Category: Beijing

Gary Shteyngart is a Very Funny Guy

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I heard Gary Shteyngart (latest book Super Sad True Love Story) at the Beijing Bookworm. No better job of authorial self-promotion have I seen. He was born in Leningrad in 1972, he grew up hearing jokes from his parents. For example: The 1980 Summer Olympics were in Moscow. At the time, Brezhnev was in charge. He was going senile. At an Olympic ceremony, he gave a speech. His hands shook holding the text of his talk.

“Ohhhhhh…..” he read.

He paused.

“Ohhhhh…….”

He paused.

“Ohhhhh……”

An apparatchik ran up to him. “Senior Comrade Brezhnev, those are the Olympic Rings!”

The moderator asked Shteyngart what he thought of Putin’s plan to require every Russian teenager to read a specified 100 great books by graduation. “These things never work,” said Shteyngart. “American cities have done this. Everyone’s supposed to read a certain book, usually To Kill a Mockingbird. Never tell someone what to read.” However, he said one of his favorite authors is Karen Russell. (For a New Yorker podcast, he read a story by Andrea Lee.)

I asked about his favorite TV shows. He mentioned The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. “Who would have guessed that TV would become a great art form?” He is writing a show for HBO about Brooklyn immigrants.

I learned that he was interviewed by a magazine called Modern Drunkard. The interviewer — not Shteyngart — mentions an Russian saying: “The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully.” How true.

 

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • One of my Tsinghua American colleagues writes an op-ed: “China wants you. Job prospects are abundant.”
  • Robert Anton Wilson’s skepticism about skeptics. “Those people claim to be rationalists, but they’re governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They’re so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic. . . . None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma.” I agree. They should be called one-way skeptics.
  • Excellent Vanity Fair article about Occupy Wall Street. Better than The New Yorker‘s article covering similar stuff.
  • The many side effects of statins. I am impressed by the new way of learning about drug side effects.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday and Gary Wolf.

More About The Willat Effect

Seth Roberts16 Comments

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.

 

Beijing Smog: Good or Bad?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

I am in Beijing. The smog is bad. It is more humid than usual and the air is dirtier than usual. At his blog, James Fallows, who is also in Beijing, has posted pictures and pollution measurements. (Incidentally, Eamonn Fingleton, an excellent writer, will be guest-blogging there. In Praise of Hard Industries is one of the best business/economics books I’ve read.)

The effect of smog on health isn’t obvious. Maybe you know about hormesis — the finding that a small dose of a poison, such as radioactivity, is beneficial. It has been observed in hundreds of experiments. It makes sense: the poisons activate repair systems. Even if you know about hormesis, you probably don’t know that one of the first studies of smoking and cancer found that inhaling cigarette smoke appeared beneficial: inhalers had less cancer than non-inhalers. R. A. Fisher, the great statistician, emphasized this (pp. 160-161):

There were fewer inhalers among the cancer patients than among the non-cancer patients. That, I think, is an exceedingly important finding.

This difference (a negative correlation) appeared in spite of two positive correlations: Heavy smokers get more cancer than light smokers; and heavy smokers are more likely to inhale than light smokers. It is far from the only fact suggesting the connection between smoking and health isn’t simple.

So I am not worried about Beijing smog. The real danger, I think, is not eating fermented foods. Which, thankfully, is infinitely more under my control.

Chinese New Year in Beijing

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Sounds like we’re under attack. Bombs going off, gunfire. A few fireworks.

More At midnight I was awakened by the densest loudest fireworks I have ever seen. About two per second for ten minutes or even longer. One launch pad was on the street near my apartment; I could see two other sources further away — geysers of glittery light. This proves the Chinese invented fireworks, I kept thinking. They were so pretty and varied I didn’t mind being woken up. And it was so nice to be able to watch them from my warm apartment.

Beijing Students at Berkeley

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts8 Comments
  • “ant tribes” near Beijing
  • What exactly is umami?
  • Is omega-3 an antidepressant? “Initial analyses failed to clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of Omega-3 for all patients taking part in the study. Other analyses, however, revealed that Omega-3 improved depression symptoms in patients diagnosed with depression unaccompanied by an anxiety disorder.” Are they fooling themselves? Maybe not. My research suggests that morning faces can reduce only depression but also anxiety disorders. So if you have depression without an anxiety disorder it may indeed have a different cause.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment
  • Success is fickle: The case of Megan Fox. Is Big Pharma in the same situation? Lacking profound understanding of disease (just as Fox can’t act) . . .
  • Excellent anonymous obituary of Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist. “Give power to the state and you end up with self-serving interest groups [he believed].” Via The Browser.
  • David Healy on Big & Little Pharma (100 words). “Posted parcels are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.”
  • Beijing Ikea. I shop there often. The cafeteria, with heavy silverware and live music, feels opulent. An industrial design student I know admired one of their chairs for three years and finally bought it as a prop for her final project. During exhibition of her work, unfortunately, visitors said, “What a beautiful chair.”

Thanks to Bruce Charlton and Paul Sas.