Marian.panganiban

One thing that was pretty important for me in my development was an office visit with Eugene Fama, my dissertation adviser, where I had a couple of ideas to pitch for a dissertation. I pitched the first idea, and he barely looked up from whatever paper he was reading and shook his head, saying, "That's a small idea. I wouldn't pursue it." Then I hit him with the second idea, which I thought was way better than the first one. And he kind of looked up and said, "Ehh, it's OK. It's an OK idea." He added, "Maybe you can get a publication out of it, but not in a top journal." He indicated I should come back when I had another.

Even though he had shot down both of my ideas, I left feeling energized. The message from him was that I had a chance of hitting a big idea. That interaction, which I am sure he doesn't remember, was very influential — it pushed me to search for big ideas and not settle on the small ones.

People are often hesitant to seek advice because they fear it will make them appear incompetent, said Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In fact, those who seek advice are perceived as more competent than those who do not, according to a recent paper that she wrote along with Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. ...

Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing the responses of college students and working adults who were asked to give their impressions of people (a computer-simulated partner, in this case) who sought their advice on various written tests and tasks. ...

Being asked for advice is flattering. As Professor Gino said, “People commonly believe that asking for advice is inconsiderate — we don’t want to bother others.” But in fact, “by asking someone to share his or her personal wisdom, advice seekers stroke the adviser’s ego and can gain valuable insights,” she said. And regardless of whether you use the advice or not, “People do not think less of you — they actually think you’re smarter.”

Only “a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits,” because “too much is on the line” for pop stars to do it themselves: “it would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day.” “The performers are called artists,” though they are not, while the hit-writers “remain largely anonymous”

Fascinating, expansive interview (also available as a podcast). Endlessly quotable: “Did humans start agriculture in order to have beer?” “When you cook, what you are essentially doing is outsourcing digesting.” “Until the invention of frozen French fries in the 1960s and 1970s, French fries were for the elite.” “Probably the only things that we regularly eat but taste as they would have done hundreds of years ago are fish.” And many more

Wesley Morris expertly examines the show's achievements:

American television has always been fundamentally white. Its points of view emanate from the vantages of those who control the industry and create its content. If it deals with race as a problem, it typically can do so only if it believes there's a solution. But as a black viewer, I'm never looking for contrition, simply an acknowledgement of a condition; I don't need television -- or American culture -- to provide a remedy. Black America has tended to see the discrepancy between the cultural importance to diagnose and the delusion to attempt to cure. Merely giving a nonwhite person a speaking role is not absolution. That contradiction is visible to a black audience almost anytime it sees itself chauffeuring, housekeeping, mammying, best-friending, sidekicking, saying everything about white characters while saying nothing about itself. That was the biracial brilliance of Key and Peele. It understood race as real and racism as inevitable, and never lost sight of the way in which individual white people can be agents of change but also of offense, wittingly or not supporting a system of demoralization.

Kwame Opam discusses how the show lived and grew across the world wide web:

Key & Peele's greatest strength and weakness was its format; as a sketch show, it's best remembered for its bite-sized bits -- most of which wound up online. "Substitute Teacher," which first aired in 2012, is one of the show's earliest highlights. It quickly went viral, and right it now boasts more than 80 million views on YouTube. Earlier this year, Paramount even announced it plans on turning it into a feature-length film. But the episode it premiered on only pulled in 1.16 million viewers at the time, a drop in the bucket compared to its online views. And it makes sense, especially for a huge swath of the population that doesn't have cable. Why wait for the show when you can watch the best clips on the internet?

This is a complex but not unique irony: how a slice of pop culture in 2015 can be popular enough for the President himself to take notice (and embrace it), and to seem to have zeitgeist-defining properties, but not be quite popular enough to sustain a half hour in basic cable.

Maybe that's tied to something Morris and Opam touch on but don't quite name. More than any show on television, to my mind, Key and Peele felt young. Not young in the shallow way that all media, maybe especially television, seem to exploit young talent; not young in the same reckless, juvenile way Chappelle's Show or vintage Saturday Night Live was; young in the open, searching, insouciant, absurdist key that's so important to sketch comedy.

That's what's in the mix of what Morris rightly identifies as the show's blend of sadness and acceptance. It's youth knowing that this is not forever, that it would be wrong to linger, that the future (and everything good, bad, and unchanging that comes with it) is inevitable.

Tags: comedy   Key and Peele   television

I love this poster by Korean designer Chae Byung-rok. His web site is currently down, but you can see more of his work on It's Nice That. (via @djacobs)

Tags: Chae Byung-rok   design

These guys know that stealing is bad; they know that drug dealing is bad, or at least that society considers it a bad thing. They know that drug using is considered bad. And so they don’t disagree on what the moral principles are in society. They just don’t necessarily believe that that’s their group. Like, why, that’s bad for you, but that’s not bad for guys like me. And so that was their image, that was their self-image. And so the goal was to actually get them to try thinking like mainstream society members.

That’s Freakonomics Radio covering my study of cognitive behavior therapy and crime in Liberia. Crimes drop up to 50%.

The previous week covered a similar program in Chicago, with similar success. Our study here (including a policy summary) and the Chicago study here.

 

The post Prevent crime with… therapy appeared first on Chris Blattman.

A striking section of Elizabeth Warren’s memoir is about advice she says Larry Summers once offered her:

After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.

This gets at one reason why powerful people tend to become less intellectually honest as they accumulate power: they begin protecting fellow insiders instead of speaking truth.

At various points of my life, in various contexts, I’ve been an outsider and I’ve been an insider. As an outsider, I relish the opportunity to think independently and speak my mind. But as Summers suggests, my outsider status relegates me to the margins of the “conversation.” As an insider, I tend to feel muzzled — i.e. countless blog posts drafted and then deleted. But I have the most impact on the world when I’m on the inside of a power structure, exerting influence.

Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.

“Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake,” and academia would be improved if it acknowledged only natural sciences and the humanities (and separated them with a moat). Social science is built on unproductive “physics envy,” forgetting that human beings have agency and can choose their responses to stimuli, while “asteroids and atoms” just “go where they have to go”

Exiled Chagos Islanders are asking Britain’s supreme court to let them return home, 40 years after they were forced out to make way for a US military base on Diego Garcia, one of 55 islands in the Chagos Archipelago. America’s lease runs out next year; but caught between the Pentagon and 1,500 Chagossians, Britain will probably put the Chagossians on hold and renew the American lease until 2036

John McPhee, maybe our greatest living nonfiction writer (depending on how you feel about Joan Didion), has a lovely essay on omission in this week's The New Yorker. Along with a tidy analysis of Hemingway's iceberg metaphor and some great shaggy-dog stories about citrus fruits, General Eisenhower, and more, he includes an exercise he learned writing for Time that he's adapted for his students at Princeton.

After four days of preparation and writing--after routinely staying up almost all night on the fourth night--and after tailoring your stories past the requests, demands, fine tips, and incomprehensible suggestions of the M.E. and your senior editor, you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said "Green 5" or "Green 8" or "Green 15" or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil so Makeup would know what could be put back, if it came to that. I can't remember it coming to that...

The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed. Easier with some writers than with others. It's as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train--or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size. Do not do violence to the author's tone, manner, nature, style, thumbprint. Measure cumulatively the fragments you remove and see how many lines would be gone if the prose were reformatted. If you kill a widow, you pick up a whole line.

Greening seems like such a material thing, wholly specific to print -- not just to the fact of magazine layout, but a specific kind of workflow. One's tempted to say with digital writing, we've overcome those space limitations, but I'm less sure. Twitter's the obvious example, but doing web layout, I've killed more than my share of lines to preserve symmetry or squeeze everything into a smaller space.

Tags: John McPhee   writing

There's something magical about a comic book that makes you feel like a kid again.

Maybe it's because a lifetime of loving comics can invite cynicism. "Surprises" are no longer surprises when you've groaned through the Xorn-Magneto retcon, or slogged through all the different Earths of DC's multiverse. The loss of life and/or love doesn't seem like that big a deal when you've seen people resurrected from the dead, return after being trapped in a metal bullet whizzing through space, or dimension hop back to your home. Comics fans have learned to never feel comfortable, especially when things are going well for a favorite character. It's hard to love something without a voice in the back of your mind telling you this story is just like "that one time…"

Plutona, by Emi Lenox and Jeff Lemire, breaks out of that rut, convincingly asserting that comic books can still tell stories that make readers let their guard down and earnestly appreciate the adventure on each page.

Lenox and Lemire drop readers into a familiar, Amblin-esque suburb, but one that's hard to place. Kids listen to the radio (the kind with antennas) but use Twitter. Superheroes soar in the sky and have tongue-in-cheek names like C.O.M.bat, but they're barely seen. Plutona, the series' namesake, is one of these superhumans, but she's not the focus of the book.

Lenox and Lemire want to show what life is like for regular kids in a world that's filled with wonder. Most of them do what any tween would: take it all for granted. Being the runt at school, surviving run-ins with bullies, having a deadbeat father — it's all more important, and ostensibly more fascinating, than someone else trying to save the day.

Lenox's art is dreamy. The kids have big, anime-like eyes, bringing believable youth and spryness to the characters. But Lenox also sharpens these features into semi-pouts that bring all the hurt to the surface. Being a kid isn't easy, nor is it always happy.

Even though the children in Plutona don't really care about superheroes, it's a superhero who brings them together. Like the 80s modules of detention, a treasure hunt, a summer vacation — adventure becomes the thing that now links these kids.

The challenge in creating a book like Plutona is making the dialogue sound simple, like something kids would say, but also instilling those voices with depth and purpose. Lemire, who has written coming-of-age comics like Descender and Sweet Tooth, has a gift for this. The conversations are unforced, even when introducing a concept like cape-spotting or conveying the prick of bullying in a handful of words.

Comic books have the potential to make us curious about the world and about each other. The very best ones figure out a way to get through our cynical, comics-hardened skin and grab our hearts. Plutona is one of these rare gems.

Plutona No. 1

Story by: Jeff Lemire, Emi Lenox

Art by: Emi Lenox

Colors by: Jordie Bellaire

Letters by: Steve Wands

Publisher: Image comics

Release date: September 2; Plutona is available in stores and online

It took a graphic photograph of a dead child washed up on the Turkish shores for much of the world to finally wake up to the human catastrophe of the Syrian refugee crisis. That crisis is not new: More 4 four million Syrians have been forced out of their home country since fighting began there in 2011. Many were hastily resettled in squalid refugee camps in neighboring countries. Since then, thousands of these refugees have risked drowning in the Mediterranean in hopes of finding a better life in Europe.

This tragedy may seem incomprehensible — and, morally, it is. But to understand how things came to be this way, here are a few maps and charts that help to outline the very basics.

1) The number of Syrian refugees has been growing steadily for years

The above chart tells a very clear story: The Syrian civil war has been pushing civilians out of the country for three and a half years, and especially rapidly since the beginning of 2013, when the war became even more horrible than it had already been.

The Syrian uprising began in March 2011, as a broad-based nonviolent uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's corrupt, sectarian, and authoritarian regime. The Assad regime responded to these demonstrations by slaughtering protestors in the street. Eventually, perhaps naturally, they took up arms to defend themselves. By the beginning of 2012, the uprising had become a civil war.

The war escalated very, very quickly. In March 2012, the UN estimated that around 9,000 Syrians people had been killed in the fighting. In January 2013, the estimate was up to 60,000; then 100,000 by July.

2) The war in Syria is devastating for civilians

Thomas van Linge

The dynamics of the Syrian civil war are particularly awful for civilians. As you can see in the above animated map, a collection of Thomas van Linge's maps showing areas of control from March 2014 through September 2015, the borders have shifted frequently between multiple groups. This has meant that the front line has, at one point or another, come to many, many Syrian towns and neighborhoods. Indeed, much of the fighting has been over control of civilian populations — a war that both Assad and ISIS have waged by targeting those civilians themselves. And it has meant that any given family might have lived under the distinctly horrible tyrannies of multiple factions.

The Assad regime, for its part, has deliberately targeted Sunni civilian population centers, both to undermine the rebel base of support and as part of a devilish plan to sectarianize the conflict. His weapons have included sarin gas and barrel bombs, which are barrels filled with explosives and dropped indiscriminately from helicopters.

To make matters worse, ISIS has taken large swaths of Syria — and forced the people who live under their rule to abide by its horrific system of Islamic governance. ISIS, as well as other extremist Sunni groups, have targeted minorities and other civilian groups for systematic terror and murder. It makes sense that this war would cause people to flee in huge numbers.

And the conflict is still raging, with no end in sight. Stephen O'Brien, the UN's undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, said in August 2015 that more than 250,000 people had been killed over the course of the conflict. So long as this continues, there will be millions of Syrians unable to go back to their homes.

3) Huge refugee populations are straining Syria's neighbors

(European Commission)

As Syrians are pushed out of their homes, they have to go someplace. And most have ended up in camps: internally displaced persons (IDP) camps within Syria or refugee camps in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. These countries are being stretched to their limits by the influx, with both the host countries and of course the refugees themselves suffering under the burden.

In total, about half of Syria's entire population has been uprooted by the fighting. For many of them, there's no home to go back to.

Lebanon's population in 2013 was about 4.5 million; the roughly 1.2 million Syrian refugees have increased its population by about a quarter. Jordan has taken the equivalent of about a tenth of its 2013 population. Even Iraqi Kurdistan, itself currently in the midst of a war against ISIS, has managed to take in more than 200,000 Syrians. These huge population influxes are extremely difficult for local governments to deal with. The camps absorb lots of resources, which local governments might not have much of, and can be politically destabilizing.

Amnesty International, citing UN figures, reports that "at least 40% of refugees [in Lebanon] live in inadequate accommodation ‘including in makeshift shelters (garages, worksites, one room structures, unfinished housing) and informal settlements’ whilst ‘others are at risk of eviction or live in overcrowded apartments.’"

The funding is insufficient. The UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) is about $3 billion short on its 2015 funding requirements for Syria operations. In December 2014, the World Food Program declared that it had to stop providing food to 1.7 million refugees — because it didn't have enough cash. An emergency fundraising drive restored that program, but the episode illustrates just how precarious the situation is for aid organizations trying to help Syrian refugees.

Bottom line: The regional response system is overloaded, and Syrians are suffering. Even if the camps were better funded, they're still camps, and the future they offer Syrian families is not bright. That's why these families are increasingly fleeing the region altogether.

4) Syrian refugees are increasingly traveling to Europe — at tremendous risk

(UNHCR)

Syrian applications for asylum have spiked in the past year and a half, reflecting a turn among Syrian refugees towards Europe as safe haven.

"They may have been in Jordan or Lebanon or Turkey or have been in transit somewhere for a couple years and are now moving onward," the head of a European aid organization told BuzzFeed's Borzou Daragahi. "It’s a sign of immense desperation in the areas where they sought refuge. They have these nice camps, but there is no hope."

According to Daragahi, the breakdown in Syrian peace talks, as well as growing fears of conscription into the Syrian army as it weakens, have helped to push people out. A lack of job prospects has made life in the camps untenable; Syrian refugees are legally barred from some jobs in Jordan and Lebanon.

Europe is thus the only real choice for a future, but the trip is dangerous. Roughly 332,000 migrants have tried to reach Europe from the Mediterranean Sea this year, according to the International Organization for Migration (the UN estimates that about half of Mediterranean Sea migrants are Syrian). At least 2,636 of the total have died — meaning one in every 125 Mediterranean Sea migrants will die attempting to get to Europe.

Those are daunting odds, especially given how few of these refugees have actually been permitted to have real lives in Europe once they get there. The fact that people are even attempting this tells us just how bad the situation in Syria and the Middle East has gotten — and suggests that maybe, just maybe, it's time to start letting more refugees into our own country.

Watch: The shameful US response to the Syrian refugee crisis, by the numbers

Two paragraphs that I think capture the current milieu quite nicely, by Lionel Shriver in the book of essays Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.

---

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture, or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we’re not especially bothered with what happens once we’re dead. As we age–oh, so reluctantly!–we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but would whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from 60s catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since it any given time today is all you’ve got. We justly cherish characters capable of living “in the moment” — or, as a drummer might say, “in the pocket.” We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives as much as various experience as time and money provided, who never stop learning, engaging, and savoring what every day offers — in contrast to dour killjoys who are bitter and begrudging in the ceaseless fulfillment of obligation. For the role of humble server, helpmate, and facilitator no longer to constitute the sole model of womanhood surely represents progress for which I am personally grateful. Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.

On the difference between common knowledge and public knowledge. Two people coming back from a date know perfectly well that the reason they’re going up to the same apartment has nothing to do with “having a coffee”. Each knows that the other person knows that. But they want plausible deniability in case something doesn’t go quite right. “So long as nothing was ever openly said, there’s no agreement to break”

After 11 years, the WireTap radio show is coming to an end. As a farewell, they put together a video of people giving advice to their younger counterparts.

Dear 6-year-old,

Training wheels are for babies. Just let go already.

Regards,

A 7-year-old.

Dear 7-year-old,

Stay weird.

Signed,

An 8-year-old.

This video is magical...give it 20 seconds and you can't help but watch the whole thing. (via a cup of jo)

Tags: how to   video

I hadn't realized there was so much cussing swearing in Wes Anderson's movies. Here are some damn examples:

Just realized what the world is missing: the "fuck fuck fuck" scene from the first season of The Wire, but done in the style of ("cuss cuss mothercusser") and with the characters from Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Tags: Fantastic Mr. Fox   language   movies   swearing   The Wire   video   Wes Anderson

My commute these days doesn't lend itself to listening to headphones and I can't listen to anything with words while I work, so I don't listen to many podcasts. But I've been driving more than usual this summer, so I've had a chance to dip into some shows, old favorites and newcomers alike.

I've only listened to the first three cases so far, but Starlee Kine's new Mystery Show is particularly well done. The conceit of the show is that each week, Kine and her team of investigators solve a mystery for someone. Everyone loves a mystery, but the real draw of the show for me is Kine's ability to get normal people to say interesting things about themselves along the way.

The second mystery concerns a not-so-popular book seen clutched in Britney Spears' hand in a paparazzi photo. [Mild spoilers follow...listen to the show if you wish to remain unsullied.] Where did she get it? Did she read it? And if so, did she like it?

The celebrity aspect and the Britneyology was interesting -- What sort of person is Britney? Is she a reader? -- but the best part of the whole thing was Kine's conversation with Dennis, a Ticketmaster customer service representative. She asked Dennis his opinion of Britney and somehow the exchange very quickly got intimate. You could feel their crackling connection right through the phone line, and seemingly out of nowhere, he utters the line, "you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness", which totally left me breathless. Kine, Dennis, Britney, and I, all suddenly exposed. Fantastic stuff.

Tags: audio   Britney Spears   podcasts   Starlee Kine

Kevin Kelly has travelled in every sort of way, from five-star hotels to penniless hitchhiking. And he says that when traveling, more time is better than more money.

When you have abundant time you can get closer to core of a place. You can hang around and see what really happens. You can meet a wider variety of people. You can slow down until the hour that the secret vault is opened. You have enough time to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep.

Money is an attempt to buy time, but it rarely is able to buy any of the above. When we don't have time we use money to try to get us to the secret door on time, or we use it avoid needing to know the real prices, or we use money to have someone explain to us what is really going on. Money can get us close, but not all the way.

(via @craigmod)

Tags: Kevin Kelly   travel

From illustrator @takumitoxin, a wonderful rendering of the events of Mad Max: Fury Road in the style of an ancient Egyptian painting.

Fury Road is out on Blu-ray today (and streaming). This movie was the perfect summer entertainment.

Tags: illustration   Mad Max   movies

One of the tragedies of Katrina was that so many of New Orleans’ residents were forced to move. But the severity of that tragedy is a function of where they were forced to move to. Was it somewhere on the Salt Lake City end of the continuum? Or was it a place like Fayetteville? The best answer we have is from the work of the sociologist Corina Graif, who tracked down the new addresses of seven hundred women displaced by Katrina—most of them lower-income and black. By virtually every measure, their new neighborhoods were better than the ones they had left behind in New Orleans. Median family income was forty-four hundred dollars higher. Ethnic diversity was greater. More people had jobs. Their exposure to “concentrated disadvantage”—an index that factors in several measures of poverty—fell by half a standard deviation.

That is from Malcolm Gladwell, interesting throughout.

Learn more

• I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
• Hispanic, Latino, or neither? Why people can't agree on these labels.
• I spent the last 15 years trying to become an American. I've failed.

The weekend of July 30, a group of intellectual heavyweights met at a beautiful vineyard in California's Napa Valley. Their agenda was modest: learn how to predict the future.

The "class," organized by Edge, was led by Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who has made the study of prediction his life's work. For the past several years, Tetlock and his colleagues have been running a project supported by the US intelligence community. Their goal is to find ways to accurately predict major events in world affairs, such as whether Vladimir Putin will lose power in Russia.

Now they're sharing what they've found with the world. The results are astonishing: Tetlock's team found out that some people were "superforecasters" who, when placed in teams, can produce a surprisingly good track record at predicting the future of world affairs. And Tetlock thinks he might know why.

Who is good at predicting future events? Who isn't?

Fall of the Berlin Wall: kind of a big deal, kind of hard to predict. (Thomas Imo/Photothek/Getty Images)

Tetlock's project was born out of failure. Failure, specifically, of people like me: pundits and subject matter experts.

Between 1987 and 2003, Tetlock asked 284 people who "comment[ed] or offer[ed] advice on political and economic trends" professionally to make a series of predictive judgments about the world: 82,361, in total. Sample questions, according to the New Yorker's Louis Menand, included things like "Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa?" and "Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup?"

Tetlock's findings, documented in a 2005 book called Expert Political Judgment, are pretty interesting. Tetlock asks us to imagine a bunch of chimpanzees throwing darts at a board full of predictions — a metaphor for random choice. These "dart-throwing chimps," in Tetlock's famous phrasing, would be more accurate than the so-called experts. Knowing a lot about Russia didn't help the experts predict what was going to happen in the country — in fact, it seemed to make them worse.

That seemed concerning. Foreign policy analysis depends on the idea that people with more information can formulate better policy. Obviously, there is more to policy than predicting certain outcomes in foreign countries, but it's certainly part of it. If the experts tend to be wrong about those predictions, it calls into question all of their analysis as well as the policies they come up with.

Tetlock wanted to know more. In 2011, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the US intelligence community's equivalent of DARPA — announced a contest. Researchers were invited to submit proposals on how they might go about developing a better way to predict future events.

Tetlock's group, founded along with Penn's Barbara Mellers and UC Berkeley's Don Moore, aimed to harness the wisdom of crowds. The Good Judgment Project, as it was called, asked huge numbers of people (it ended up being around 20,000) to make judgments about future world events. The researchers then used a variety of algorithms to sort through all of the individual predictions and come up with an aggregate prediction.

To be clear, these were not crystal ball–style predictions whereby participants were asked to guess, say, who would win the World Series. Rather, they were specific questions on known issues, on which there was lots of readily available information whereby participants could make reasoned conclusions about future outcomes.

One question, for example, was, "Who will be inaugurated as President of Russia in 2012?" Another: "Will the United Nations General Assembly recognize a Palestinian state by Sept. 30, 2011?" A third: "What will be the lowest end-of-day price of Brent Crude Oil between Oct. 16, 2011 and Feb. 1, 2012?"

The Good Judgment Project won IARPA's contest for predictive capability. More than won, in fact: The researchers found something fascinating.

How the project was able to get much more accurate predictions

Here's a chart of the 100 best-performing forecasters who participated in the Good Judgment Project versus the 100 worst-performing, by Brier score (a statistical means of measuring prediction accuracy; all you need to know is that negative scores are better than positive ones). The x-axis is the number of questions posed; what you see is that as people were asked to make more predictions, the gap between the top predictors and the worst ones actually widened. That suggests that it wasn't a statistical fluke:

(Good Judgment Project)

The results got even more interesting when Tetlock's team looked closer. They separated participants into three groups: "superforecasters" (the most accurate 2 percent, who were asked to work together to make predictions in groups), "top team individuals" (the next 3 to 5 percent, working individually), and everyone else. The superforecaster teams dramatically outperformed everyone else — and as the project's years went on, the gap widened:

(Good Judgment Project)

The results here seem potentially quite significant. If these superforecasters can be identified, and their judgment can be harnessed with the right statistical tools, that would seem to be a step toward significantly improving our ability to foresee future geopolitical events.

To be clear, no one is imagining that we'll be able to see the future or offer Nostradamus-style predictions. Rather, the skill on display here is analytical judgment on known issues in world affairs, which can be applied to better anticipate, say, how a foreign election seems likely to turn out, or whether North Korea looks like it's planning to conduct another nuclear test. These are analytical questions that just happen to be about future events, but that is a good metric for gauging the quality of the analysis.

The study is meant to produce lessons about prediction-making that can be used in the real world; remember that the intelligence community is sponsoring Tetlock's research.

It's not hard to understand why US intelligence agencies would want to be better at understanding how to predict future events. That's about knowing what's coming and being able to prepare for it, but also about avoiding mistakes — something Tetlock pointed out, referencing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Would a forecasting tournament have saved us a multitrillion-dollar mistake that could have cost tens of thousands of lives? I don't know," Tetlock said at the Edge meeting. "I would say that if you have a tool that can increase the accuracy of probability estimates — by 30, 40, 50, 60 percent— as much as has been demonstrated in the IARPA tournaments, it's worth investing many millions of dollars even to reduce, to a small degree, the probability of multitrillion-dollar mistakes."

But how do you find a superforecaster — let alone enough of them to build a team like the ones that so excelled in Tetlock's project?

Four lessons for how to predict more accurately

And hopefully avoid this. (Steven Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images)

Consider Bill Flack.

Flack is a retired irrigation specialist, with no obvious experience with world politics. Tetlock calls him "a nobody in Nebraska." (Flack's family would probably dispute this.)

And yet, Flack is "scientifically documented, officially certified IARPA tournament superforecaster." In Tetlock's project, "he did a great job assigning probability estimates to hundreds of questions posed over four years in the IARPA forecasting tournament, a superb performance. This is with neutral umpires, no room for fudging, this is objective scoring."

But how? What do Flack and people like him have that many of the so-called experts don't? It turns out there are a few things:

1) They change their mind, frequently and in little bits. According to Good Judgment Project researchers Pavel Atanasov and Angela Minster, one of the best things you can do is be open to change. People who slightly and frequently adjust their estimates about how likely something is to happen, based on new information, are much more likely to end up calling events correctly than are people who don't change their mind ever or who flip-flop more dramatically.

"Frequent, small belief updates are the marks of an accurate forecaster," Atanasov and Minster write.

2) Work in teams. One of the reasons the "superforecasters" did better than the other two groups is that Tetlock and company asked them to work in teams. According to Atanasov and Minster, grouping people into teams where everyone had "equal rights and responsibilities ... increased their level of engagement and produced highly accurate forecasts."

Even superforecasters, it seems, benefit from working with people who have different ideas and perspectives to make their predictions better. And people who were more open to working in groups tended to do better than people who preferred to work alone.

"I like to think of forecasting tournaments as intellectual ecosystems that require different types of creatures," Tetlock says.

3) Make actual predictions. One of the reasons this experiment worked, according to Tetlock, is that people were asked to make specific hard predictions. Instead of asking, "Is the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria stable?" (the sort of vague question pundits like to weigh in on), they asked, "Will Bashar al-Assad remain president of Syria through Jan. 31, 2012?"

By forcing participants to answer with firm predictions, and assigning actual probability values (e.g., there's a 60 percent chance Assad will remain president), you ended up getting predictions that could be proven categorically true or false. The more that people do this, the more people can be held accountable for getting things wrong — which forces them to adjust the way they think about the world, hopefully for the better.

4) You have to know at least a little. It helps to know some background in order to make good predictions. According to a study Tetlock et al. published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, people who knew more about world politics and were given some training in probability theory tended to do better in the tournament. Smarter people, as measured by IQ tests, also tended to do better.

This research is all very new, so it's hard to say if these tips and traits can actually be harnessed to produce accurate forecasts for decades.

But the possibility that we're starting to develop a better system for anticipating future events, by putting the right kinds of people in the right kinds of settings, is an exciting one. It's important not to get too carried away with the implications at this point; being able to better forecast, say, the coming UK parliamentary elections is a lot different from foreseeing the rise of ISIS. But this is a promising step toward better understanding what's coming in the world, and thus knowing how to prepare for it.

Advice to the British government from a collective of ex-prisoners on how to reduce crime. “There aren’t really that many people committing crimes in this country. The problem is that it’s the same old faces coming in and going out of prison”. Break the cycle of recidivism by giving newly released prisoners a place to live and a crack at some job interviews, so that they have at least the possibility of returning to normal life

Like many of you, I have been entertained by the unstoppable clown car that is Donald Trump. On the surface, and several layers deep as well, Trump appears to be a narcissistic blow-hard with inadequate credentials to lead a country.

The only problem with my analysis is that there is an eerie consistency to his success so far. Is there a method to it? Is there some sort of system at work under the hood?

Probably yes. Allow me to describe some of the hypnosis and persuasion methods Mr. Trump has employed on you. (Most of you know I am a trained hypnotist and this topic is a hobby of mine.)

For starters, Trump literally wrote the book on negotiating, called The Art of the Deal. So we know he is familiar with the finer points of persuasion. For our purposes today, persuasion, hypnosis, and negotiating all share a common set of tools, so I will conflate them. 

Would Trump use his negotiation and persuasion skills in the campaign? Of course he would. And we expect him to do just that. 

But where is the smoking gun of his persuasion? Where is his technique laid out for us to see.

Everywhere. 

As I said in my How to Fail book, if you are not familiar with the dozens of methods of persuasion that are science-tested, there’s a good chance someone is using those techniques against you.

For example, when Trump says he is worth $10 billion, which causes his critics to say he is worth far less (but still billions) he is making all of us “think past the sale.” The sale he wants to make is “Remember that Donald Trump is a successful business person managing a vast empire mostly of his own making.” The exact amount of his wealth is irrelevant. 

When a car salesperson trained in persuasion asks if you prefer the red Honda Civic or the Blue one, that is a trick called making you “think past the sale” and the idea is to make you engage on the question of color as if you have already decided to buy the car. That is Persuasion 101 and I have seen no one in the media point it out when Trump does it.

The $10 billion estimate Trump uses for his own net worth is also an “anchor” in your mind. That’s another classic negotiation/persuasion method. I remember the $10 billion estimate because it is big and round and a bit outrageous. And he keeps repeating it because repetition is persuasion too. 

I don’t remember the smaller estimates of Trump’s wealth that critics provided. But I certainly remember the $10 billion estimate from Trump himself. Thanks to this disparity in my memory, my mind automatically floats toward Trump’s anchor of $10 billion being my reality. That is classic persuasion. And I would be amazed if any of this is an accident. Remember, Trump literally wrote the book on this stuff.

You might be concerned that exaggerating ones net worth is like lying, and the public will not like a liar. But keep in mind that Trump’s value proposition is that he will “Make America Great.” In other words, he wants to bring the same sort of persuasion to the question of America’s reputation in the world. That concept sounds appealing to me. The nation needs good brand management, whether you think Trump is the right person or not. (Obviously we need good execution as well, not just brand illusion. But a strong brand gives you better leverage for getting what you want. It is all connected.)

And what did you think of Trump’s famous “Rosie O’Donnell” quip at the first debate when asked about his comments on women? The interviewer’s questions were intended to paint Trump forever as a sexist pig. But Trump quickly and cleverly set the “anchor” as Rosie O’Donnell, a name he could be sure was not popular with his core Republican crowd. And then he casually admitted, without hesitation, that he was sure he had said other bad things about other people as well.

Now do you see how the anchor works? If the idea of “Trump insults women” had been allowed to pair in your mind with the nice women you know and love, you would hate Trump. That jerk is insulting my sister, my mother, and my wife! But Trump never let that happen. At the first moment (and you have to admit he thinks fast) he inserted the Rosie O’Donnell anchor and owned the conversation from that point on. Now he’s not the sexist who sometimes insults women; he’s the straight-talker who won’t hesitate to insult someone who has it coming (in his view).

But it gets better. You probably cringed when Trump kept saying his appearance gave FOX its biggest audience rating. That seemed totally off point for a politician, right? But see what happened.

Apparently FOX chief Roger Ailes called Trump and made peace. And by that I mean Trump owns FOX for the rest of the campaign because his willingness to appear on their network will determine their financial fate. BAM, Trump owns FOX and paid no money for it. See how this works? That’s what a strong brand gives you.

You probably also cringed when you heard Trump say Mexico was sending us their rapists and bad people. But if you have read this far, you now recognize that intentional exaggeration as an anchor, and a standard method of persuasion. 

Trump also said he thinks Mexico should pay for the fence, which made most people scoff. But if your neighbor’s pit bull keeps escaping and eating your rosebushes, you tell the neighbor to pay for his own fence or you will shoot his dog next time you see it. Telling a neighbor to build his own wall for your benefit is not crazy talk. And I actually think Trump could pull it off. 

On a recent TV interview, the host (I forget who) tried to label Trump a “whiner.” But instead of denying the label, Trump embraced it and said was the best whiner of all time, and the country needs just that. That’s a psychological trick I call “taking the high ground” and I wrote about it in a recent blog post. The low ground in this case is the unimportant question of whether “whiner” is a fair label for Trump. But Trump cleverly took the high ground, embraced the label, and used it to set an anchor in your mind that he is the loudest voice for change. That’s some clown genius for you. 

Update: When Trump raised his hand at the debate as the only person who would not pledge to back the eventual Republican candidate, he sent a message to the party that the only way they can win is by nominating him. And people like to win. It is in their nature. And they sure don’t want to see a Clinton presidency.

Update 2: And what about Trump’s habit of bluster and self-complimenting? Every time he opens his mouth he is saying something about the Trump brand being fabulous or amazing or great. The rational part of your brain thinks this guy is an obnoxious, exaggerating braggart. But the subconscious parts of your brain (the parts that make most of your decisions) only remember that something about that guy was fabulous, amazing and great.

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics, focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I don’t think he put much effort into it. Imagine what he could do if he gave up golf.

As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every time.

Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.

I also saw some Internet chatter about the idea of picking Mark Cuban as Vice Presidential running mate. If that happens, Republicans win. And I think they like to win. There is no way Trump picks some desiccated Governor from an important state as his running mate. I think Cuban is a realistic possibility.

I don’t mean this post to look like support for a Trump presidency. I’m more interested in his methods. I’m not smart enough to know who would do the best job as president. There are a lot of capable people in the game.

Update: Now that you have read my explanation of Trump’s three-dimensional chess, read this article and chuckle at how he is operating on an entirely different level from the TV host, Chuck Todd, and even the author of the article I’m linking to. It is literally hilarious.

Scott

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In Top Tech Blog, robots are learning how to evolve on their own. I don’t see any risk with that. Do you?

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The good reviews for my book keep coming.

Rameet Chawla, an app developer, reported similar findings a couple years ago when he created an app to automatically like within five seconds the pictures posted by everyone he followed on Instagram. He did this after friends seemed put out that he never liked their photos, many of which were selfies.

Just a few months after secretly deploying his app, Mr. Chawla discovered that 50 percent more people were following him on Instagram, and that he was also getting more invitations to parties and business opportunities. Instagram has since blocked his app.

That is the new and highly intelligent book by Stephen Macedo, and the subtitle is Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy & the Future of Marriage.  I balk at only one of his conclusions: he is pro-gay marriage, where I agree, but he does not believe in legal polygamy.  For instance he argues there is no polygamous orientation comparable to a same-sex orientation, rather polygamy is a preference.  He views polygamy as unstable, and also as leading to distributive injustice, with high status males reaping excess gains.  Furthermore the historical record of polygamy is often negative.  Here are relevant comments from Will Wilkinson, who (like me) is convinced by Macedo on gay marriage but not polygamy.  Is polygamy going to be such a significant practical problem that we ultimately have to in some way wield the coercive apparatus of the state if people insist on trying to practice it?  Would polygamous-equivalent contracts be not just left unenforced but also banned?  I don’t quite see how a liberal doctrine gets you there.  Furthermore, might polygamy make more sense in some eras than in others?  (“Not your grandfather’s polygamy!”)  I still wish to defend the presumption for some notion of freedom of contract.

In the future, when time travel is a totally normal thing to do, people will use it to do stuff like tell their 10-year-old selves to learn the guitar so their adult selves can impress women.

(via @mouser_nerdbot)

Tags: time travel   video

The author is Michael Booth and the subtitle is Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia; please note the book is (at times) as much tribute as critique.  I found it interesting and informative throughout, here a few passages:

Right now, the Danes are especially preoccupied with role playing — dressing up like Gandalf or elves and acting out violent narratives deep in the woods with their foam “boffers” (the name given to role-play weapons).  There are also 219 folk dancing clubs in Denmark, but do not worry, as with the pigs, you very rarely see them.

Here is a not funny to outsider satiric video about the Danish language, cited by the book, which refers to its “declining intelligibility.”  The video has about five million views.

On Finland:

You have got to love a country that enters Lordi into the Eurovision Song Contest and wins, which consumes more ice cream per capita than any other European country (14 litres a year), and has more tango dancers than Argentina.

I enjoyed this fragment of a sentence:

The Finns’ obmutescence seemed especially to go hand in hand with that other most famous Finnish characteristic…

On economic issues, the author thinks Denmark in particular is overextended and in denial about the need for reform.  Overall I found the Danish sections to be the most interesting and detailed, the chapters on Sweden to be the least deep, and the Iceland and Finland sections to have the most new information.

Recommended, it is fun plus you will learn something.  Imagine “Bill Bryson goes to Scandinavia,” as The Christian Science Monitor put it.