking work? I asked my students.
I asked my students why question-asking works.
The first way (“Why does”) grabs my attention more than the second (“I asked”). I did ask my students why it works. One said that when you hear a question you automatically try to answer it. I cannot do better than that. I suppose we notice questions much like we notice loud noises.
Edward Jay Epstein on Homeland
A new series on Showtime called Homeland is about a CIA agent (played by Claire Danes) who believes that a newly-released American prisoner of war may have been “turned” during his years in Iraqi captivity. In the first episode, she tries to find evidence to support her belief. Judging by that episode, it is very good.
I told Edward Jay Epstein about it — his book on James Angleton centers on CIA infiltration by “moles”. He commented:
What is interesting here is the schism between the fictional world and real world of counterespionage. In the former, it is an issue of “who”. Find the guilty man and arrest or kill him. In the real world, the issue is vulnerability. The bureaucracy has two choices: admit its methods are vulnerable to penetration and paralyze the organization, or deem the search for a mole to be paranoia and sick think. That latter course is what happens in the real world, alas. Some fiction writers understand this: Graham Greene in Human Factor and Le Carre in Smiley’s People.
Yes. If you go back in time, I predict you will find that the term kill the messenger arose at the same time as powerful organizations. I have a theory: Only people who derive power from their placement in big organizations want to kill the messenger (who says the organization assumes something not true). In other situations, bad news is less threatening. In health care, outside ideas are met by insiders, such as doctors, with where’s the double-blind placebo-controlled study? As Epstein says, the dismissiveness is partly motivated by fear: fear that something is wrong with their system and its values.