Deep Optimism
By Kevin
As any good young person in his 20s should know, optimism versus pessimism is not simply about half-glass full or empty sort of thing. In a recent FT article in 'Recruitment', research suggests that optimist tend to get the best jobs. They mentioned the concept of a 'deep optimist', whose optimism is not the simple foolish concept of 'looking on the bright side'. It is something that goes deep into the personality and thinking of these people:
In fact, psychology suggests that an important way in which deep-rooted optimism does good is through better coping strategies. The deep optimist has the strength to see obstacles more realistically and resourcefully, not less. And drink and drugs are deep optimism’s enemies, not its friends.
In other words, being cheerful and bubbly is more of a by-product of optimism though the reverse can often help to improve one's ability to adopt that deep optimistic approach to thinking. And Matt Ridley provides a very sophisticated demonstration of what it takes to be a deep optimist, although he tends to also exhibit the cheery personality that can be 'faked', it takes a remarkable deep optimist to stand up and tell everyone around him to snap out of the gloom.
I personally believe that a deep optimist does not ignore problems or negative aspects of issues but sees the opportunity to eradicate them. He seize the day and take action to realistically right things. And it is these actions, this attitude that you can strive and achieve that provides them with outcomes that might differ from everyone else.
Mode of Doing
By Kevin
Take Action!
After spending 15 years in education, I spent a brief two and a half year or so working (2 years in the military and then 6 months in the private sector). I returned to education after that; almost completing my first year of education since the hiatus. So I guess I know a thing or two about studying, or at least learning. Of course, everyone have different styles of learning but from my experience with people around me (who have mostly done remarkably well in the education system back in Singapore), studying/revising for school work almost definitely involves some form of active 'doing' rather than passive stuff (like plain reading).
The trick to absorbing new materials and learning in general is to involve as many senses as possible. This is a concept I explored a while back in 'Remembering Stuff'. It is then, more sensible to draw mindmaps while reading, to do underlining, annotations, taking notes while going through materials. When I go through my Economics notes, I often have to try deriving the equations myself because if I don't walk myself through the equations using my own interpretation of the logic of the theory, I will never be able to internalize the materials. This true for all the hard sciences (granted, economics is not exactly a hard science but when it comes down to the equations and formulas, we can reasonably assume it takes on that slice of nature of hard sciences).
But what about social sciences and humanities? It helps to draw mindmaps, basically to make connections between things that are studied. And the best part about mind maps is that it allows you to make many different complex connections. Although at the end of the day you might not actually find the stuff you drew particularly useful, the mindmap is really more of a tool to pin down your thinking of the connections than a visual representation of the actual concepts (especially true when you're doing revision) so it's fine. Getting in the mode of 'doing' activates your kinesthetic self and enlist the help of your muscles to 'remember' stuff for you. It's not that the muscle cells helps you to remember stuff but that the motor neurons help to provide another channel by which the new material enters your brains.
All that busyness also keeps you engaged and focused, especially if you're like me, dozing off easily as I stare at my materials. So for those who are studying out there, preparing for examinations, plainly trying to be consistent, don't waste your time staring blankly at your notes. Take some action and learn something.
Jamie’s Dream School
By Kevin
Dreaming Up Stuff
I don't really watch TV and I won't actually recommend it because of how it drains your time away slowly. But I found myself watching an episode of Jamie's Dream School and was immediately drawn to how inspiring it is. It is an incredible experiment about motivation, attitudes to life and trying to inject aspirations in the minds of our younger generation. The best part is that it's available free on Youtube.
You realise that often, sensibility and maturity follows from aspirations and that, I guess gives parents an answer to what you can do to motivate and drive your children. And for the rest of us, it teaches us about maximizing our potential. In the world today, we have to remind ourselves that our career, our work isn't something constant and unchanging through our life. And it is fine. The most important thing is to be able to manage the change, to know the direction you might be driving towards at any moment in time and make sure you follow through.
Perfect Choice Fallacy
By Kevin
Why the different cover designs?
Some time a year ago, I introduced Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice in an entry to encourage students to watch TED.com videos and read more widely. I have been intrigued by Barry's idea but didn't exactly give much thought to it. All I took away was that from a marketer's point of view, offering customers a wide range of choices may frustrate him more than anything else. Now, we are all more of consumers than marketers, so how are we going to use Barry's ideas in our daily conduct of life and consumption?
Before we go on to that, we need to understand why Barry's ideas merit much more careful thinking. Intuitively, it is true that when you're confronted with a myriad of choices, you become frustrated and you cease to be able to decide properly. Yet when there's too few choices you wonder if there are alternatives to what is offered.
The other cover...
In other words, there is an optimal number of variety that we would like to see for different things in our lives, assuming you're searching for anything in particular. We might be happy to have a couple of models of cameras with different functions, size, ease of use and other technical specifications but we would probably prefer to have less choices when it comes to carrots (think different shades of red, lengths, textures, maturity, country of origin, etc). Nonetheless, it takes quite a lot to build up a theory that suggests that a multitude of choices may have a negative impact on society's welfare.
But one key idea that we often leave out, is that when we are confronted with too many choices, we almost definitely believe there is a particular option that will be the perfect one. This is perhaps the source of frustration that we feel when confronted with so many choices. The Economist discusses this at length recently. It also highlights how the multitude of choices raises our expectations of the eventual choice we make, increasing room for disappointment and unhappiness. More importantly perhaps, this finding is a call for simplifying our lives and reducing decision-making to things that matters and wisely defer the insignificant choices to others.
It is interesting then, that Barry's book was published with 2 different cover designs; not that we would be making the choice anyways.
Fair Value Accounting
By Kevin
Doesn't matter who fights who...
ERPZ authors seem somewhat on a hiatus thanks largely to devotion to studies in university and the school holidays which means that students are largely slacking and not keen on searching the web for intellectual tidbits. Being in London for the winter also means I'm using the holidays for traveling and not writing for ERPZ. By and large, we're neglecting ERPZ but this should not stay too long. From this day on, I shall share a bit of my on-going research for my essays and articles so as to benefit my peers and students keen on current affairs and topics in Economics.
ERPZ disappointedly failed to provide much discussion about the financial crisis and its causes. One of the important 'causes' being finger-pointed at is that of Fair Value Accounting. It took me a while to realise what it is and then learn about its role in the financial crisis. It's interesting how this attempt to achieve a 'fair' valuation of asset prices ends up distorting it thanks to panic behaviour of investors or distorted incentives of managers. An article by The Economist points out the economic explanation for it:
Eliminating one market imperfection (such as poor information) need not bring the ideal of a frictionless economy closer, because this may magnify the effect of remaining distortions (such as managerial short-termism or illiquid markets).
I thought this is an important concept worthy of some thought. Free market advocates would often encourage policies that align real world markets more closely to perfectly competitive markets. Unfortunately, creating perfect markets is not about eliminating imperfections one by one but all at once. Therefore, not every de-regulation or removal of market failures would push it closer to perfect competition. The relationship has got to be more complex than that.
In any case, the whole episode about fair-value accounting shows that accountant's main concern of protecting investors through true and accurate disclosure do not always serve the entire system well and policy-makers may sometimes be put into a tight spot when the interests of various parties in the economy are pretty much at odds with each other.
Aspirations & the World
By Kevin
About the Cash...
Just went a friend at the LSE studying Law was talking about how the returns on a study of Law is not exactly worth it, The Economist describes how American Law School graduates are finding themselves jobless and under-compensated (compared to what they had expected). But should these students have studied Law because of the prospects of making big bucks?
At times you might find yourself drowning in reality, with people aggressively pursuing high-paying jobs, thinking fast-paced, intense life suits them. People are hungry for success but this success should be something you measure yourself with and not what others measure you with. Staying focused on one's goals are important and it becomes more and more of a challenge as you grow up and become faced with ever increasing alternatives in the world.
In school one usually follows the 'standard goal' of trying to do well and get good results and as you go higher in your education you realise that the co-curricular activities are important as well and then there's the community service; and then there's networking with peers, professionals, even politicians, potential employers, potential superiors and finally, when you're out in the world: trying to do the things you want to do (or you think you want to do). The point is that there are dozens of people out there who are trying to convince you that their idea of success matches yours and you should basically adopt their definition and go along what they defined to be great. You're very much on your own and through your life, you need to sharpen your ability to decide things independently and then bear the consequences of your decisions yourself. In other words, you need to grow up, in the truest sense of the word.
Education and social interactions have great powers in terms of encouraging conformity and you need to always blend-in while retaining yourself. I recently attended a talk and the speaker was quoting an assessment of kids' divergent thinking and 98% of the kids aged 3-5 are classified divergent thinkers but when they get to elementary school, and the assessment was done on the same kids, the figure dropped to 50%. By the time they're in high school, it's 32% and finally, a separate assessment of adults classified only 2% of them as divergent thinkers. Conformity is powerful and illusionarily (if there's such a word) comfortable.
The truths are, you don't have to be rich to be happy; the truth is success is a journey, it's about the trip you make and not the destination of it; the point is the action you took and not so much the outcome of it. The action is what tells people about you; the outcome serves only to tell half the story. So before you follow the flow, think where you wanna go.
Measuring Life
By Kevin
How long can you stretch yourself?
As A Levels are ending or have already ended for some kids, it's important to start considering what is next in your life. Many may have avoided the question altogether for most of their lives so far. Some may have tackled it and then gave up, leaving stuff to fate and higher beings (whoever they may be).
Yet as you grow up and encounter greater responsibility in life and make decisions that are of increasingly greater significance and impact (sometimes even on the lives of others). You must learn to take on them and not to fear these decisions or their impacts. You need to put yourself in the position to grow up and take these responsibility, and to make these choices. Keeping yourself in the state of a limbo would only serve to offer a greater disappointment later on in life.
Choosing what you want to do is one of them, because it has such grand impact on what is to come and your experiences later on. Yet, interestingly, a decision can only be wrong if you choose for it to be so. That's the way regret works - regret is a choice, it may be instinctive for you but be aware that you have instinctively chosen to regret when you could have embraced your choice and make the best out of it. At the end of the day, don't make a choice because of someone else, because of money, or your parents. Choose because you want to.
At the end of all, the question is really: How will you measure your life? Against that of someone else? Based on the ratio of right decisions to wrong decisions you make? So make a choice that follows through that. Don't just take the easy options and attempt to sail through life; find out what you truly want and go on to create those options. Ultimately, it's yourself you don't want to disappoint.
True Learning
By Kevin
Make sure it's long term...
I'm finally in London and fulfilling my dream of studying in London School of Economics. I'm hoping to share this little insight about learning from my department's Undergraduate Tutor. She mentioned that the only true learning is by our long term memory and when you're older, with thousand things to remember (such as how much laundry is accumulating, when to get the groceries, what to cook for dinner and plenty of meeting with different friends), your short term memory would have much less space for learning and that's why you may need more time picking up new things.
The advantage is that whatever you pick up will stay with you for a long time to come. On the other hand, the youngsters typical learn things fast since they've got good short term memory (having more space since there's not much matters about life to remember and also less old information) but then they run the risk of quickly forgetting once they no longer practice. It takes a long time to transfer things over from the short term to the long term memory.
So the key to true learning is really to practice, practice, practice and recall stuff now and then.
Inspiration Break
By Kevin
Get inspired with new ideas about things in the world by surfing the web beyond the bounds of sites you normally hang out at. Readers of ERPZ probably think I only hang out on Economist.com, Knowledge@Wharton, or basically stuff on our ERPZ reading list. While I subscribe The Economist Free Xchange (Here for RSS) on my Google Reader, I also check out the Threadless Blog very often to find out what sort of designers people are coming up for their Tee Shirts. It may sound kind of lame but these are places where we get ideas or just inspired. It's also a place for a break from the knowledge and structured stuff that we commonly deal with.
Look Ma, no Rulers!
Graphics and concepts links up bits of ideas that might be floating around us all the time. Designer Couch is a good place to look at how design ideas are put into place in products, ads, just about everything that surrounds us, physical or virtual. Not long ago, I chanced upon this 'Constrained Ball' idea by a Korean product designer. I haven't found anyone selling this so I reckon is still an idea but it looks great and should hopefully work in practice. The design featured here is also very elegant and think about how your 'ruler' is no longer going to too long for your pencil case. So yea, by then, 'How do you draw a straight line without a ruler?' won't be such a baffling question anymore.
Otherwise, animations can be awesome source of ideas as well. The following is something cool I discovered:
Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.
After that, just give yourself some time to link up what you see with your life and observations in reality. Draw something, sketch your ideas, design something, invent something; then go back to studying.
Thinking Beliefs
By Kevin
The Skeptic
Michael Shermer speaks on TED about Beliefs, and how people are wired to want to believe in things. He explains 'The pattern behind self-deception' but it really is more about how the brain makes decision on what it pretends to be 'objective' based on extremely limited information. The decisions would therefore be a result of evolutionary experiences as well as learning.
It is really very true that you choose to believe in false patterns and become superstitious especially when you feel out of control, helpless in a specific matter. That is the reason why gamblers often believe in luck and we Chinese think that you should not touch a book ('shu', a homonym of 'losing' in Chinese) before entering a gambling den. One of the articles in The Economist's special report on Gambling discusses this. It quotes from David Sklansky:
[E]xpert players do not rely on luck. They are at war with luck. They use their skills to minimise luck as much as possible.
Therefore, it is the less skilled who'd think that they are 'victims' of fate or luck. The article's conclusion highlights a point from David that shifts your perspective of luck from winning to losing:
Imagine trying intentionally to lose at a game of pure chance, like roulette or baccarat. It would be impossible. At the beginning of a deal or a roll you have to bet on something. You can no more deliberately play badly than you can deliberately play well. The same is not true for poker, which offers multiple opportunities to make sure you lose.
That is to say that for something which you can deliberately play badly in, you'd have a good control of the outcome, and you need to make use of that control. It applies to life at large; when you choose to blame other things, events, people and circumstances for your situation, you're victimizing yourself and thinking that you've been toyed by chance. It makes you more likely to believe in false patterns and weakens you. That sets the basis for bad thinking and destructive self-deception.
Michael is also the founder of Skeptic Magazine. The magazine appears to be both humourous (at least from my point of view) and full of science tidbits that most people would really enjoy. For those who believes the world is ending in 2012, do check out a little interview they've done for you guys.
The takeaway? Understand your tendency towards beliefs and learn how to use them to your advantage; maintain a healthy skepticism and at times, accept false things so that you'd feel better. Most importantly, empower yourself with your beliefs.
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