Lunch at the Labs

I've never understood what benefits there were for deciding to do something before I had to, which is different than waiting until it's too late. Now there is a new book which appeals to my sensibilities: Why Procrastination is Good for You

University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy argues that the key to success is waiting for the last possible moment to make a decision

An added bonus for me is it contradicts Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.

Whenever I have a pain or ache I wait (i.e, procrastinate) for days/weeks and invariably it goes away or at least gets better. Given that so-called cures like homeopathy, reiki, acupuncture, etc work no better than placebos, I guess this is not surprising.

But recently I had a case of procrastination that baffles me. I have a dishwasher that I never use. Several months ago water started to accumulate in it so that once a week I had to run it on the dry cycle to empty it out. Since it didn't seem to be causing an immediate problem I put off having it fixed. But lo and behold after several months it fixed itself and water stopped accumulating. Recently I had a handyman in for something else and I asked him to check my dishwasher because I feared the water might be going someplace else. He opened it up and it was completely dry, top to bottom. So procrastination even worked for my dishwasher!

Addendum 10/13/2012.
On July 3, 2012 Frank Portnoy talked about his book Wait: The useful art of procrastination. at The RSA in England.

        Human cycles: History as science

To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analyzed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

But also see an opposing viewpoint from Maria Konnikova,

        Humanities aren't a science. Stop treating them like one

Yes, we could say, we can predict this and avert that and explain this and understand that. But you know what? The cliodynamists, just like everyone else, will only know which cyclical predictions were accurate after the fact. Forgotten will be all of those that were totally wrong. And the analysts of myths only wait for the hits to make their point—but how many narratives that are obviously not based in reality have similar patterns?

We’re held back by those biases that plague almost all attempts to quantify the qualitative, selection on the dependent variable and post hoc hypotheses and explanations. We look at instances where the effect exists and posit a cause—and forget all the times the exact same cause led to no visible effect, or to an effect that was altogether different. It’s so easy to tell stories based on models. It’s so hard to remember that they are nothing more than stories. (It’s not just history or literature. Much of fMRI research is blamed for precisely that reason: if you don’t have an a priori hypothesis but then see something interesting, it’s all too tempting to explain its involvement after the fact and pretend that that’s what you’d meant to do all along. But the two approaches are not one and the same.)

I particularly like the comparison with fMRI research.

Talk by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman on May 21, 2012 in Washington DC at the National Academy of Sciences, concerning how the mind filters and shapes information:

        Thinking That We Know by Daniel Kahneman

He discusses how scientists and non-scientists differ in what it means to know and believe something and how that relates to the challenge of communicating science to the general public:

Other communities have very different views about what it means to know and to believe. So for example for scientists believing unlike knowing does not carry a guarantee of truth. But this is certainly not true for true believers. True believers believe what they believe is true. They know it. They have a different conception of what knowing is. And for them the guarantee of truth is revelation and faithful transmission. And that is sufficient. It's just a different way of knowing.

And from their point of view, not ours, but from their point of view, science is just another religion, with its own rituals and its own claims and like all other religions it's false or it could be false, or there's certainly no guarantee that it is true. So we have to recognize that the definition of knowledge is contested and we have to take that into account, I think, in trying to communicate science to people who do not accept our definition or our concept.

Similar to the placebo affect where a fake pill can have a positive effect and relieve real symptoms, a fake pill can have negative side effects if the patient anticipates them.

Beware the Nocebo Effect

Nocebo Phenomena in Medicine (pdf paper)

The thing I miss the most about being retired from AT&T and Bell Labs are the lunch time conversations with colleagues about the events of the day, both technical and non-technical. Being around very smart people makes one realize how dumb most of the so-called pundits in the mainstream media (TV, radio, magazines) really are. I intend to use this forum to point out and discuss interesting things I see and hear just like I use to do, so please join me for lunch at the labs.

This blog use to be http://mjm.freeshell.org/blog/, using an old free version (2.64) of Movable Type .

The software powering this blog is nanoblogger-3.5-rc1 from:

NanoBlogger: small weblog engine for the UNIX command line
http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net

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A fork of nanoblogger with some modifications, namely a built-in comment system
https://github.com/mrstegeman/nanoblogger-mod

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