I fantasize about learning how to use this thing.
I give myself a 50% chance over the next year.
A Hero of Our Time
Carroll, 23, says he lived like a Roman emperor, spending £10,000 A WEEK on depraved, 24-hour cocaine and sex parties at his Norfolk mansion, The Grange.
Getting Divorced?
Almost Got my Wish
Robin is bombarded with links to the OK Cupid article I commented on here
Unfortunately he doesn’t really get around to discussing it. He cites research that suggests that old people are more emotional because their intellectual capacities decline and examines the question of age related political orientation as it relates to a shift in the relative importance of emotional and informational processing.
From the abstract, it isn’t clear that the declining ability to reason suggests an equal decline in the willingness to reason is established. Just because someone isn’t any good at something any more (relative to his youth) doesn’t mean he’ll be unwilling to do it.
For these purposes I much prefer the data set the OKCupid folks use. Hopefully Robin will give us a more complete analysis of the OKCupid post later.
Smart Meters and Silly People
They monitored the power used by each household and then wrote each homeowner a note comparing their consumption with the neighbourhood average.
Ok, so far so good.
A week later households with above-average power usage had reduced it significantly – but those with below-average usage had increased theirs
What?!
The researchers found that the low-energy users could be prevented from using more power simply by drawing a smiley face on the notes to indicate that conserving energy carries approval.
Hilarious.
I always thought that simply giving people the data on consumption would probably be enough to convince them to change their behaviour.
What I forget is that without a carbon tax, there simply isn’t any real financial incentive to conserve energy. Happily, we all feel like conservation is something that PEOPLE SHOULD DO, so peer pressure can be introduce with more data. Notice the pressure is implied, nobody actually has to know what others consume.
Wow, there’s a lot here
Ok, so one of my favourite data sources has come up with another stunner:
Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority.
Today, we’re going to perform a data-driven investigation of this
Read the whole thing. This is amazing stuff.
The basic idea starts with this chart, which I found fascinating:
The old idea of one’s political beliefs changing over time is obvious, here. It goes deeper, too, though. They demonstrate that when a person is in the Republican parts of life, that person is much closer ideologically to other Republicans in their respective Republican phases. Democrats are more ideologically disparate. Their tent is too big and so they are more likely to defect.
What a data set.
Brooks on Happiness
David Brooks has an interesting column with a Faustian bent:
Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal?
He then discusses a lot of research which suggests that
People get slightly happier as they climb the income scale, but this depends on how they experience growth. Does wealth inflame unrealistic expectations? Does it destabilize settled relationships? Or does it flow from a virtuous cycle in which an interesting job produces hard work that in turn leads to more interesting opportunities?
and, finally:
The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.
And, for our purposes, we finally get to the punch line:
Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most.
This is starting to turn into a theme here. Data is what we’re going to need most in this next phase of human history.
Not Unreasonable 
