Vast amounts of human behaviour can be explained not by causal utility but by symbolic utlity, to use Nozick's distinction. We do many things not because they improve our (or others) objective well-being, but to signal who we are.For instance:
... voters cherish irrational views on many issues ... relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). Economists know that these positions are irrational, because the average person actually benefits from market competition, which provides the best product at the lowest price; from free trade with other countries, which (for American consumers) usually lowers the cost of labor and thus the price of goods; and from technological change, which redistributes labor from less productive to more productive enterprises.
People do not ... vote their self-interest: ... “Precisely because people put personal interests aside when they enter the political arena,” Caplan says, “intellectual errors readily blossom into foolish policies.” People really believe that the country would be better off if profits were regulated, if foreign goods were taxed, and if companies were prevented from downsizing. Politicians who pander to these beliefs are more likely to be elected, and the special interests that lobby for protectionism and anticompetitive legislation are the beneficiaries—not the public. The result, over time, is a decline in the standard of living.
... [M]ost economists peg the optimal level of government involvement in the economy too high, because they overestimate the virtues of democracy. ... some suggestions for fixing the evils of universal democratic participation: require voters to pass a test for economic competence; give extra votes to people with greater economic literacy; reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout; require more economics courses in school, even if this means eliminating courses in other subjects, such as classics; teach people introductory economics without making the usual qualifications about the limits of market solutions.
“It is possible to design mechanical futures-trading strategies which generate returns with the same, and often better, risk-return properties as hedge funds,” [Kat] said. “This means investors can have hedge-fund returns but without the massive fees and all the other drawbacks that come with the real thing.”What you need to replicate this : a highly trained British trader-turned-academic and a graduate student in finance trained in computer programming. And Voila! You can create or replicate as many hedge funds as you wish, with no fees to boot.
"If you are really convinced that you can find those super managers, then don’t waste your time with our stuff. Go look for them. But if you are a bit more realistic, if you know that eighty per cent of hedge-fund managers aren’t worth the fees they charge, then the rational thing to do is to give up trying to find a super manager, and just go for a good, efficient diversifier instead."
... individuals with incomplete control over, and foresight into, their own behavior watch more TV than they consider optimal for themselves and their well-being is lower than what could be achieved.-- Recent paper from the Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol 28, Issue 3, June 2007
sometimes we're more likely to remember words that we were instructed to forget, while being more likely to forget words that we were instructed to remember. How can this be?Thus begins the interesting Remembering can lead to forgetting, recent research reported by the British Psychological Society from the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
In the high-tech world, divergence devices have been spectacular successes. But convergence devices, for the most part, have been spectacular failures.
The first MP3 players (the Diamond Rio, for example) were flash-memory units capable of holding only 20 or 30 songs. The first iPod, on the other hand, had a hard drive and could hold thousands of songs. Now there were two types of MP3 players, a classic example of divergence at work.
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The first computer was a mainframe computer, followed by the minicomputer, the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the handheld computer, the server and other specialty computers. The computer didn't converge with another device. It diverged.
When the cellphone was first introduced, it was called a "car phone" because it was too big and heavy to lug around. You might have thought it would eventually converge with the automobile. It did not. Instead it diverged and today we have many types of cellphones.
... a host of other divergence devices that have been enormously successful: the digital camera, the plasma TV, the wireless e-mail device, the personal video recorder, the GPS navigation device.
As comedian Ricky Gervais recently put it in one of his stand-up routines, we don't need to be able to take a piss in the washing machine because we've already got toilets. Yet, every time I pack my iPod, phone, BlackBerry and laptop into my travel bag, along with all their various chargers, I find myself wishing I had one mobile device. Call me irrational, but I'm willing to believe the iPhone might be the one.
"if you accomplish that, will you be seen by your audience as the best in the world, or will you be seen as doing your best?"If you're doing your best, only your AYSO soccer coach cares. If you're the best in the world, the market cares. The secret, if you have limited resources (don't we all) is to make 'world' small enough that you can actually accomplish that.
The compensating wage for bearing risk varies, obviously, with the risk, and the risk in turn depends on efforts that are and will be made to minimize the risk, including body armor, rescue, medical treatment, and so forth. Knowing that one's fellow soldiers do not just abandon one when the cost of rescue would be disproportionate to any tactical value of the rescue reduces the wage that a volunteer army has to pay to attract soldiers of the quality it wants. ...
Persons who join the military to obtain or exercise technical skills have civilian alternatives, so the military has to compete with civilian employers for the services of such persons. But if you want to be a combat soldier, there is only one possible employer (if you are an American) and that is the U.S. government. So the government can pay a low wage to persons desiring that employment--in fact it seems that it can pay a lower wage than it does to its military technicians (adjusting for the value of the technical training that the latter receive) even though the latter are less exposed to combat risks.
When a gun goes off, wireless sensors spread throughout a neighborhood register the instant the sound wave reaches them, using GPS to pinpoint the moment to within 20 nanoseconds. The sensors then transmit the timing data to a server within the police department’s control. This server makes the calculations necessary to triangulate the source of the sound and, within 5-10 seconds of the shot being fired, specially-equipped police cars on patrol get both the precise origin of the shot and a playback of its audio signature, allowing the officers to determine how many shots were fired and make a tactical decision from there.The technology ... is deployed in neighborhoods throughout 15 American cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and DC.
It’s much more important to be open than to be intelligent if you want to succeed as a leader. And conscientiousness is good for being the person who does stuff, not the person who leads. Agreeable is a good trait for a great team player, bad trait for a boss. Neuroticists are good when you need to hear about the worst-case scenarios, all the time.
Right now, Nokia is designing global positioning system receivers into every new mobile phone they plan to sell. GPS receivers in a phone SIM card have been demonstrated. GPS is exploding everywhere. It used to be for navigating battleships; now it's in your pocket, along with a moving map. And GPS is pretty crude — you need open line of sight on the satellites, and the signal's messed up. We can do better than this, and we will. In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is.Predicting the future is tough business, and anyone might get lost in the eddies of time, but not in 3D space anymore, it would seem. Another one: driverless cars."Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.
They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy. Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all. But because cars have until now been marketed to us by appealing to our personal autonomy, there are going to be big social changes when we switch over to driverless vehicles.One thing is fairly clear - dreamers will never be out of business!Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they're not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi.
France is very socialist and the US is very capitalist; time-wise, the French value leisure, the US, work; the French emphasize equal society, the US, meritocracy; the French take care of their poor but shun the immigrant (an immigrant is a foreigner even if legal and 3rd generation, there is no way to ‘become French’), the US welcomes immigrants (comparative to almost any western nation) who want to work and embrace our values but we don’t take care of our poor. We both, however, tend to be nationalistic, arrogant, deeply politically divided, and idealists about our countries’ history and founding values of freedom and equality.As France has moved left, the US has moved right, and it seems that both countries are having a little buyer’s remorse. Wanted: A country with lofty goals, a society that recognizes that hard work is the force that creates a civilized world, but also that it isn’t worth much if you don’t take the time to enjoy and think about the civilization you’re working so hard to create, one that wanted to include all members of it’s society no matter race or social class, but also kept a strong sense of identity and individual freedom. Let’s see, a cross between the US and France. Hmmm…Canada, anyone? Yeah, really friendly people would be a plus, too.
To Google, hiring is mathematically equivalent to Information Retrieval, except that they only care about "precision" not "recall".Also, read Two Kinds of Judgement, which discusses this issue in some depth.
What that means to lay-people is that so long as they can maintain 10,000 applications coming through per-month, false negatives (passing on a suitable applicant) do not matter because there'll be another candidate along in a minute. False positives (hiring an unsuitable applicant) are all they need to focus on. The "fit factor" is effectively the search string of traits; however, with such a large candidate pool, they can focus their "hiring algorithm" entirely on rejecting candidates where it is even slightly difficult to ascertain whether they fit or not.
So, their advertising blitz "aren't we a great place to work for" is a part of what lets them keep their hiring process easy. If they get bad PR and applications fall, then they'll need to worry about recall as well as precision.
