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Dunning-Kruger effect - Idiots have more confidence than the good guys

A study by researchers in Cornell university in 1999 found that idiots overestimate their abilities, and the good guys underestimate them. Also, the idiots fail to recognize good qualities in others. From the wikipedia

• incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,

• incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,

• incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,

• if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

See full article. It is left as an exercise to the motivated reader to figure out what this means if a manager is incompetent (e.g. in terms of hiring).

How to become a better writer in 2 minutes

Lifted this entire post from the Dilbert blog:

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)

That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.

Experts are NOT!

“Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” is a new book by Philip Tetlock which essentially has collected a lot of hard data to prove that most “experts” are no better than you or me. Specifically, he is talking about people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables. And he shows that they are no better at their predictions than average people who read newspapers (i.e. are a little knowledgeable).

See this New Yorker review for details. Excerpt:

“Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable.

I should go and try to find this book…

Sibling non-rivalry in plants

Apparently, plants are nice to their own “brothers” but get competitive with other plants nearby if they are not related, according to this new research. Excerpt:

“When plants share their pots, they get competitive and start growing more roots, which allows them to grab water and mineral nutrients before their neighbours get them. It appears, though, that they only do this when sharing a pot with unrelated plants; when they share a pot with family they don’t increase their root growth. Because differences between groups of strangers and groups of siblings only occurred when they shared a pot, the root interactions may provide a cue for kin recognition.”

See full article.

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid”

Speigel has a very interesting interview with Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati where he says that aid to Africa is doing more harm than good. Excerpts:

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

And later:

Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They’re in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

I know nothing about Africa, or aid to Africa. I don’t have enough information to decide whether to agree with Shikwati or not. But this sure is a contrarian viewpoint - a side to the argument that most people are unfamiliar with. Hence, I believe it is a must read. I love contrarian points of view. Read the full article.

Useless body parts

This webpage has a fairly comprehensive list of all body parts that are now useless. Some time in our evolutionary past, they were useful, but are now just sitting around, waiting for evolution to get rid of them. For example:

ERECTOR PILI:
Bundles of smooth muscle fibers allow animals to puff up their fur for insulation or to intimidate others. Humans retain this ability (goose bumps are the indicator) but have obviously lost most of the fur.

See full article. Blogging about it because some things you just need to know for no good reason…

Scott Adams’ Golden Happiness Ratio

Scott Adams has an interesting theory on how to be happy - something I totally agree with:

I have a theory that you can predict how happy people are and perhaps how successful by their ability to tolerate imperfection. The Golden Happiness Ratio is about 4/5ths right, also known as “good enough.

Once you achieve about 80% rightness, any extra effort is rarely worth the effort. People who can’t stop until they get to 100% are usually stressed to the point where they can barely function. And don’t expect them to do much multitasking.

See full article.

What makes a restaurant successful?

Scott Adams, who is a very smart guy, and who just happens to own a couple of restaurants, has spent some time analyzing what makes a restaurant successful and writes this post. Excerpt:

When asked about the most important factor for a restaurant’s success, experts often pick lighting. Your first inclination is to laugh that off as absurd, because you’ve probably never made a restaurant decision based on lighting. But if you look at the restaurants that are doing well without being Italian or Mexican or tax cheats or a chain, they generally have excellent lighting. Everything, including your date, looks better with the right lighting. And that can be enough to make you remember the food and service as being better than they were. I pay attention to restaurant lighting, and find it a far better predictor of success than food or service. (I’m working on my restaurant’s lighting too.)

I assume you are not going to start your own restaurant, but nevertheless, it is interesting to read what how that business works.

In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell

Recently found this article by Bertrand Russell lamenting that modern society (the article was written in 1932) puts far too much emphasis on “work”. He makes an intriguing argument that everyone should do less “work” and should have more leisure to pursue other activities. Excerpt:

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered ‘highbrow’. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

See full article. It is a long article, and a little slow in the beginning but it has lots of insightful snippets and is well worth the effort.