Category: interviews

Interview with Tyler Cowen

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Tyler Cowen’s new book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World has a lot to say about two topics in which I am especially interested: autism and human diversity. What can the rest of us learn from people with autism? What does the wide range of outcomes among autistic adults tell us about our world? I interviewed Tyler by email about his book.

ROBERTS If I remember correctly, you think a book should be new, true, and something else. What’s the something else?

COWEN The “something else” should cover at least two qualities.

First, if everyone read the book and was persuaded by it, would anything change for the better? An author should aim to write a book which matters.

Second, the book should reflect something the author really cares about. If the author doesn’t care, why should the reader?

ROBERTS What was the tipping point for this book — the event that made you say: I’m going to write a book about THIS?

COWEN To me it’s very important what an author is thinking about in his or her spare time, if the phrase “spare time” even applies to my life, which has an extreme blending of work and leisure time. Ideally that is what an author should be writing about. At some point you realize: “Hey, I am constantly thinking about xxxxx in my spare time!” And then you want to write it up.

I also hit up the idea of this book through pondering the lives of some particular individuals I know — and how much they *live* the thesis of my book — although I am not sure they would wish to be identified publicly.

ROBERTS Have you been to Autreat, the annual conference of Autism Network International, that you mention? If so, did it affect your thinking?

COWEN I haven’t been to Autreat, which for me is located somewhat inconveniently away from major cities (that is on purpose, I believe). I’m also not clear on exactly who is welcome, who needs an invitation, etc. Most conferences have a very high variance in quality across presentations and mostly one goes to meet one or two key people; often you don’t know in advance who they will be. I suspect the same logic applies to Autreat as well.

ROBERTS Do you think there are jobs that persons with autism do better than persons without autism?

COWEN Autistics often exhibit superior skills in attention to detail, pattern recognition, what I call “mental ordering,” and they have areas of strong preferred interests, in which they are very often superb self-educators. So yes, that will make many autistics very good at some jobs but also poorly suited for others. But I don’t want to generalize and say “autistics are better at job X,” that would be misleading. Across autistics there is a wide variety of cognitive skills and also problems. Engineering and computer science are the stereotypical areas where you expect to find higher than average rates of autism. While I suspect this is true in terms of the average, it can be misleading to focus on the stereotype precisely because of the high variance of skills and outcomes among autistics. One of the central issues in understanding autism is grasping the connection between the underlying unity of the phenomenon and the extreme variability of the results. In the short run, positive stereotypes can perform a useful educating function. But the more we present stereotypes, the more we are getting people away from coming to terms with that more fundamental issue, namely an understanding of the variance.

ROBERTS There is a basic biological phenomenon in which animals and plants under stress become more variable. Some say variability in the genotype has been released into the phenotype. Do you think the variance seen in autism has been “released” in some way?

COWEN I am not sure I understand the question…for one thing I am not sure what is the postulated increase in genetic stress…

ROBERTS Yes, it’s a confusing question. Let’s try this: What do you think the high variance of outcome seen in autism is telling us?

COWEN I’ll try to make that more concrete. One view of autism is that autistics have greater access to lower-level perception and such that access is essential for understanding autism. On one hand it gives autistics some special abilities, such as pattern recognition, certain kinds of information processing, and noticing small changes with great skill. (In some cases this also leads to savant-like abilities.) This also may be connected to some of the problems which autistics experience, such as hyper-sensitivities to some kinds of public environments.

It could be that non-autistics have a faculty, or faculties, which “cut off” or automatically organize a lot of this lower level perception. The implication would be that for autistics this faculty is somehow weaker, missing, or “broken.” The underlying unity in autism would be that this faculty is somehow different, relative to non-autistics. The resulting variance is that the difference in this faculty gives rise to abilities and disabilities which very much differ across autistics.

That’s one attempt to come to terms with both the unity of autism and the variance within it. It’s a tough question and we don’t know the right answer yet, in my view. What I outlined is just one hypothesis.

ROBERTS A clear parallel in the increased variance of autistic persons is the increased variance of left-handers. Left-handers have brain organizations that vary much more than the brain organization of right-handers. Right-handers are all one way; left-handers are all over the place. Do you see any similarities between left-handers and persons with autism?

COWEN I recall some claims that autistics are more likely to be left-handed but I’ve never looked into their veracity. There are so many false claims about autism that one must be very careful.

ADHD is another example of something which produces high variance outcomes. I don’t think it is correct to call it a disorder *per se*.

We’re just starting to wrap our heads around the “high variance” idea. Most people have the natural instinct to attach gross labels of good or bad even when a subtler approach is called for.

ROBERTS The term left-hander is confusing because left-handers aren’t the opposite of right-handers. The dichotomy is okay but the two sides are better labeled right-handers and non-right-handers. In other words, one group (right-handers) has something (a certain brain organization); the other group doesn’t have that brain organization. Then the vast difference in variance makes sense. How accurate would it be to say that non-autistics have something than autistics don’t have? (I’m left-handed, by the way.)

COWEN I would say we still don’t have a fully coherent definition of autism. And “have” is a tricky word. I think of autistic brains as different, rather than “normal” brains with “missing parts.” Some researchers postulate differences in the kind of connections autistic brains make. In thirty years I expect we will know much, much more than we do right now.

ROBERTS I hope this isn’t too self-indulgent: What do you make of the correlation between autism and digestive problems?

COWEN I don’t think there are convincing theories about either digestive problems causing autism or autism causing digestive problems. There is *maybe* a correlation through a common genetic cause, but even if that is true it is not very useful as a means of understanding autism. This is another area where there are many strong opinions, often stronger than are justified by the facts.

ROBERTS Another “assorted” question: I loved the study you mentioned where people with perfect pitch were more likely to be eccentric than those without perfect pitch. That’s quite a result. How did you learn about it?

COWEN There is a somewhat scattered literature on music, cognition, and society. It still awaits synthesis, it seems. Someone could write a very good popular book on the topic. (Maybe Gabriel Rossman is the guy to do it.) The more I browsed that literature, the more interesting results I found.

ROBERTS I don’t think I’ve done justice to your extremely original book but here is a last question. You talk about Thomas Schelling’s use of stories. Presumably in contrast to other econ professors. I think of story-telling being something that once upon a time everyone did — it was the usual way to teach. Why do you think Schelling told stories much more than those around him?

COWEN Thanks for the kind words. Schelling has a unique mind, as anyone who has known him will attest. I don’t know any other economist or social scientist who thinks like he does, but we’ve yet to figure out what exactly his unique element consists of. I would say that Schelling views story-telling as a path to social science wisdom. They’re not even anecdotes, they’re stories. Maybe that doesn’t sound convincing to an outsider, but it got him a Nobel Prize.

I am very interested in the topic of “styles of thought in economics.”

How Things Begin (Japan Traditional Foods)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

I eat natto (fermented soybeans) once/day. Most of the natto I see in stores is from Japan (soybeans from America) but I found one local source: Japan Traditional Foods, in Sepastopol, California. Like many people I believe traditional diets are far healthier than modern ones. How can such diets, now almost extinct in rich countries, become popular again? To learn more about this, I interviewed the owner of Japan Traditional Foods, Minami Satoh.

How did your company begin?

I started it in 2006. We started to produce product in November 2008. So far natto is our only product. I went to business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a private business school in Arizona, and graduated in 1983. After that, I worked for DuPont in Japan, but I wanted to work in the US. At DuPont, I did marketing of Teflon and Silverstone (a sister brand of Teflon). Then I worked for my father’s company selling wholesale steel pipe and tubes. I was successful but felt it was boring. I thought food would be more interesting. I acquired a small natto-making company (Yaguchi Foods ) in Japan in 2004 or 2005. The owner had died. His relatives sold it to me.

In 2004, I came to America to meet Malcolm Clark. He’s the great-grandson of Dr. Clark, who is very famous in Japan. Malcolm Clark was responsible for introducing shitake mushrooms to America. He owns Gourmet Mushrooms in Sebastopol and lives in Occidental. Natto is an unusual food, like shitake mushrooms. I thought he could give me good advice about how to start making natto or other possibilities. That’s why the company is in Sebastopol. When I met Clark, he was thinking of retiring. I bought a stake in Gourmet Mushrooms; now Gourmet Mushrooms helps Japan Traditional Foods sell natto. I moved here in June 2008 to manage this company.

Why natto?

Americans already eat tofu, soy sauce, miso, edaname, and soy milk — but no natto. Natto is more nutritious than the other forms of soy that we currently eat. It’s more nutritious because of fermentation. It has more vitamins. A enzyme found in natto called nattokinase dissolves blood clots. In Japan natto is a traditional health food. It is usually eaten at breakfast.

How is natto made?

You boil the soybeans in a steam basket. Spray with bascillus. Put the soybeans in a paper cup. Put the cups in a fermentation container for 20-24 hours. Take them out and put in packages. Then give to the distributor. If you ferment more than 20 hours, natto bascillus start to eat themselves, which produces ammonia. Most companies stop fermenting at that point to avoid ammonia. If fermented longer, it may smell of ammonia. Japanese accept this, but Americans may not.

How big is Japan Traditional Foods?

One person plus myself. I hired someone from my natto company in Japan. He makes artisanal natto. He handcrafts it.. We put it in the paper cups by hand.

How did you get distribution?

It wasn’t hard. There are two distributors, one for Los Angeles, the other for San Francisco. They specialize in Japanese markets. Now it’s in close to 30 stores, including Korean and Chinese stores. The Los Angeles distributor wanted to sell his stuff in New York but the shipping costs would have been too high. This summer we will start going to farmer’s markets. We’ll have a booth there to sell and sample. The goal is to educate and share recipes. We’ll be at the San Rafael Sunday market and the Ferry Building Tuesday lunchtime market. It’s a kind of test. We’re talking to distributors about getting the product into non-Japanese grocery stores, such as Berkeley Bowl and Whole Foods. From the farmer’s markets we hope to get feedback to improve the packaging, size, and recipes. We want to find the best ways to make the Western market receptive to natto. For example, we can sample it in different ways. In Japan, the most popular way to eat it is over rice with finely chopped green onions, often at breakfast. I’ve come up with many different recipes: with rice or bagel or lettuce or crackers. With different sauces and toppings.

What were the hard parts?

It was difficult to find a good temperature control system here; I had to import it from Japan. I also needed a big steam cooker, which I had to import. This was hard because it is prohibited to export them from Japan to other countries.

Your promotional leaflet says “stir natto more than twenty times” before eating it. Why?

We do not have any valid research on this. But somebody says stirring natto creates the “Fifth Taste” we call “umami.” Somebody else said that it gets the natto bacillus awake again with oxygen because the bacillus was sleeping in the refrigerator.

Rejuvenation Company (interview)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I sampled four brands of kombucha available in Berkeley; my favorite was from Rejuvenation Company. They are in Emeryville, which is close to where I live. “Can I visit your manufacturing facility?” I asked. The answer was no, but they were happy to be interviewed. So I interviewed Chris Campagna and Jerry Campagna, who are the company’s two employees. Before the interview I discovered they also made the rejuvelac I’d bought after a reader of this blog recommended it (“When I was a database administrator at Whole Foods, I used to drink it daily and never felt better”). Those are their two products: kombucha and rejuvelac.

How did your company begin?

It was started in 1983 in San Francisco by Dennis Campagna [Jerry’s brother, Chris’s uncle]. He was a health-food fanatic, a die-hard vegetarian, and a hippie. Now retired. He is ten years older than Jerry, but , Jerry says, looks younger.] At the beginning, he sold several health-food juices, such as carrot juice and wheat grass juice, but he also sold Rejuvelac. That was the part of the product line that’s lasted. He made them in a shared kitchen. Back then, there were dozens of small health food stores in San Francisco. It was a one-man show. Dennis drove around to them.

What’s rejuvelac?

A fermented grain drink. We use wheat. You sprout wheat berries with water, ferment them for a while, then strain out the wheat berries. We’re the only company we know of that sells it.

Why do your products say “Keep Refrigerated”?

The Health Department wanted it. For years and years, they sat store shelves, not refrigerated.

When did you start making kombucha?

Five years ago. Dennis added it to his product line. It took a few years to catch on. He’d been making it for himself for years — making it, drinking it, giving it to friends. We’re tiny players in the kombucha market. Synergy is the big player. Maybe there are 10-15 manufacturers around the country, it’s hard to know the exact number. There’s no Kombucha Manufacturers Association. Some commercial kombuchas are pasteurized; look on their websites to find out which ones. [Kombucha Wonder Drink is pasteurized.] Our kombucha isn’t pasteurized.

How has the business changed?

It used to be lots of mom-and-pop stores. The people who owned the store ran it. They recommended stuff to their customers. The customer would come in with a health problem, the owner would say, “Why don’t you try this?” Now Whole Food dominates. The emphasis has changed. The buyers want to know: Will it sell? As opposed to true quality. Nowadays, the main way we spread is that someone buys our products on a trip to San Francisco and goes home and sends us email: Where can we get it? We say: If you really want it, go to your store manager and tell him. You have a tremendous amount of clout. They listen to you. It often works out that we get a store out of that deal. We don’t do internet sales.

Over the last five years, our sales have grown a lot. Five years ago, we were mostly in San Francisco, mostly in small stores. Around 20-30 small stores. Now we’re in roughly 100-120 stores. It’s hard to have a store locator on our website because distributors don’t want to tell us who they deal with. [Their store locator page.] In the Bay Area, we’re sold at Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, Rainbow Grocery, plus smaller stores. In Santa Cruz, at Staff of Life. We’re moving into Whole Foods in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland. Pretty soon you should be able to get it in any Whole Foods on the West Coast.

What do your customers say?

A year ago, we got a phone call from a woman in San Francisco. I’m moving to Utah, where can I buy your product? Eight years earlier, she’d been sick. [Digestive problems, apparently.] Her doctor had given her antibiotics. She didn’t get better. She was given more antibiotics. Still didn’t get better. This went on for several months. She couldn’t eat anything. Even baby food would make her gaseous. She was turning ashen, suffering from malnutrition. Then she got a small bottle of rejuvelac. Just 30 minutes after drinking it, she felt a little better. She’d been drinking it regularly for eight years, didn’t want to be without it.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 15)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

ROBERTSÂ How is it possible that Cal Tech’s basketball team was considered better than UCLA’s basketball team in the 1950s? That was the part I was amazed at.

MLODINOW At least the early part of the decade. That was harder to understand than the Girl Named Florida Problem. I think in those days basketball was nothing–imagine saying that the Cal Tech curling team is better than the UCLA curling team. Since nobody really cares about curling it’s just a quaint fact that someone at Cal Tech, probably in the faculty, would care about curling well enough to organize a team. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but in the 50s I think it was a much different sport and a much different sports world. Not to belittle their team; I think they had some really good players from the looks of it and maybe Cal Tech cared more about recruiting players for sports than they do today. Maybe our world in general is a little looser about things and you could invest the time to play sports more even if you were at a high-powered place like Cal Tech; not to be as pressured–to just study. I guess it was just a different world in some ways–a nice world–back then that could happen. Now college basketball is just a huge and money generating industry that no one would allow a school like Cal Tech–by allow it I don’t mean that there’s some individual disallowing it but the world will not allow, it’s not loose enough to allow, a school that’s not completely focused on that sport to have a good team in that sport. Everything is too high-powered today.

ROBERTS Yes. Of all the things in your book, that was the most staggering.

MLODINOW You should see the movie Quantum Hoops; it’s a documentary about the Cal Tech basketball team. I recommend it.

ROBERTS I didn’t know there was such a movie.

MLODINOW It’s on DVD; I’m thinking it must be available from NetFlix.

ROBERTS Yes, I’ll get it.

MLODINOW It’s very amusing–it is for me because of my connection to Cal Tech–but I think for the general public, it’s a very amusing film.

ROBERTS We were talking about unexpected things. If you looked at the Cal Tech basketball team, if you just looked at basketball in the 1950s, you would think, ’Well, Cal Tech–that’s as it should be.’ But then all of the sudden, 20 years later, it’s so very different.

MLODINOW I think in those days it was more like a club, like a sport, like what you think of as a kids’ fun activity and now the athletes for basketball are heavily recruited and bribed in one way or another, and the huge amounts of money at stake for the school for them. It’s a totally different calculus and it’s sad in a way, isn’t it? I think everything is like that today.

ROBERTS I guess what I’m saying is that there was something–you’re in the 1950s, it’s 1956–very few people saw that there was something hidden in basketball that could lead to what it became.

MLODINOW And if you were the superstar of that time you also didn’t get the rewards of what became today and it’s a little bit late for you now, right? I know in the bathroom in the Cal Tech cafeteria there was a framed article about him, I can’t remember his name, one of the superstars of the 50s who was one of the best basketball players to ever live–I think they claim that even today–who basically probably never even made a living from it, or not a good living.

ROBERTS Yes, that kind of brings us back to the very beginning. I feel like somehow the times have changed and people are smarter. Now you can make a living from what you’re doing. You’re writing this very entertaining intellectual history; finally there’s a market for it. Finally people are smart enough to be at your level so that you can write a book that you respect but you can get a wide enough audience.

MLODINOW Are you saying that in the 50s that couldn’t have been done? I don’t know.

ROBERTS Well, nobody did it; let’s put it that way.

MLODINOW No, nobody did it. I don’t know why.

ROBERTS As I said before we started recording, you’re the first person to ever do this. Will you be the last? I don’t know but you’re the first. You’re the first person to write intellectual histories that actually are popular and that people want to read, that they’re not forced to read by their teachers. It’s not just a tiny group of people reading them. Professors of course write them but they’re not well written and it’s just their job to write them; they get a salary from the government to write those books. You’re not getting any salary. You’re an entrepreneur and it’s just so different. Your books have to be popular or your job goes away. It’s just a different level of competence; your books are just infinitely more accessible, infinitely better than a professor would normally write. A professor is subsidized and that’s what is basically comes down to. Practically everybody who writes about science is subsidized but you’re not.

When the TV show The Simpson came along I would talk about IQ scores in my class and I talk about the fact that they had been rising and so forth. And I say, ’Well you know there is evidence that people are getting smarter and one example is The Simpsons; this is at a higher level than other TV shows that came before it.’ Now maybe that’s not so important, how intelligent is an animated show, but I think what you’re doing is very important and I think it may be a sign of increased intelligence. There’s enough of a market now for what you’re doing. There wasn’t before.

MLODINOW I’m certainly glad that there is and that people appreciate the way I put things.

ROBERTS I’m glad because that means you can do so much more of it.

MLODINOW Yes, and I look forward to that. It’s a great privilege to be able to do that.

ROBERTS When I was a freshman at Cal Tech I was always looking for books like yours but they just didn’t exist. So I ended up reading The New Yorker for my intellectual history. That was very narrow; they never did a good job of covering science. They never talked about geometry or DeMoivre, Laplace, or Gauss. They didn’t cover those people. But those people are important. But you do; finally we have someone. It’s great.

Interview directory.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 14)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

MLODINOW As I start talking about events in the world around us and looking at the psychological components–and I dealt with that, I greatly expanded that part–they were fascinating studies and I was just so interested I just kept putting more and more into the book.

ROBERTS Yes, that’s when you decided to ask me for help. “Oh, I wasn’t planning on this.” How did you learn about the lottery winner who won twice–the Canadian?

MLODINOW It was in a book somewhere, an academic book. A lot of those interesting stories came from academic papers or books.

ROBERTS That’s interesting.

MLODINOW Sometimes I’ll find something in the newspaper that was really interesting and I would track it down but a lot of it was in academic research. I don’t know why they found it.

ROBERTS Yes, who knows where they got it, but that’s where you got it. How did you learn about the Girl Named Florida stuff? Some professor told you?

MLODINOW My friend Mark Hillery that I mentioned from Berkeley.

ROBERTS A physics professor.

MLODINOW He heard it somewhere… It wasn’t quite this problem but then I kind of tweaked it and made it the Girl Named Florida Problem. That’s a great problem for the book.

ROBERTS Yes, I loved that. So he got it from some physicist . . .

MLODINOW I’m not sure; probably. I took a few days to figure out how to make it into this problem; I don’t remember exactly the problem he told me but I tweaked it into this problem. Just to show you how much work goes into the book, I even spent a whole afternoon deciding on the name Florida. I went back into the records–I needed a rare name–and I looked up different names and tried to find one that would be colorful, interesting, but that was rarely used, and I wanted to know the percentage that it was used; I dug up percentages of names. Everything in the book . . . if you read it, it might just sound like, ’Oh, you know’ . . .

Not a thing is just tossed out there. Or very little; there’s an amazing amount of thought and work that goes behind every little detail.

ROBERTS That’s a very memorable detail I must say. I like it better than the Monty Hall Problem.

MLODINOW I do, too. I think it’s interesting; I found in the reactions to the book that the Monty Hall Problem has gotten more press and in some ways more reactions, which I found interesting given that it has been talked about before and this problem was completely new. I think this problem is in some ways even more striking than the Monty Hall Problem, more counterintuitive and more difficult to believe and certainly closer to something you might actually encounter. And yet I’ve gotten a lot more response based on the Monty Hall Problem and a few places have said that I gave the best explanation they’ve seen. I think the New York Times review said that, too. The New York Times did mention the Girl Named Florida Problem and said that they still find it hard to believe even though they followed the explanation.

ROBERTS I thought your explanation of the Girl Named Florida problem was very clear.

Interview directory.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 13)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

ROBERTS Did the psychology stuff grow and grow? Did you add more and more than you expected?

MLODINOW Yes. As I was putting a lot of it in the end I would find other studies that really belonged earlier that I would discover, so I would go back and rewrite the earlier parts to incorporate those studies; that became a very fun part of the book, though. That was maybe the most fun, all the psychology studies that I dug out at the end.

ROBERTS How did it happen? You knew that you wanted to include some psychology and then it turned out to be more interesting than you expected?

MLODINOW In the second half of the book when I was talking more and more about viewing life as a random process that we’re going through and applying the concepts of randomness to what we’re seeing in life, I would just naturally come upon these psychology studies.

ROBERTS What fraction of the psychology you read was in the book? I was impressed that you talked about psychology studies that were really good, whereas most of them aren’t. You did a good job of selection and from teaching I know that you have to read a lot of stuff that isn’t good in order to find the good stuff.

MLODINOW What you see in the book is probably a quarter of the stuff that I read or that I thought of putting in the book. In the psychology studies maybe half of them made it into the book and I think I was good at filtering before I even read by following trails of one study leading to other studies and using either textbooks or compilation conference reports to figure out what would be good and what wouldn’t be so good.

I’m talking about half of the studies where I actually bothered to copy the papers; there are other ones, countless studies, where I would get to the abstract and dismiss it after reading the abstract or one page. That I have no way of counting, that’s just constant; maybe ten times as many. But the ones that I actually got to where I made copies . . . if I like something I will print it out because I just can’t read dozens of pages on the screen and plus I like to sit in cafés and carry it around. I guess I could bring my laptop but I tend to print them out. About half of the ones I bothered to print out I put in the book and then there were countless ones that I just dismissed.

ROBERTS Yes, I see what you mean. How did the book’s structure differ from your original proposal? Did the structure change very much?

MLODINOW Yes; I don’t remember exactly, but it did. The first chapter was not there in the proposal; the proposal started with chapter two. Then I realized that I needed an introductory chapter to really set the stage for why we’re interested in these things so for introductory chapter, which is applications to life, I start by analyzing certain situations in life that I think are surprising that people misinterpret; I thought that was a good lead-in as to why we care about this. Then I went into other chapters about developing the ideas of randomness and a lot of that was similar to the proposal although I put in less about Brownian motion and the actual drunkard’s walk itself than I think it had in there. The last several chapters, I extended the discussion about life; I think the middle part of the book is fairly similar to the proposal but the beginning and the end I expanded greatly on discussions of the everyday world and applications; the psychology was not in the original proposal nearly at the level that it was in the final book.

ROBERTS Yes, I see what you mean.

MLODINOW . . . again, as I start talking about events in the world around us and looking at the psychological components–and I dealt with that, I greatly expanded that part–they were fascinating studies and I was just so interested I just kept putting more and more into the book.

Interview directory.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 12)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

ROBERTS I have some questions about details of the book. What was the hardest part of writing the book? . . . there were no hard parts?

MLODINOW Well, I’m thinking about it and also thinking about how I interpret the word ’hard.’ Usually ’hard’ would mean that you’re struggling with it and I’m not sure I exactly struggled with any particular part, in a sense of . . . with all the negative connotations of the word ’struggle,’ where I’m unsure of victory and battling and becoming exhausted and fear for my life.

I guess the part that comes to mind that I had the most doubts about whether I could get through it was the structure of the book because it weaves together three areas that are historically not that smoothly tied together–probability, statistics and the random processes. Or one united subject, like geometry, that you can see the fairly linear development and here it was more intertwined strands. I did have some trouble at first seeing the segue both in concept and tone of the book, from probability to statistics and at the end when I’m talking more about random processes and very specifically about peoples’ lives. To make that a smooth transition so it doesn’t seem like two books, a book on the concepts and another book on peoples’ lives. There was a lot about peoples’ lives in the earlier parts, too, but in the latter parts of the book, I had less and less actual mathematical concepts and almost solely psychology and sociology and discussion of peoples’ lives. Figuring out exactly how to do that–I do remember struggling with that part–I guess that was the hardest part, I would say.

One other difficult thing was that I went back–when I was talking about the Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers–I went back and looked at the very specific work that was done by DeMoivre, Laplace, Gauss etc. That was difficult because what they actually did is not in the form that is often attributed to them today. I went back and tried to disentangle what they actually showed and tried to figure out what they were thinking, rather than just talking about the modern form of the theorem in textbooks and attributing it to them.

ROBERTS I see.

MLODINOW That took a lot of effort to figure out. I actually went back and found some of the original calculations.

ROBERTS In a library somewhere? In a manuscript?

MLODINOW They’re in academic books–there are several academic books, so I found some academic books (academic press books, I mean) that presented their actual calculations. I went through those in order to figure out and explain the differences between what they actually did and what the offshoot of their work looks like today.

Interview directory.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 11)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

ROBERTS I think that if you take the different things that happened to you and you measured their effect, the effects will have a power-law distribution. A tiny number will have a huge effect . . .

MLODINOW Yes.

ROBERTS . . . and a large number will have very little effect. But I guess you could shift the slope of that power-law distribution if you were smart. My research with rats has involved measuring how long they hold the bar down when they press the bar and it turns out that has a power-law distribution.

MLODINOW That’s interesting. Why is it that they hold it down with a power-law distribution rather than, let’s say, a normal distribution?

ROBERTS Why? I think it’s because the way the cerebellum is constructed. I think it has to do with . . . the brain is a network and it’s much easier to get a power-law distribution out of a network than out of a non-network and it’s revealing of the mechanism that produces the bar presses. It’s revealing that it comes from a very networked structure and a little bit more than that, too. It’s not only networked, it’s also chain reactioning and it sheds some light on the mechanism that’s producing the bar presses and that mechanism is not so far from what we see in the cerebellum, which has these incredible density of neurons, highly interconnected neurons. So that’s the connection.

MLODINOW Interesting.

ROBERTS That’s the best I can say as to the why. Clearly evolution designed the brain to solve the problems that animals encounter and why does the cerebellum have the structure it does? Because this power-law distribution is a good idea. Normal distribution is probably too conservative, whereas the power-law distribution is . . . every now and then it’s searching much more widely.

MLODINOW Searching for . . . to see if holding it down less or more amount of time will have any effect, so the power-law you will have some of those explorations into holding it down not long or extra long and therefore sometimes discover something new, rather than really more narrow . . . in a narrow band holding it down a certain number of milliseconds or whatever.

ROBERTS I would guess that the brain has been shaped to produce the power-law distribution in those operations and I think there’s probably other patterns of variability in other aspects of behavior but this is the one we measured.

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Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 10)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

ROBERTS What did you think of The Black Swan on the same topic?

MLODINOW It’s on the topic of how little things can cause big changes, you mean, and . . .

ROBERTS And how poorly we understand what really matters.

MLODINOWÂ I haven’t read the book from beginning to end so it’s hard to comment on that.

ROBERTS What about his previous book? There are similar ideas in the two books.

MLODINOW I didn’t really notice that book when I started writing Drunkard’s Walk; I wasn’t aware of the book. I had looked–in the library–gone through tons of books that seemed somehow related to randomness and somehow that one didn’t stand out to me. Sometime later it came out in paperback and it got very popular. Then I rediscovered it, and yes, I agree with a lot of what he says in that first book, but I still never read it from cover to cover. I’m not the type who feels compulsive about reading everything that’s been written on the subject that I’m writing on.

ROBERTS Yes. I always think of his book as being about these very long-tailed distributions–not only about that, but they play a large role–whereas you didn’t mention long-tailed distributions in your book.

MLODINOW Not explicitly, but I did talk about that idea and certainly the idea that not everything follows a normal distribution and how important it is to note that, for instance in Hollywood–Hollywood box office receipts. But I think The Black Swan was exclusively about that, so in that sense it was a different topic.

[For readers who don’t know what that is, if you’re talking about the probability of events occurring–let’s say you’re talking about the probability of a movie making a certain amount of money–there may be a mean amount of money that a movie makes or that a movie of that type makes. Then there will be fluctuations around it; some movies will make more, some movies will make less. The normal distribution is a distribution of the revenues that would follow a bell curve and the long-tailed distribution differs. One of the important respects that it differs in is that it has a lot more results that are far from the average that you would expect in a normal distribution. So if the average movie makes $1,000,000 or to be more realistic let’s say the average movie makes $50,000,000 and if it was normally distributed you would have, depending on the variance, but let’s just say you would have a certain number that make 40 or would make 60 and another small number would make 30 or 70 and you have a very small number indeed–probably practically zero–that would make $500,000,000. In Hollywood the way it really works is there are more that differ that far from the median than you would have if it were a normal distribution. That’s what they call a long-tailed distribution–the number of occurrences that are far from the average is much higher than you would expect with the normal distribution. — LM]

So that applies in many areas of life as well. I think that translated into what we were just talking about, it means that these little minor incidents can have major effects on you. It’s not all kind of pushed toward the mean effect, which is just going into my office and doing more physics.

ROBERTS Yes, I think that if you take the different things that have happened to you and you measured their effect, the effects will have a power-law distribution. A tiny number will have a huge effect and . . .

MLODINOW Yes.

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Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 9)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

ROBERTS I see. The smaller the event, the bigger the outcome, the better the story. The more famous the person happens to be . . .

MLODINOW The idea that Bruce Willis decides to visit his girlfriend in Los Angeles leads to the Diehard series is interesting. It’s a more interesting idea than the fact that I’m on my way to the mailbox to mail a letter turning down a fellowship to Germany when I bump in–literally cross paths at the mailbox, when I was in school–with the lady from the fellowship office who’s appalled that I’m not taking this fellowship that is so hard to get and makes me go talk to my advisor about it. I literally had the envelope in hand turning it down and it was the last day for deciding. I go to my advisor whom I’m sure will agree with me that it’s a stupid thing to leave Berkeley and go to Germany for a year on this fellowship and he convinced me to do it. That completely changed my life. Had I not bumped into this lady, had I not had an extra sip or had I had two extra sips instead of one of my coffee, we would not have crossed paths, literally, at the mailbox. It’s a really bizarre thing and . . .

ROBERTS You mean your advisor convinced you to take the fellowship?

MLODINOW He convinced me to take the fellowship and go and I hadn’t even considered it, I just thought, ’Well here I am in graduate school, I have to get through and to go on something that could be just a lark in Germany . . .’ But I ended up meeting a woman I fell in love with, learning the language, loving Europe, staying there for years. Many, many things in my life changed; it was really a life changing experience and I think it broadened my horizons quite a bit also, living abroad. It just changes your whole view of the world. All that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t literally crossed paths on campus with this lady. To make the story weirder, I had heard about the fellowship a month earlier or six weeks earlier, I don’t remember, but just ignored it and by chance the night before had come across the letter and thought, ’Oh I shouldn’t be impolite, I should tell them whether I’m taking it or not; someone else might be waiting for this.’ That’s why I wrote the letter and was walking to the mailbox that next day. If anything, had I found the letter a day earlier and sent it out or not found the letter on my desk or not bumped into her or any of those things wouldn’t have happened, I would not have had these experiences.

ROBERTS I think different events have different potentials for change–you could say they have different life-changing potency. If you spend an hour doing the events with the big life-changing potencies you’re going to be in a lot better position than if you spend an hour doing the dead events, the events that are unlikely to change your life. I think your example plays into what I think because I think traveling is one of the events that has high life-changing potency.

MLODINOW Yes, that’s true.

ROBERTS And why that is, I think, is sort of interesting. You refer to something you call the Normal Accident Theory of life–what is that?

MLODINOW The Normal Accident Theory of accidents. The Theory of Normal Accidents is the theory that in a complex system you can’t prevent accidents; they will happen and you need to account for them, you need to plan for them and you should stop–well, I shouldn’t say stop–but you should give up the idea of zero tolerance and certainly try to minimize them. You also have to look at implications of when they occur because they will occur and in a very complex system there are always going to be events that on their own–or even in certain other combinations–are unremarkable and yet together in certain combinations can cause huge catastrophes.

One example is the story that I just told, meeting the lady at the mailbox. If you want to consider that–I don’t want to say that it was a catastrophe–but it was on a big event which is the life-changing event of going and the little things that caused it that are normally totally unremarkable such as straightening out my desk, which caused me to find the letter. Taking the letter to the mailbox on my way to work and a number of other things that were minor and on their own not noteworthy conspired to have me collide with this lady at that time and end up in Germany. The nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island or the space shuttle or Chernobyl, these are complex systems that are so complicated that little events can conspire to cause a big event which can be a big tragic event. After those big events–after 9/11, after Pearl Harbor–we go back and we find the little events that made the big event happen and we blame people for not having avoided them. The question in the Normal Accident Theory is whether that’s really wise because you can’t know ahead of time what those un-noteworthy events will mean what or will cause what. Finding the actual events and tracing the path of tragedy doesn’t really tell you a lot because there are a million possible paths which could have happened. You couldn’t have worried about all of them. And only one of them, which is really not distinguishable from the others, a priori, is the one that led to the catastrophe. It’s all about trying to understand that–that’s the Normal Accident Theory.

I think in life, as I just said, I think that a lot of unremarkable, un-noteworthy events happen to push you this way or that, give you different opportunities or cause things to happen in your life that have the potential to cause major changes in life. It’s as much that sort of thing than your actual planning and conniving on how to get ahead causes you to get where you are.

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