Diagram of a neuron, and why simple is often (always?) better

The Children's Hospital Boston has an instructive interactive diagram explaining some of the electrical and chemical processes in the neuron. Although it probably goes into slightly less detail, quite frankly it does a solid job of summarizing the information I learned about neurons in my physiological psychology class this semester.

It is strange, then, that it is advertised as "for children." What kind of children are they talking about? I didn't see any references to Digimon. This reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowsky's post about when he tried to explain Bayesian inference at the elementary school level. It ended up being wildly successful for college-level students. I have two conclusions:

1) Don't allow hubris to prevent you from reading things aimed for a lower level than you consider yourself. It will be easier to read and it will help you ground yourself on the basics.

2) If you are explaining something, it might be helpful to pretend that you are explaining it to somebody at a much lower technical level than you really are. You shouldn't admit it, of course (to avoid problem #1 altogether), but it will help the actual understanding of your readers tremendously.

Of course, this all assumes that you know what you're talking about. If you don't, you should probably go ahead and use as much technical jargon and as many acronyms as possible.

Link to the diagram of the neuron. (Hat tip: Mind Hacks)

The Conformity Theory

A couple of weeks ago our basketball team played in The Hudson Valley Shootout in Bard. The games were fun, but the most interesting part of the tournament was how many fans Bard had in their gym. My rough guess was 150 students (out of 1800 undergrads), but it could have been more. And they were rowdy. I heard a story that four years ago when we last played there the fans cut out a picture of our best player's head and stuck it on a poster with a picture of George Bush's body.

Those of you who don't know much about Bard probably assume that it is some sort of big jock school, a liberal arts version of USC or something. But anybody that has seen the student body knows otherwise. These kids are artsy. I saw more wool sweaters and tight jeans during two hours at Bard than I saw in four years of high school. They're too trendy to shop at H&M, too politically heterodox to vote Green. They're too fucking punk rock to listen to punk rock.

So why do they go in droves to watch their basketball team? Basketball, the mainstream sport that was started by a crotchety old guy from the YMCA? I think it's because they're so non-conformist that they conform.

If everybody starts out as conforming, some cool people will probably end up not conforming in order to stand out. But if all of the cool kids are doing it, then everybody else will too. Now most everybody is non-conforming. So the next generation of non-conformists are so-non-conformist that they refuse to conform with their fellow non-conformists, and they conform. Viola, watching Bard basketball is cool again. This diagram should help explain my point (click on the image to make it bigger):

The numbers refer to degrees of coolness. So 0 corresponds to your average Mathlete competitor, and 720 is reserved for Chris Brown driving down to Tijuana in a convertible smoking a blunt, with his arm around Jessica Alba. Moreover, the numbers can apply to both individual people and activities. In the example of Bard basketball, the coolness of the activity jumped from 180, where nobody went, to 360, where suddenly it was cool enough to go again. If this all seems complicated, good. Keeping up with the cool kids can't be easy, otherwise everybody would be cool.

My advice to sports teams at trendy liberal art schools that want to get more fans at their games? Go semi-underground and market the team as conformist or boring. Maybe write an article in the campus newspaper under a pen name about how traditional sports are washed up and irrelevant. Explain in layman's terms why nobody watches the games anymore. Then sit back and watch the crowd tip back in your favor.

Does embracing your narcissism mean that you have to feel superior than other people?

I just took an online psychology study for extra credit, and while I don't want to ruin the experimental integrity of the study (so if you are planning on taking it, don't read this post), one of the questions has stuck with me. The section asks you to rate which attitude you most agree with. So either you believe more strongly that,

a) I am not better or no worse than most people
or b) I think I am a special person.

There are some social cues working against the second answer, and overconfidence bias working against choosing the first answer. I suppose that this question aims to determine which of these forces is stronger, and hopefully illuminate how narcissistic you are.

Tyler Durden insists in Fight Club that you "are not a special, unique snowflake." But I think that for the purposes of positive psychology and pragmatism (ie, getting shit done) it is more useful to consider yourself as at least a little bit special. If you don't think of yourself as special, why should you even do anything? You might as well wait for somebody else to do it first. And as Victor Frankl describes in Man's Search for Meaning, a purposeful life is one of our core human needs. So there is plenty of reason to choose option b, and nobody can fault you for that.

But there may be reason to fault those who believe that they are better or worse than others. To not believe that you are "not better or worse than most people," or in essence to believe that you are intrinsically better than most other people at just life in general, is a scary thought. It's the idea that led Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment that it was forgivable to commit murder. So there is also very good reason to choose option a.

So here's the problem that this question poses us, and I would say that this question is indicative of our society's general view towards narcissism. Either we think of ourselves as special, and better than other people, or we think of ourselves as boring, but the same worth as everybody else. Do you have to feel superior to others in order to embrace your narcissism? Or, can you think of yourselves as special and still assign yourself the same value as you assign everybody else? Let me know what you think.

Do you become happier as you age?

I somehow stumbled across this article about how happiness correlates with age, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. You should check it out. Money graf:

"In a study published in September in Psychological Science, Wood and her collaborator, neuroscientist Michael Kisley of the University of Colorado, recorded the brain activity of 63 adults, ranging in age, who were shown a series of negative and positive images, such as dead animals or a bowl of ice cream. Older adults were about 30% less reactive to the negative images compared with the younger adults."

Anyway, I figured that I could attempt to replicate this article's findings in my own life. I'm sending the article to myself using a 13-year time delay (I'll be 32!), reading it again, and deciding whether or not I agree with the results then.

Two key assumptions: 1) that I'll still have the same e-mail address and 2) that I'll still be alive. But as long as those two points are met, we could be in for some pretty sweet results. Bookmark this page, and come back in 2020.

Edit: By the way, the program I used to send myself the message in the future was called Time Cave. I've never seen a website with more incentive for people to donate.

The psychology of hating the referee

Any serious athlete or fan has had multiple experiences dealing with referees (or umpires, or whatever) that they thought had a vendetta against their team. In fact, you probably have dealt with a couple of refs whose faces you've have memorized in case you see them in a dark alley 10 years from now. We've all been there. Having been on both sides of the equation, as a soccer referee, I can attest that it's not as easy as it looks. You have so many different things to keep track of--was that offsides, does that slide tackle warrant a yellow card, is that cute older sister in the stands talking to her boyfriend or just some dude, and all the while you just want the game to be over with so you can get paid. Unfortunately, nobody takes any of that into account. I had parents--of 9 year olds!--yell at me from across the field well after the game, when they were walking back to their cars. One minute its, "here, Johnny, have a couple of orange slices, make sure you stay hydrated slugger," and the next its, "hey ref, you suck, take out your whistle next time, you blew the game!" It's wild. But what you learn to realize as a ref is that everybody loves to vent some anger by getting out of control now and then. Reason #45357 why an iPod is the best money you've ever spent. Anyway, I've come up with a few biases to try to explain why people get so angry at the refs at sporting events (all definitions from Wikipedia, the premiere source for information, whether broad academia is willing to admit it or not): "Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot." This is a big one in sports, where people at home and in the stands believe that they have an impact on what happens in the games based on their cheering, whether or not they watched a given play, or whatever. While it's fun to feel like part of the team, it probably means that you take any referee errors a little bit too personally. "Impact bias — the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states." When a referee makes a questionable decision in the game, people have the right to feel a little bit upset. Bill Simmons has a famous Levels of Losing column in which he pretty much talks about how awful it is to lose, and he's right. But generally nobody seems willing to admit that there will be another play, and another game. If they were, they might not care about a couple of bad calls, even if the ref does clearly need LASIK eye surgery. "Actor-observer bias -- the tendency to attribute their own behavior to their circumstances, but tend to attribute other people's behaviors to their dispositions." When a ref makes a call, we automatically assume that it must be their fault--they weren't paying attention or they are racist, even when it's just as likely that the ref had a tough angle or was forced to make the decision on the move in a split second. Any other reasons why we chastise referees so much?

Not everything good is bad for you

We all start out our lives as children believing that anything that is said to be "good" for you, or more likely just what our parents want us to eat, will taste bad. The classic example of this phenomenon is broccoli, which has been shoved down the throat of children or used as a prerequisite for desert since Martin Luther posted his 99 theses.

However, as we get older, we begin to realize that broccoli is really not so bad tasting after all. Indeed, if cooked and tossed with a touch of Parmesan, it can be quite appetizing. Nevertheless, the thought process remains intact, seemingly disregarding a few solid counterexamples. For a long time now, if something is said to be good for me, my first presupposition is that I will find it impetuously disgusting.

Now that all of that nonsense is aside, I can describe to you the best possible test for proving this theory false once and for all. Anybody that has ever bought a multi-pack of Clif Bars knows that you are lukewarm to the Peanut Butter ones, you worship the Chocolate Chip Peanut Crunch ones, and you learn to despise Oatmeal Raisin ones faster than you learn to hate Chris Wilton from Match Point.

So with such a healthy hatred of Oatmeal Raisin, and with such a longing for Chocolate Chip Peanut Crunch, one would naturally assume that the latter must be substantially less healthy for you. After all, if it tastes better, it must be worse for you. But this is when you compare the nutritional facts and learn one of the greatest life lessons you will ever learn.

Spoiler alert, dear readers. The nutritional facts for these two bars, which differ so tremendously in taste, are exactly the same. The consequences here are broad-reaching, and are probably beyond the scope of this blog to explore fully. So instead I will leave you with a simple forewarning. In the course of your adventures, gustatory or otherwise, do not assume that everything that good is bad for you. We'll all be better off for it.

Knowledge is Dead

My buddy Andrew, one of the many bright young minds attending Claremont McKenna College, poses a fantastic question in his comment to my previous post. Among other things, he writes that,

"Most blogs talk about current events or future events. I haven't seen many blogs on the history of French republics or blogs on the Fed. Papers. It seems history might be hard to chase down in the blogging world."

So the question is, can and will you learn the relevant history of a particular subject just from reading a blog on it? Or, must you take a class in order to read a wide range of information on the subject and have a teacher evaluate your knowledge?

My response would be that blogs once again will trump traditional methods of learning here. While traditional learning tells you to read up so that you can have general knowledge that may or may not be helpful in the future (and so you can get a good grade, ugh), reading up on current happenings demands that you be literate in past events so that you can understand what is going on now.

The difference is one of incentives. Classroom learning posits a long-range reward of understanding French history with the rationale that eventually it will be useful. The current events that you read about in blogs, on the other hand, give you immediate incentive to search for an article about the Marshall Plan on Wikipedia to understand how our foreign intervention policies have morphed into what is going on in Iraq. There's no grading system that rewards cramming online, just your desire to understand the world around you.

In a world where information is so liquid with Google Scholar and Wikipedia at each of our fingertips, and Amazon able to drop any book on your doorstep within two days, I would expect that mass stores of prior knowledge would be even less helpful.

Nevertheless, I'm not about to drop out of Vassar next semester and I intend to finish my stay here, for two main reasons:

a) The social scene, including but not limited to being around a bunch of smart and funny guys on the basketball team, is incredible and probably couldn't be replicated anywhere else.

b) There's little economic incentive to blog and read blogs, because our mainstream society is nowhere near to accepting this form of knowledge. If I want recognition for my studies, which isn't necessary but undoubtedly provides a sense of security, I must grind out the process and receive a formal degree.

Models of Learning

OK, this is an incredibly subjective question, but I'm going to pose it anyway.

What would make you more intelligent, attending the classes of a rigorous four-year college for a semester or reading some of the top influential blogs on a daily basis and blogging your responses for four months? I think that many in the "real world" (ie, people who probably definitely wouldn't read this blog anyway), would knee-jerkily respond that college is the obvious choice here.

But hear me out here. Reading many of the top economics, science, and political blogs over the past four to five months has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Freakonomics and Marginal Revolution have taught me a love for data. Cognitive Daily and Mind Hacks help to reaffirm my belief in the importance of raw, experimental science. And reading David Brooks and Kevin Drum have kept me far more informed on the political scene than I ever was when I used to drone through CNN and the occasional Daily Show. All the while I'm actively learning, and reinforcing this learning by writing about these subjects on my own time.

Compare this experience with college. While Vassar is probably one of the most challenging schools in the country and I have had to engage in each of my classes to keep up, most of the talk among my fellow students is not about the issues, but instead about "beating the system." Respect in many cases comes not through understanding the material the best, but by getting the best grade while doing the least possible amount of work.

I'm sure that this sounds plenty pretentious, and rather rantish, by this point. But it's not meant to be. The point is, I succumb to this groupthink on a daily basis as well. It'd be remarkably difficult not to.

I'm usually not this forthright about the utility of blogging, and perhaps it is the stress of all of the work that is piling up on my shoulders that is forcing me into it. But the next time you fellow bloggers look down upon your writing as merely a hobby, consider the possibility that your supposed hobby might not be as trite as you assume.

Mixing art and science

I was reading this recent article in Nature, which talks about how science could use the aesthetic process and take more risks in order to produce faster results. But I think the article could take it one step further.

What if a new wave of artists in this next century didn't work in oil or pastels but instead in genetic engineering? The next Picasso could engineer new plants that are blue and grow sideways, and display them at the MOMA in New York or San Francisco. Now that would be art that I could really appreciate, instead of this postmodern stuff that I could make in Microsoft Paint in 20 minutes on a whim.

Note to Self

Writer's block doesn't mean you don't have anything to say, it just means that you have too many individual ideas, and when compared to the whole they seem useless. Now, that's not simply to say that the first step is the hardest, in fact it probably isn't because you'll choose the easiest path, the most intuitive topic for your first step. What I'm saying is that writer's block can be a good thing. How else would you form all of your nascent ideas but to let them simmer and heat up in your brain?

So, blog readers, there is no reason to shun a break in the action now and then. As long you aren't a paid writer, taking a week or two off from writing could be quite helpful. It's like Obi-Wan in the first Star Wars. Strike me down now, Darth, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

What I'm Reading

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl -- I can't imagine how you wouldn't be moved by the description Frankl presents of his time in concentration camps during WWII. He manages to make a multitude of pointed and thoughtful remarks on human nature along the way. One of the few books (as far as I can tell) that is easy to read and interesting, yet still highly regarded as a work of science.

Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior by Phil Jackson and some other guy that co-wrote it but is shirked to the side most of the time and nowhere to be found on amazon (Hugh Delehanty) -- A fun one, especially for somebody who plays basketball, and especially for a basketball player that is especially interested in the Zen and Native American traditions that the book discusses. The thoughts on finding a way for one competitor to win while respecting the humanity of both sides was particularly poignant. Also gets points for funny lines such as, "If you meet Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball."

The Firm by John Grishman -- Thrilling ride that centers on a young lawyer that joins a firm that pays well but is very small. Something seems to be wrong, and when the FBI gets involved, it hits the fan. An excellent travel book. Perhaps the scariest part the novel was that a part of me didn't want him to find out anything about his firm, I just wanted him to keep making money and driving his BMW and spending quality time with his apparently beautiful wife.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway -- I can see why some people might like this book, including the intricate detail it provides over a three day period, but it just wasn't for me. I spent much of the summer toiling over this book, stuck around page 350. While I eventually finished it, I need to accept that sometimes the right call is just putting the book down. Hemingway was a giant, but read this one at your own peril.

Quick thoughts and updates

1) "What kind of classes are you taking?" is a 500 times better class than "what classes are you taking?" Nobody cares about what actual classes people are in unless they are very close and are likely to forget anyway. My parents asked me 189203 times this summer what classes I was taking, and I'm sure they still don't know. Not only that, but most students hate to answer this question because they get asked all the time. I would say it'd be better just to find out generally what type of stuff they're interested in, if anything.

2) I couldn't be more excited for this upcoming year.

3) By the end of last year, I had stopped saying "hella." When I realized this, I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror for three days, I was so ashamed. When you don't say hella, you let the whole bay area down. I pledge to continue saying hella all year this time, and hopefully my whole life. It could be cool to try to work it into writing too. Any thoughts on this? Is it too colloquial?

Book Review: Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss does a lot of things right in his first serious foray into the writing world. He crammed his book full of very useful life-hacking tips, including actual websites where these ideas could be followed up on. He included tons of interesting tidbits about his life and how he has seen angles that others haven't been able to. And perhaps most importantly, he emphasizes that each of us can be just as successful if we put our mind to it and maintain the right attitude. This book doesn't lack details, which separates it from many of the other self-help books I have read and is probably one of the key reasons that it has been so high-grossing.

Nevertheless, his book wasn't flawless. One of the main gripes I had with Ferriss's style was his attitude that the world should be working for you. He suggests that everything be outsourced, from checking your mail to researching column topics, so that you can pursue the things that you ought to care about. This is a cute idea, but there are two problems it doesn't account for:

a) You can't take an order or check a pulse while you're halfway around the world. Doing your business mobile works for some industries, but certainly not all of them.

b) It totally disregards the notion that your occupation is at least partially about doing some good in the world. If you want to be an activist, Ferriss encourages you to streamline your main occupation and commit yourself to volunteering. But what about organizations that provide valuable services or perform research critical to solving novel diseases? Maybe I'm young and idealistic, but I think that some professions might be worth not quitting.

Ferriss writes funny, quick, and interesting. You have to respect the way he has reinvented his own life. But keep in mind that while forging your own path in life is admirable, the way he specifically did it may not be for everybody.

J.K. Rowling's Last Metaphor

One of the reasons that the Harry Potter series has been so successful is Rowling's ability to illuminate problems with her society by portraying slightly altered versions of the same issues in the her fantastical wizarding world. For example, wizards who are not direct descendants of other wizards are considered "half-bloods" if one of their parents is a Muggle (the wizard term for a non-wizard) or, worse yet, "mudbloods" if both their parents were Muggles. This problem is absurd to the reader, which is partly Rowling's point because such name calling is shockingly similar to much of the racism that occurs in our real world. Countless other such metaphors are found in the series, exploring the issues that she finds important in her life through the fictional lives of Harry and friends.

While most of these metaphors make a lot of sense, the one thing that I have never understood is the reason why many in the wizarding world are unwilling to call Voldemort, the main "bad guy," by his real name. They prefer to call him "You-Know-Who," or if they are very serious about the whole thing, "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." Harry never believed in this taboo about Voldermort's name, prefering instead to follow Dumbledore's advice that "fear of the name only increases fear of the thing itself." Rowling obviously included this phenomenon for a reason, for yet another social commentary, but I had up until now not been able to figure out why.

It took the death of an old classmate of mine about two weeks ago to enlighten me. While pondering how sad it is that he died, I've reflected upon how we as a society don't really discuss death until it affects us immediately. I've been lucky in that I haven't had to experience much death in my young life, but this classmate was one of the first people my age who I had known for a long time, whose house I had been over to, and who had made an impact upon my life. I think there are many reasons why death is such a hushed topic, one of which must be a fear that it will lead to unnecessary melancholy.

Through this reflection I believe I understand Rowling's last metaphor, the most convoluted yet one of the most powerful points in her series. Fear of a "name," or fear of talking about something, will only increase fear of the thing itself. The less we talk about death publicly, the more we will fear it privately. Do you agree?