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Would you kill someone if your boss told you to?

“Obviously not!” is what you are thinking, if you’ve never heard of the Milgram Experiment. But if you knew about the Milgram experiment, you wouldn’t be so sure.

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” - - that they were just following orders of their superiors. In the experiment, so-called “teachers” (who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram. They were asked administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake he made during the experiment. The fictitious story given to these “teachers” was that the experiment was exploring effects of punishment (for incorrect responses) on learning behavior. The “teacher” was not aware that the “learner” in the study was actually an actor - - merely indicating discomfort as the “teacher” increased the electric shocks.

When the “teacher” asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!

source.

Read the whole wikipedia page on this topic. It is very interesting. Especially the variations on the experiments. And the effect on the subjects.

And then there is this video on YouTube (part 1, and part 2) of one session of the experiment. It is horrifying.

Milgram Experiment video - Part 1

Milgram Experiment video - Part 2

Analyzing creative “right-brainers”

 Venkat analyzes what he calls the “da Vinci mind” and a couple of books that describe the minds that will dominate the future. Although the whole article is intriguing, what I found most interesting is his section on the failings of those who have this kind of mind:

Whole New Mind is a book with which I resonated wildly, but which nevertheless made me very uncomfortable. On the one hand I felt an instant surge of resonance and recognition. I could not help but recognize myself clearly in the portrait Pink paints of this thinking style. In fact, through my meandering years through graduate school, I zeroed in on almost exactly the same set of attributes as characterizing the strengths of my thinking style. Metaphor and narrative, in particular have driven much of my work. So Pink’s book was, in a way, a source of strong validation to the point where I found myself thinking, “Dammit, if I were a better writer, I could have written this book.”

And yet, I found myself feeling uncomfortable about the uniformly “brave new world” tone of both books. My discomfort probably has to do with my fundamentally tragic outlook on life, which rests solidly on the idea that our brains (right-brained or not) are hopeless flawed and optimized for self-delusion. Had I been the one to write WNM, I suspect I’d have devoted as many chapters to the pathologies of the whole new mind as to its strengths. Wild mood swings and bipolar tendencies, bouts of deep and extended lethargy, dissipated daydreaming, sloppy amateurishness — these are all traits as characteristic of the WNM as its conceptual and creative strengths, and no amount of the sort of educational reform that Gardner and others like Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and Martin Seligman suggest, will fix these flaws.

Which does not mean necessarily that the WNM will not rule the future. But just because many influential people may be (metaphorically, in the Pink sense) right-brained in the future does not mean most right-brainers will be influential (applying a dose of left-brained necessary/sufficient logic here). Most of us will in fact fade into oblivion as blog writers or end up institutionalized believing we are Napoleon or Bill Gates. The reason is hard logic: the output of one Einstein can keep hundreds of left-brainers busy for decades. The world only has the bandwidth to realize the conceptual imaginings of a few of the most creative right-brainers. The rest who don’t make the Einstein grade will have to learn to play with their underdeveloped left brain.

On a smaller scale, this issue plays out in the tension that exists between discipline and IQ. To succeed you need a combination of both - having just high IQ is not enough.

Who gets lucky?

Another long Marc Andreessen post, this time talking about the different kinds of “luck” and gives ideas on how you can go about getting luck on your side. Excerpt:

This of course leads to a number of challenges for how we live our lives as entrepreneurs and creators in any field:

* How energetic are we? How inclined towards motion are we? Those of you who read my first age and the entrepreneur post will recognize that this is a variation on the “optimize for the maximum number of swings of the bat” principle. In a highly uncertain world, a bias to action is key to catalyzing success, and luck, and is often to be preferred to thinking things through more throughly.

* How curious are we? How determined are we to learn about our chosen field, other fields, and the world around us? In my post on hiring great people, I talked about the value I place on curiosity — and specifically, curiosity over intelligence. This is why. Curious people are more likely to already have in their heads the building blocks for crafting a solution for any particular problem they come across, versus the more quote-unquote intelligent, but less curious, person who is trying to get by on logic and pure intellectual effort.

* How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing — at linking together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly? I think this is a hard skill to consciously improve, but I think it is good to start most creative exercises with the idea that the solution may come from any of our past experiences or knowledge, as opposed to out of a textbook or the mouth of an expert. (And, if you are a manager and you have someone who is particularly good at synthesis, promote her as fast as you possibly can.)

* How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view — a personal approach — a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create? This, in a nutshell, is why I believe that most creative people are better off with more life experience and journeys afield into seemingly unrelated areas, as opposed to more formal domain-specific education — at least if they want to create.

In short, I think there is a roadmap to getting luck on our side, and I think this is it.

See full article.

Modern IQ ranges for various occupations

Interesting graph here.  Not particularly useful, but I am sure you are curious enough to see what it says…

Age and Creativity

Marc Andreessen (who is often wrong but never in doubt) has this detailed but very informative post on the relationship between our age and our “output”. Excerpt:

So what have we learned in a nutshell?

* Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.

* This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

* Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.

* The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.

* Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!

Found: here.

And after reading the full article. you should also check out Naval Ravikant’s follow-up to this article which manages to add more interesting thoughts to this topic. Well worth spending the time required to read these long articles.

The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography

Venkat has just written about a new way to map all our social interactions. The innermost ring is the twitter zone, which he describes as:

The twitter zone is the zone of people about whom you get a constant stream of nonessential trivia, ranging from children’s illnesses to tastes in coffee. In previous ages, the high cost of communication meant that this mapped to your village, tribe, (or suburban neighborhood plus cubicle neighbors). Today it includes anyone who engages you in a bidirectional flow of trivia about both your lives, in a constant steady stream, so you develop a full, rich background picture of their lives. It includes some of your physical neighbors (since in this age of Bowling Alone we don’t talk to all our neighbors) and your twitter and instant messaging buddies.

See full article, which should be read in conjunction with the Monkeysphere that I had blogged about earlier.

A disclosure based approach to monitoring educational institutions

Business standard has an editorial pointing out that instead of having approvals / accreditations for educational institutions, a better system would be to have a disclosure based approach. Institutes do not need approval, but they are policed to ensure that they disclose all the “important” information to prospective students. Excerpts:

A major question animating law-makers is the fear of “fly by night” firms who will “run away” with the money of students or short-change them. This is reminiscent of the problems seen in the securities markets, where there are concerns about similar “fly by night” firms who sell securities to “hapless investors” and run away. In the securities markets, the country has seen a shift away from the Controller of Capital Issues—who gave out discretionary permissions to any firm seeking to sell securities—to the modern disclosure-based framework. In this disclosure-based framework, the government only emphasises the importance of accurate information being available to the investor when a decision is made to invest in a security.

A similar approach would work very well in education. In a disclosure-based framework, the focus of the government would be on disclosure. For the rest, the decision about what university a person chooses to go to is best made by that person—and not by the government. The key insight here is that—as with investors—students are not eager to waste money on earning low-quality diplomas. Students are self-interested and work hard on trying to identify good programmes. Their efforts at making a choice can be supported by the government, if it runs a disclosure programme whereby accurate and salient information is made available to prospective students. The great advantage of such a disclosure-based approach lies in the fact that it would eliminate entry barriers in higher education, and make possible a surge of supply through which shortages would ease. Reputed global brands would come into the country to offer educational services. The market for education would shift from the present framework of scarcity and low quality to one with competition and choice.

See full article which I found here.

What fraction of a start-up is owned by whom

Ever wondered how rich you would be if you were in a start-up that was successful. Obviously, it depends upon how much of the company you own; and that depends on what level you joined at.

See this post for some “average” figures:

# CEO - 4%
# VPs - 1% each
# Director level - .5%
# Managers - .25%
# Individuals - .05

See full article. Interesting reading.

How to be a genius

Good advice:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius.You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: How did he do it? He must be a genius!»

Stolen from here. Contains other interesting bits of advice.

Conan O’Brien Hates Your Country

Conan O’Brien is the host of NBC’s show Late Nite and apparently is insulting all countries in the world. See this webpage:

Awhile ago, Conan did a bit where he showed fake Euro coins. One of those coins made fun of the Ukraine, which provoked a lot of angry letters. Here’s the interesting part: those letters were from the Ukraine. Conan had no idea that Late Night was aired in the Ukraine, and began to wonder where else he was on. You would think he could just ask NBC, but they won’t tell him, because then they’d have to pay him more.

There is just one way to find out, and that is to viciously insult every nation in the world, and see which ones he gets letters from.

Some example insults:

Afghanistan
The bad news is, there’s a new article about everyone farming opium.
The good news is, you can’t read.

Angola
Hey, call me when your life expectancy catches up with your inflation rate.

Brazil
Home to more than 800 species of unregulated breast implants.

India
A nation so richly diverse, you can walk into a single neighborhood and find cholera, dengue fever, malaria, typhoid, and plague.

See the whole list. Very funny.

Serious thought: If you really took the trouble to find out why each insult there was funny, you would be more knowledgeable about world affairs than most other people in the world.