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And they don’t need to sleep.

Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

“They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again,” Dr. Jones says.

“Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they’ve been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep,” says Dr. Jones. “There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don’t understand.”

Beware. N = 20:

To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers …

There is currently no way people can teach themselves to be short sleepers.

Their star course, called “Modern Applied Statistics: Learning,” started a decade ago with 30 students. Its current enrollment just closed off at 190. “We try to give them long and difficult homework assignments,” Mr. Hastie says. “Nothing works.”

More here.

Now read that last sentence again and ask yourself this question: “is this how we get people into STEM?” I think not.

Two more quotes:

The two men also teach a two-day course for businesspeople called “Statistical Learning and Data Mining” that costs $1,450 and attracts a broad range of data-laden people. “We had two guys from Hong Kong who taught a course in horse race prediction,” Mr. Tibshirani says. “One of them came back and told us they’re making $10 million a year by modeling the last-minute betting.”

Are the only people who ever get to learn something like statistics from a teacher that is designing the course for educational impact (as opposed to status-affirmation) those that spend an enormous amount of money or those that spend nothing at all? How weird is that?

About half of the Stanford stat professors have joint appointments with other departments, including economics, human biology and environmental science. “Statistics is unusual,” Mr. Hastie notes. “It’s a service field to other disciplines. It doesn’t rely on its own work. It needs others.”

This last quote is interesting. Statistical techniques are tools and are not particularly useful without domain knowledge. But they still need to be taught by a specialist, probably.

But these guys/gals get down and muck it up with real data every day and for that they need to join forces with others. It’s an applied discipline.

via Jim Lynch

The Bar is at the top of a mountain.

Who has the most highly optimized genotype?

The Tibetan (probably):

You probably are aware that different populations have different tolerances for high altitudes. Himalayan sherpas aren’t useful just because they have skills derived from their culture, they’re actually rather well adapted to high altitudes because of their biology. Additionally, different groups seem to have adapted to higher altitudes independently, exhibiting convergent evolution. But in terms of physiological function they aren’t all created equal, at least in relation to the solutions which they’ve come to to make functioning at high altitudes bearable. In particular, it seems that the adaptations of the peoples of Tibet are superior than those of the peoples of the Andes. Superior in that the Andean solution is more brute force than the Tibetan one, producing greater side effects, such as lower birth weight in infants (and so higher mortality and lower fitness).

Apple came out with a product yesterday called iBook Author. Is this the textbook killer that everyone’s been waiting for? Who knows.

But I noticed something interesting in Horace Dediu’s post crowing about how how he emailed Jobs on something like this a while ago. Here’s  his post:

My thoughts were expressed 20 months ago in a private email.

I did not get a response.

No kidding he didn’t get a response. I’m a sympathetic, interested reader and I had a hard time following that email. Everything about it is hard work, even the subject line.

It’s an excellent example of how to get someone to ignore whatever you’ve written. As my boss once told me about presenting something to busy people (no matter how intelligent): it’s got to be simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Want to be successful in life?

Be relentlessly resourceful.

Two Paul Graham essays crossed my screen today.

This caught my attention because earlier we’d noticed a pattern among the most successful startups, and it seemed to hinge on a different quality. We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we’d say “they can take care of themselves.” The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they’ll close it, whatever type of lead it is. When they’re raising money, for example, you can do the initial intros knowing that if you wanted to you could stop thinking about it at that point. You won’t have to babysit the round to make sure it happens. That type of founder is going to come back with the money; the only question is how much on what terms.

He earlier named that quality:

A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.

Two posts I really liked today.

First:

“High intergenerational mobility” is sometimes a synonym for “lots of parental underachievers.”

Another way of putting this is that people with high general ability (which could just mean conscientious hard workers, mind) choose to either make their mark in the world or make their mark on their kids. The distinction between Steve Jobs (“I want a biography so my kids know who I was”) and Richard Feynman’s dad comes to mind.

Second, a link, from here:

This leads to a concept: A restaurant called Placebo. What do they sell? A 50% discount. Which is to say: The entire menu is framed with everything at about twice the price you’d otherwise expect to pay for it, but then your check gets a 50% discount. So say you have a steak roughly of the same quality as the $13 steaks at the Outback Steakhouse. The menu says $26, your bill when it arrives has a 50% discount. But everything you order feels expensive.

For extra credit, you could do interviews and arrange waiters to adopt personalities which suit the customers. Someone comes in who likes Good Wholesome Cooking? We can set you up with a waiter who thinks fancy food is ridiculous. Or, we can set you up with a waiter who is a total food snob, and you can have a wonderful meal knowing that the waiter is missing out on Good Wholesome Cooking. Your call.

1. Datacenter review by James Hamilton. Random, I know, but isn’t engineering so cool? Ductless cooling, direct current power… A geek’s delight!

2. Jumping to another planet, here’s an interesting thought on networking.

After you identify your key contacts, think about how you first met them. In the center column of the work sheet, write the name of the person who introduced you to your contact (if you met the person yourself, write “me”). This column will reveal the brokers in your network and help you see the networking practices you used to connect with them.

These are the people you already know who are clearly able and willing to help you branch out. They should be the first people you call and where you invest a disproportionate amount of your time and energy.

Who are the super connectors in your life?

3. And, finally, Paul Graham has another essay out:

Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people’s broken code. Maybe that’s possible, but I haven’t seen it.

One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps.

The question, then, is this: if you cranked up your willingness to ‘schlep’ by a few percent, would the value of your activity go up exponentially? The answer here is normally ‘yes’. One way I like to think about this is that people are only willing to pay someone to do things they either cannot themselves do or do not want to do. These obviously aren’t mutually exclusive, but finding a problem most people couldn’t solve and none of those who could are willing to even try would be quite the business.

Here’s another interesting observation:

Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they’d known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they’d have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that’s one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.

In practice the founders grow with the problems. But no one seems able to foresee that, not even older, more experienced founders. So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they make two mistakes that cancel each other out. They don’t know how much they can grow, but they also don’t know how much they’ll need to. Older founders only make the first mistake.

Well, I waited until I was 30 before I finally figured out how to study.

The first step for me is controlling presence. Presence is this ridiculously useful concept my wife taught me from her acting days.

The point here is to be ‘in the moment’. In an acting context this means that you need to react to your environment from your ‘crotch’. Great actors believe what’s happening to them for pretend, even though they’re on a set or in front of a blue screen and have people and microphones and gadgets around. That takes focus.

And so does studying. You need to be completely consumed by the material you’re learning in THAT moment, not thinking about dinner, not thinking about your wife or girlfriend or kid or some TV show. Your mind cannot wander, particularly for difficult subjects, or you won’t actually learn anything. Recognizing when you are and are not focused is the first key. Next is learning techniques for creating presence and retrieving it once it’s lost. The power of these skills simply cannot be overestimated.

Next are some practical tips. Some are from this Barker post.

1. Don’t copy down notes, make your own. This means listen to an idea, understand the idea, then write the idea down in your own words. Most of the time you’ll realize you don’t actually understand the idea, which means you go back and learn it right. Then you write it down.

2. Write questions and answer them. If you truly understand a concept then you understand how to ask questions about it that make sense.

3. Think about the things that you’re studying. Think about how they might interact with the real world. In my math exams, I can link a lot of what I’m learning back to concrete examples at work. When might I use the Hypergeometric distribution? Bit of a stretch, sometimes, but it’s useful. This is where programming, specifically the ML class, has helped me learn math immensely. I understand much better how to actually translate math language into a more useful programming implementation, which helps me better understand how it works in life.

4. Forgetting is important. Weird, I know, but the more times you learn something the more likely it is to stick. Know that you’re going to forget stuff and plan for it.

5. Plan. Overestimate the time it takes to learn things. This is every mediocre student’s downfall, I think. They procrastinate and try to crunch it all in at once. Not how you learn.

6. For god’s sake don’t cram.

7. Sleep in a routine. Exercise in a routine. Don’t drink. Be a warrior monk.

8. Change your location! This is a funny one. But memory cues matter and you’re going to be testing in an unfamiliar location. Be ready for that.

9. Always remember that learning is HARD. Learning is PAINFUL. You feel stupid, you get frustrated, you waste time. Be ready for that and when you get discouraged, realize that you’ve just lost your presence, get it back and crank away. Then go work out.

The Finnish education system is great and a lot of people are making a lot of money pretending to know how this country of white people* can get away with it.

There’s something called culture working here and you aren’t going to change the subcultures that destroy education in some American areas. There is a (very low) limit of how much you can learn/copy from another culture.

Here is a list of DW-approved initiatives on this subject:

1. Pay Finnish administrators to come here and set up a private school system in a city of their choice. Compare results. And set up a betting market so I can make a ton of money on the failure of this initiative.

2. Compare the performance all of the countries that share whatever features you’re saying matter.

(What? There’s only one? What does that tell you?)

*sorry to play the race card. I know it’s crass but let’s face it, when it comes to phenomena too complex to understand, we tend to get stupid. Why all the attention to Finland over Singapore?

I nearly had my bubble burst last night. By which I mean encountering people with sufficiently different world-views that I’d unconsciously insult them after a few drinks. Witness some snippets from one such conversation:

“Yeah, South Africa has a lot of car-jackings and robberies, but the people are so nice! You should go!”

Me: “aren’t there places in the world that are less terrifying with equally nice people? Shouldn’t those places be higher on my list?”

Next: “oh, you’re from Canada. Are there any ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movements up there?”

Me: “what?”

‘Right wing’ people care more about security and less about inequality. On those dimensions I’m probably right-leaning, but wow, I felt neo-Nazi last night.