Intriguing Ideas in Productivity

Posted on by David Wright

How do you get better? Here are some ideas:

To summarize these results:

  • The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
  • but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
  • and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

I remember a really interesting discussion (I think it was on reddit, but google has failed me) about how working ‘overtime’ (an ambiguous term, I admit, but stay with me) is a sign of a poorly designed work process.

Should there be such a thing as overtime? If you’re a doctor or lawyer or some kind of hourly-paid professional the concept is ambiguous. If you’re not paid hourly you’re paid for delivering some kind of completed project and the concept is even more ambiguous.

How about this?

Most of the time, a week in which I work 40 hours sucks. If I’m working on interesting things, 40 hours is not enough. If I’m working on boring things, 40 hours is far too many. Either way, not so fun. 40 hours is a compromise week in which I don’t actually get a lot of work done, but I’m probably stuck in the office a lot.

And there’s no question that even 40 hours at your desk yields something less than 40 hours of solid work. Work productivity ebbs and flows. If you work 0 hours one week and 85 the next, how much overtime have you worked?

The Market Speaks

Posted on by David Wright

Want job security?

Have a look at the professions you should consider.

There are, broadly speaking, three industries with impressive future/current demand. The first is easy: anything that requires math and science. Want a free lunch for our grandchildren? Find a way to increase M&S aptitude and interest in your kids by 1%.

The second is a darker reality. Remember TGS and Baumol’s cost disease: the share of health care and education in our economy will be constantly rising over time.

Here are the skills:

1. People good at math and science

2. Healthcare and pharmacology (50% math and science, 50% Baumol’s cost disease/TGS).

3. Teaching teachers (100% TGS).

#3 makes me think of the (perhaps proverbial) merchants in the gold rushes of history. We’re funneling talent into the teaching profession, but the smart talent doesn’t go into the mine, the smart talent sells miners $50 pints of recycled beer and $10,000 pickaxes.

Berlusconi

Posted on by David Wright

Sounds like he’s stepping down. Ah, Berlusconi…

I’m going to miss him. He’s the villain everyone loves to hate. He’s like the European George W. Bush.

He controls the media!

He gets up to all sorts of shenanigans!

What amuses me about him is that he’s such a punching bag. He’s one of those politicians that the (admit it, left-leaning) press awards the disparaging moniker “election-winner” as though that’s some quality distinct from any other a politician can have.

He obviously has SOME kind of appeal to Italians or they wouldn’t put him in office time after time. Can you chalk it up to him having a ridiculous stranglehold on the media? Some of it, sure. But maybe he’s also what Italians want in a Prime Minister, relative to the rest of the field.

Look, I’m not saying he ain’t a bad dude. Dodging criminal prosecution because you’re the Prime Minister until the Statute of Limitations expires is pretty despicable, but of the society as much the man. Are people saying he rigged elections to achieve this? I don’t think so, which means he did something that’s pretty tough to do (get friggen elected multiple times) to pull it off.

Anyway, the vast majority of public figures are bad dudes. Maybe he’s in the 75th percentile or something, sure, but much more than that?

Most people are happy to talk past one another on this kind of thing. I marvel at how cognitively costly it is to engage in real empathy or admit a mistake (I mean this of myself as much as anyone else). Real understanding of a disagreeing party’s position, therefore, is elusive simply because people won’t shoulder that burden.

We foreigners may never know why on earth the Italians elected such a douche bag. But maybe they’ll be nice enough to put another one in office so we can still have someone to look down on.

Lots of Links This Morning

Posted on by David Wright

Big picture econ heavy.

1. Tyler Cowen gives us a brace of thoughts today: First is a big-think:

Going back to unemployment, labor market opportunities for college grads have been eroding — except for the elite — in absolute terms since 1997-2000, well before the collapse in AD.  If those same grads are highly willing to be geographically mobile, highly willing to consider actuarial training, and highly willing to take tougher courses and study where the jobs are (doesn’t have to be tech subjects, some of those are failing too), the unemployment response to a given AD shock will be much lower.  But they aren’t, so it isn’t.  I’ve seen only small adjustments in the ambition and flexibility of college goers, not enough preaching about TGS I suppose.

Read it all.

2. Next he makes two points with quotes: 1. online education is improving and 2. ‘real’ education is stagnating. My ax grinds away.

3. Now Sumner gives us the word of the day, which I also like: “Reify” in quoting Yglesias:

don’t reify the concept of an inflation rate and then worry about whether or not the government is “really” calculating the “real” one. Things change in a lot of ways, preferences are heterogeneous and aggregating it all up into a single number is inherently wrong. It’s just that the programs need a single number.

Excellent. He follows up:

A few decades back the British tried indexing the initial benefit levels to the CPI (not wages as we do.)  Eventually the old people revolted, because as real wages trended upward over time, the living standards of the old fell further and further behind the lifestyle of those still working.

I commented on his blog with this:

My grandfather remains a retired college instructor/administrator, which he’s been for over 30 years. In fact, his life was divvied up into thirds: 1/3 before work (including WW2), 1/3 working and 1/3 retired. He’s (I think?) 90 right now. He is often amazed at how his living standard has skyrocketed since he retired.

Monte Carlo Simulation Implemented ENTIRELY in Excel (no VBA macros)

Posted on by David Wright

When I moved to NY from our Toronto office I was a bit hamstrung by needing to log into a remote server to use the stochastic software we tend to run our simulations with. Not that it didn’t work, but it was slow and a bit of a pain to use.

So the first thing I did was try to implement my own Monte Carlo simulation program. I wanted to be able to send it to people wholesale so I forced myself to use VBA.

It worked, but it was really really slow. I hate slow.

So my latest iteration is a relatively simple model written entirely in excel formulas, basically only using the rand() function, which has been greatly improved by MS in Office 2003.

The attached file simulates Poisson random numbers with the famous Knuth algorithm (a lovely bit of math, by the way).

Next up will be installing normal, lognormal and beta distributions. With those, I can probably simulate just about anything I need to, really. I’m going to limit myself to Excel’s native (C)  implementations of all of these functions, which are a ba-jillion times faster than anything you can handcode in VBA.

So why reinvent the wheel?

Aha! So That’s What Social Media Is For!

Posted on by David Wright

Cringely recently ran a piece asking what his readers think the next world-changing technology. He then ran one with his ideas, which are:

I think our next frontier should be a combination of additive manufacturing and autonomous flight… Additive manufacturing is in the middle of a revolution that within a decade will have usable devices appearing in volume and at competitive prices from backyard sheds and sold into local commerce…

…What qualifies autonomous flight as a good frontier is that it fits beautifully in the traditional frontier paradigms of population expansion and steadily increasing property values. American frontiers, as I wrote earlier this week, have long been paid for with free or inexpensive land…

Powerful ideas, particularly additive manufacturing. But this feels a bit too much like so many pronouncements of yesteryear on what ‘the future’ will look like. They’re always wrong. And they’re always wrong because they are about technology and the future is shaped by economics.

His point about flight reducing land values (possible… I suppose) is close. But the most powerful idea in economics is that incentivized individuals collaborating privately produce astounding things.

And technology pronouncements are about the things we DO think of, which means we need to think about the meta-process that produces technology. That means (to me) that the real future will be shaped by the revolution that is starting in education.

Consider this HN discussion:

TITLE: Best approach for self-taught developer looking for job?
Comment 1: Pulled up your github account. Aside from you accidentally adding your home directory, you’re making good progress. If you’re looking to get a job quickly, I’d encourage you to focus on one area and I think your shortest path is the front end technologies. Pretty much every firm I know of in NYC is hiring front end developers and the main limitation is finding people who actually know javascript…

And you can demonstrate it by sticking something on github

Prove yourself on Github and you suddenly have absolutely no need for a college degree. Even today I’d argue that there’s nothing you can achieve in a college liberal arts program you can’t do with a blog (implying an Internet connection as well) and a library card. That is to say, more or less for free.

This cuts to the heart of what an education is, which is two things: learning things and proving it. The reason why people don’t go to Wikipedia University isn’t that you can’t learn anything there, it’s that you can’t prove you learned it. It’s too easy to misjudge competence: even losers can look and sound like they know what they’re doing. The signaling aspect of ‘going to Harvard’ gets around this problem. But messily. And for so very few.

Now that’s changing. If you can demonstrate real domain competence in an open environment, suddenly the dual-power of a University (giving not just knowledge but also a piece of paper that proves it) is broken.

Michael Nielsen is getting close to what I’m thinking of in pushing for collaborative science. I’m imagining a Github for all worthwhile public goods in all scientific disciplines, but not as an output, as an input. Eventually all scientists will grow up sharing everything they do online. Those Githubs will be their training grounds. The universities of the future.

And they’re free.

Review: Pacquiao Marquez 2

Posted on by David Wright

Round 1 doesn’t have the fireworks of last time: both look to be bigger fighters, which they are as super featherweights (130). Manny definitely carries the extra weight much better than Marquez, by which I mean that Marquez looks a bit softer than he did as a featherweight. It’s all of four pounds, sure, but Manny’s as ripped as ever at each successive weight level. There’s something peculiar about Manny that way.

Anyway, the first two rounds are the usual close affairs that characterized the last 11 rounds of the first fight. Could go either way. Marquez landing the slightly better shots, but only deterring timing shots carrying little danger.

Then Marquez goes down in the third from a great (Marquez-like) counter-left hook. Then he almost goes down again. Manny’s quietly dominating now, actually, if there is such a thing.

Through the 5th, Marquez is looking a bit less sharp than Manny. He’s certainly not got the snap he had in their last meting. Age? Weight? Who knows, but he’s not as effective through the middle of this fight.

Then Lederman gives JMM the fifth. Shows what I know.

The big problem, of course, is that it’s difficult to generalize from these circumstances. I don’t know whether Manny just landed a good shot early in some round keep JMM off balance for a bit and then he comes right back hard like he is in the 6th. The fight is super close.

The differences between the two in each round is narrower than in the last fight, and that’s saying something. Manny is definitely a more complete fighter than he was, but now lacks the element of surprise that put JMM on his butt three times in ’04. Emmanuel Steward agrees with me, noting Manny’s better awareness of JMM’s punches and of his own position. He blocks and counters now.

Wow, Manny’s cut now beneath his right eye. He’s getting touched up a quite a bit in the 8th, almost like he’s taking the bigger shots. Deceiving, of course, since you can’t see power the way you feel power.

Flicking on the commentators, now, they seem to agree that that 8th was a big Marquez round. The 9th is much more even, now. Judges seem to be split but Pac is slightly stronger.

Wow, Pac catches JMM in the 10th on an action-hero-like duck-and-swing, rudely interrupting Lederman’s little monologue. Lots and lots of action.

JMM is blazing away with straight rights, southpaw kryptonite, in the 11th. Undaunted, Pacquaio returns fire. God, how do you score this? 12th also a toss-up, with maybe an edge to Marquez.

Overall, Manny scores knockdowns and lands bigger, better punches whereas Marquez lands perhaps more punches. A question of taste, then. Pacquiao by split decision this night.

Can’t wait for Saturday.

Review: Pacquiao Marquez 1

Posted on by David Wright

Watching the old fights on HBO (love HBO).

The first round was predictable and has been analyzed ad nauseum. Pac knocked JMM down three times, but didn’t really seem to hurt him much.

Following that JMM looked a lot more comfortable. I’ve since heard that he started figuring out Manny’s speed and was able to blunt and avoid the hard shots. Nobody seems to expect Manny’s power. Round two looked pretty close to me.

Rounds three and four also looked close. I could see any of these rounds going to JMM, who is settling in nicely. He is clearly the better boxer. He’s clearly a better boxer than just about anyone.

JMM’s face shows that he’s definitely taking shots. At the same time, he’s definitely timing Manny’s advances now. Pac can’t seem to get in there without getting hit clean. Even though JMM doesn’t have anything like Manny’s power, nobody likes getting punched in the face and Manny’s easing off on the offense.

This is what I’m expecting: Marquez to chill things out with defensive countering. Slow things down. Fight his fight. Since nobody ever talks about anything other than the first round, I imagine the rest of this thing is going to go this way.

Not easy coming back to draw things after getting put down three times, but grinding is the way you’d do it if you didn’t have knockout power.

What’s most intriguing about the upcoming fight is that, unlike with Floyd, neither of these two guys’ strengths are really going to fade quickly with age. JMM has an incredible, Hopkins-esque boxing IQ. He counters and moves and anticipates. Manny has supernatural power and balance.

I’m starting to appreciate Manny’s genius, actually. For most fighters, power and quickness cruelly trade off: you need to plant your feet and coordinate quads, hips, abs and shoulders to summon KO strength. It’s both slow and incredibly obvious when you do it: like sounding an air raid siren.

Not so for Manny. He punches with power from what are called ‘angles’, which means he doesn’t hunker down and telegraph cruel intentions, surprising opponents with real sizzle on shots that from most would be cheap patter. Once JMM figured this out, he could deal with this, while others either don’t or can’t. And even an all-time great boxer like Marquez is vulnerable until he gets used to Manny’s style: you can’t pull Mannys off the street to spar against, after all.

Back to the fight. The later rounds aren’t dominant in any fashion, really, but not boring either. Lots of action, which would be really exciting if I didn’t know the outcome: these are two guys that come to play. Without knockdowns, I’d say that Marquez wins 2 of every 3 rounds he and Manny square off. And all rounds are close, so who can really say?

Onto 2.

Big Man Theory of History ^n

Posted on by David Wright

I’m a big fan of this blog on genetics. And I admire Razib’s ambition with this post:

one has to observe that the vast majority of modern humans are not Michelangelo or a Bachs… Men such as Alexander, Napoleon, and Hitler, were possessed of peculiar charisma… As charismatic leaders they took collections of human beings, and turned them to there purpose. Individual humans became more than the sum of their parts, and for moments exhibited almost organismic levels of cohesion.

The model I have in mind then is one where the African humans faced up against their near relations, but not as one against one. Rather, under the guidance of charismatic leaders, Paleolithic megalomaniacs driven by fervid nightmares and irrational dreams, they ground through the many enemies who fought as sums of singulars as a cohesive social machine.

Interesting, I suppose. Don’t know much about this stuff, but I can’t really see why there shouldn’t be outstanding leaders among various animals.

Anyway, Razib’s real objective is to come up with some alternative to the idea that there is a clear genetic difference between Neanderthals and H. Sapiens. This was an interesting bit:

Backing up for a moment, why do we think there might be fixed differences between Neanderthals and modern humans? The argument, as outlined in books like The Dawn of Human Culture, is that H. sapiens sapiens is a very special lineage, whose protean cultural flexibility allowed it to sweep of the field of all other hominin sister lineages. The likelihood of some admixture from these “dead end” lineages aside, this rough model seems to stand the test of time. Consider that the Mousterian technology persisted for nearly 300,000 years, while the Oldowan persisted for 1 million! In contrast, our own species seems to switch and improve cultural styles much, much, faster. Behavioral modernity does point to a real phenomenon. The hypothesis of many scholars was that there was a genetic difference which allowed for modern humans to manifest language as we understand it in all its diversity and flexibility. The likelihood of this seems lower now that modern humans and Neanderthals have the same variants of FOXP2, the locus which seems to be correlated to elevated vocal and auditory capabilities across many vertebrate lineages. And, if it is correct that ~2.5% or so of modern human ancestry in Eurasia, and nearly ~10% in Papua, comes from “archaic” lineages, then I think that should reduce our estimates of how different these humans were from the Africans.