Social Trust Falling

Podcast of interest, how can we address the falling of social trust?

This week on Freakonomics Radio: Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades — in part because our populations are more diverse. What can we do to fix it? .... " 

Retrain Your Brain: Think like a Freak

In Knowledge@Wharton " ... Are you sure it is a bad idea to quit a job? In Think Like a Freak, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt  (of Freakonomics fame) argue that we are often overly confident about what we think we know, and they recommend a way to think differently to solve problems and make decisions.

Wharton management professor Adam M. Grant recently interviewed Dubner about his new book when he visited campus as a guest lecturer in the Authors@Wharton series. In this interview, Dubner discusses why we should say, “I don’t know” much more often than we do. ... "   

 I largely agree, as long as we follow up to find out or connect with the best resource to 'know'.   Better yet, if we have the process, or algorithm, or analytics ready, and then get the data to derive the best  answer.

Think Like a Freak site.

Data and Analytics Need Stories

In Fast Company:   Stories simplify, integrate complex things into an understandable thread, engage.   That includes data and analytics, but is not often done well.  " ... Speaking to us backstage at SapientNitro’s iEX conference in London last week, the author of the bestselling Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, abandons his fine line in self-deprecation for a moment to enthuse about the power of a good story. “I think storytelling is the heart of everything. People have this false impression that science is science, and it isn’t. There is so much art, even in science,” he says.... " 

Freakonomics Blog Moving

Confirmation that the often interesting Freakonomics blog will be leaving the NYT site and becoming standalone and 'indie' once again.  I like it independent.

Numeracy

In the Freakonomics blog, regarding numeracy. Like literacy, it should be valued. From the comments a quote I had not heard: Oscar Wilde said: “The mark of the truly educated is to be deeply moved by statistics".

Coin Toss Depends on Starting Point

In the Freakonomics blog: Is the common arbiter of binary decisions not so random? Short article points to resources that say it may depend on its original position in the hand. See the 2007 background Stanford paper: Dynamical Bias in Coin Toss.

The Fragile Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne effect is often brought up in industrial psychology. It was brought up when constructing industrial experiments and simulations where the behavior of people was involved. As it was presented, an experiment introduced better lighting in an industrial environment. Productivity increased. It was later discovered that any change in lighting in the environment, more light or less, increased productivity. The conclusion being that paying attention to the workers at all changed their productivity. Even when I was introduced to it we were told that this should be seen as a principle of caution and not some deep result. As an experts-can-be-wrong story it has survived a long time.

Now Steven D. Levitt and John List, of the NY Times Freakonomics blog say they have looked at the original data and find it does not support the conclusion that is primarily described as the 'Hawthorne effect'. A more complete write-up in the Economist.

' ... It turns out that idiosyncrasies in the way the experiments were conducted may have led to misleading interpretations of what happened. For example, lighting was always changed on a Sunday, when the plant was closed. When it reopened on Monday, output duly rose compared with Saturday, the last working day before the change, and continued to rise for the next couple of days. But a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Mondays. Workers tended to beaver away for the first few days of the working week in any case, before hitting a plateau and then slackening off ... '

Points to classic issues of data collections and external influences. You still have to consider the effect of observation on real people.

Super Crunchers

Reading Ian Ayres Book : Super Crunchers. Subtitled : 'Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to be Smart'. Steven Levitt, the coauthor of Freakonomics, last year's sort of how-to use quant methods to solve odd problems book, did something similar. I liked Freakonomics ... some of the examples are excellent ... but there was little background to the solutions, and I came away having a hard time understanding their depth and robustness.

Levitt is an economist, so his solutions are by their nature more idealistic ... addressing some form of 'homo economicus' that does not exist. Surprisingly Ian Ayres is in addition a lawyer, but his quant econometric background shows up in his also excellent examples. Levitt did not give you enough detail of what was done. I also come away with the impression that each solution is a tour-de-force, that needs special powers. Ayres makes the mistake of claiming that things are easier than they seem. His first set of examples, based on web date-matching site systems, is based on using various kinds of regressions to match people. He makes a very good case of why these kinds of approaches, using increasingly available mega data bases, can be used to generated classifications that are useful for all sorts of problems. He only hints at the fact that these methods can be harder than they appear.

As a quant guy I cringe a bit at both approaches. One giving no clue as to the underlying methods, the other not revealing that they do require rigorous methods. Bottom line: Super Crunchers is the more compelling argument, it sets up an optimistic view of how to solve tough problems by leveraging them with data. Ayres also systematically covers a number of useful methodologies that should be understood by all problem solvers. So if you only read one book, I suggest Super Crunchers, it can empower you with some powerful problem solving ideas.