Migration

I'm moving this blog to a new site, mainly because it's nicer looking, and easier to read and write on.

The site is:

www.jtraffic.wordpress.com

The Clean Bowl Club

Synopsis: A trick for shared kitchens

Every time I see a handwritten sign in a college dorm, usually taped above the sink, with an admonition "please wash you dishes," I take a moment to appreciate the futility of such an effort. There are couple of ways to think about the problem of dirty dishes in a shared kitchen: prisoner's dilemma, a public good problem, and an externality model. The simple version is that it's not a great strategy to do all the cleaning, because other people will take advantage of you. Since the incentives are lined up this way, solutions can be hard to find. You could try and impose costs for dirty dishes, or try and make the culprit leave the apartment. Often roommates try to impose costs by yelling at the offender, or by putting dishes in that person's room or on their bed. Some of the most gossip provoking drama arises from just this type of action.

One of the above ways of thinking about the problem gives a pretty good solution. I'll explain the boring econ in the notes¹, but to cut to the chase, establishing ownership of dishes is a smart solution. You can establish ownership of certain dishes by separating them from the other dishes. Putting them in an unorthodox place makes them unlikely to be used by someone who doesn't respect the ownership rule. If you stash the dishes you always use, you'll always have access to clean, free-loader-proof dishes. One important detail is to aim for having only one dish of each kind, because it forces you to clean it whenever you use it.

Now, if you feel bad for deserting the rest of your roommates via this idea, you can always wash some extra to assuage the guilt.

I've found that this solution is extraordinarily effective on the mission, and in college.

Notes:

1. Public goods are defined as goods that are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Non-rivalrous goods may be easily used by multiple people at the same time, and non-excludable goods are available to anyone, with no way of effectively preventing any individual or group from using them. When these two criteria are met, free-loading occurs any time someone is silly enough to produce the good, because everyone and anyone can use the good without paying. The Clean Bowl Club essentially makes "apartment cleanliness" excludable to anyone but the user of the Club. Notice, "clean dishes" is rivalrous in the first place, which means it isn't technically a public good, but "apartment cleanliness" is non-rivalrous, making it a public good. In application, non-excludability alone produces free-loading in the "clean dishes" case, which makes its elimination crucial. In the "apartment cleanliness" case, since The Clean Bowl Club only achieves rivalry, the problem is not totally solved; the apartment as a whole will probably look messy, but those in the Club have excludable clean dishes.

2. Doug Clark, a roommate of mine who had independently figured this solution out, gets credit for the name "Clean Bowl Club."

Farmer Subsidies and Similar Things

Synopsis: Inefficiencies abound.

Farmer subsidies have bothered me for a while. They exist because farmers are well organized and highly interested in their existence. Those who have opposing interests aren't well organized, and don't stand to gain much from their elimination. In New Zealand, a while back, the government ended subsidies, and the results have been quite positive.¹

Labor unions also make me sad. Just like farmers, union workers are well organized and highly interested in their cause. In essence, union workers are subsidized just like farmers, though not explicitly.

The final inefficiency is much closer to home for me. It is the BYUSA, which stands for the Brigham Young University Student Association. The principle governing the existence of farmer subsidies and labor unions applies here. BYUSA is well organized and highly interested in the existence of a BYUSA budget. The budget, which is purportedly about 250,000 dollars, when divided by the number of students in the leadership is probably a decent amount of money. When divided by the 35,000 BYU students, it's about 7 dollars. So everybody pays tuition that is 7 dollars higher than if BYUSA had no budget, which seems trivial.

BYUSA exists ostensibly to serve, so I could imagine the use of 250,000 dollars to improve the school. What does BYUSA do with the budget? They serve me a boiled hot dog for "free" once a semester. They also have leadership retreats and get scholarships.

I think that I could get more than one hot dog for 7 bucks, and it wouldn't even be boiled. I could be first in line to get the hot dogs that I made. I'd probably have enough money left over for a fun dip. Maybe you're indignant at this point, thinking "Hey! BYUSA also uses the money for activities." The idea here is that if there were an activity worth the money, people would pay to get in. Instead, we have our money taken involuntarily and used for an activity that is called free. Those who bear the actual costs of the activity should be the ones to decide what it should be, and if it should exist at all.

Let's compare the costs/benefits of the president of BYUSA with me:

Me: Benefit of ending BYUSA=roughly 7 dollars

Pres: Benefit of keeping BYUSA=roughly 5000 dollars (two semesters of full tuition?)

So he/she is likely to be more interested in keeping BYUSA than I am in getting rid of it. The same principle applies to farmers, and labor unions, which is very likely the reason they all exist even though they are obviously inefficient in the abstract.

Notes:

1. Farming Without Subsidies

Critics

Synopsis: Critics follow patterns

Everybody's a critic, goes the line. Well, me too. I follow critic sites quite a bit, and while critics often vary broadly in their reactions to media, they also follow some general trends.

From Pitchfork.com comes the following explanation of critic trends:

"If you're one of those poor souls who while away the day job by keeping a scorecard of music review sites, there's one thing you already know: There are two distinct groups of bad albums. The more prevalent kind is the fodder that fills a critic's mailbox, bands with awkward names and laser-printed cover art that don't inspire ire so much as pity. The second group is more treacherous: Bands that yield high expectations due to past achievements, yet, for one reason or another, wipe out like "The Wide World of Sports"' agony-of-defeat skier.

Often, these albums are bombarded with website tomatoes for reasons you can't necessarily hear through speakers: the band changes their sound and image to court a new crossover audience, perhaps, or attempts a mid-career shift into ill-advised territory. Or maybe they start writing songs about Moses in hip-hop slang. But sometimes the bad album in question is none of the above; it doesn't offend anyone's delicate scene-politics sensibilities or try to rewrite a once-successful formula in unfortunate ways. Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums."

The first trend is that critics kill copycats. The job of a critic is to know enough to be able judge novelty. The converse of this rule is probably true very often as well, namely, critics praise originality. Notice that critics seem to resort to their natural sensibilities rarely, only in extreme cases.

Critics do indeed pay attention to execution, that's for sure.¹ The awkwardly named bands, users of laser-printers for their cover art, are referred to as "fodder" producers. I think the real key behind this idea is that of intention. Critics ask themselves the questions:

1. What about this media is good?
2. Can the artist correctly answer question 1?

That criteria is probably good, since it measures reliability.

One of the stronger trends in the world of media criticism is the acclaim of new material, or re-released material by already established artists. Look at the all time best albums on Metacritic.com, for example, here's a link. In the top ten, there are several re-releases, a couple of compilations, and a couple of come-backs. The artists are Brian Wilson, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, and Loretta Lynn. Soon to be added to the list is an album by the Rolling Stones. This trend makes a lot of sense, of course. All of these bands have influenced modern bands. It would be inconsistent to criticize them, because critics use them as measuring sticks. They are ostensible pioneers of particular genres.

A possible question at this point is, does "professional" criticism predict the success of media among the general public? For a class project my friend Josh Rotz measured the correlation between the Metacritic rating of movies and their profit. Yes, he took the trouble to control for variables like the number of theaters in which the movie played, and budget size. (Measuring profit as opposed to revenue effectively handles the latter.)

In the end, the critic ratings significantly predicted profit. According to Josh's data, for every increase in the rating on Metacritic (which ratings span 0 to 100,) the movies are expected to earn around 6 dollars more in profit per theater, per day. The movies are usually in lots of theaters, for quite a few days, so this is pretty significant. So, say 2 different movies are playing in 2000 theaters across the country, and one has a 70 rating and the other a 30, over the course of two weeks the 70 rated movie is predicted to make 6 dollars x 40 points difference in rating x 14 days x 2000 theaters=$6,720,000 more profit. Causality may run the counterintuitive way, i.e. people see movies because the critics liked them, but that possibility doesn't eliminate the weight of the correlation. (To put the 6.7 million profit figure in context, the average movie on Josh's list made over 101 million in profit.)

I'm not sure if my non-Metacritic meta-criticism followed it's own rules, but those are my 2 cents.

Notes:

1. Pixar Execution

Ideas for Products

Whitney and I have been thinking a lot about products, and we came up with a few ideas. Here is the list, feel free to comment with any ideas you have:

1. Rather than self-checkout, give every costumer a bar-code scanner (or use the one that the iphone already has) and have them scan their own items as they shop. Then you can use self-checkout whenever you want. Digitize the receipts, and on the digital copy, make sure grocery stores have expiration dates as well. That way, you have a digital list of expiration dates that you can set to give alerts so you don't waste. You would know the total of the purchase before checking out.

As an extension to this idea, it would be nice to have all of your receipts on one digital card. You'd be able to return things without having to dig through a wallet full of papers. Christmas shopping would be a breeze.

Update 7/28/2010: I sent this idea to Smith's to see what they'd say, here is the response:

"Thank you for contacting Smith's. We are currently testing a portable scanner that the customer may use as they shop. Hopefully in the future you will see this technology in your store."

2. Soap bottles that pump soap from a reservoir at the bottom of the bottle, which would be filled always because of gravity. The result, no wasted soap at the bottom. It would probably look like a normal bottle with it's top bent backward, and the bottle turned upside down.

3. A built in version of electronic car scanners. The machines cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, but if the car built in an electronic scanner, you could have a constant diagnostic on your car. This could also feature mileage for each day, as well as gas consumption. People could track the expense of their commute much more accurately.

4. A public database with information about the prescribing habits of physicians, as well as the pressures being placed upon them by sales reps. This way, you could tell if a doctor is likely to prescribe you medication you might not need.

Update 7/28/2010: I sent #4 to Greg Critser, auther of Generation Rx. Here is his response:

"That's an outstanding idea. My one thought is to ask: besides providing for transparency and physician choice, would this necessarily help anyone, or would it simply perform a kind of consumer-policing? I think you have to show the former to get any traction."

These are four ideas, maybe updates will follow.

Updates:

7/27/2010

5. A cereal container with strainer sized or maybe larger holes at the bottom, so the crumbs fall through. There would be a receptacle of course, which you could empty. No more disgusting cheerio powder.

6. Air wicks that disinfect. Now they just make rooms smell nicer.

7. Choose your own adventure MOVIES.

7/30/2010

8. Retractable computer cables. They have extension cords that are retractable, but it would be cool if it just came retractable, kind of like vacuums have them sometimes. For that matter, I would love to have every cable retractable. Maybe wireless will replace cables eventually.

Flexible Thinking

Synopsis: Flexible Thinking is Valuable.

Two definitions for flexible:

a) Susceptible to influence or persuasion; tractable

b) Responsive to change; adaptable

In the 3^rd grade multiplication table contest, I made it to the semi-finals. The winner of the contest was the first to fill in the answers to a bunch of problems on a sheet of paper and flip that sheet over. I had made it far because the sheet of paper that our teacher used was always the same, and I had memorized the positions of numbers on the page. Strangely enough, that very same sheet was used in the first round of the multiplication contest, and I advanced a round. My fun ended there, when the teacher introduced a new set of problems. The adjustment proved to be too much for me; chagrined, I filled out the paper quite slowly.

One of the factors that psychologists test to measure creativity is the ability to adapt to novel scenarios. The following explains one such scenario that has been used to test individuals:

For example, [subjects] might be told that some objects are green and others blue; but still other objects might be grue, meaning green until the year 2000 and blue thereafter, or bleen, meaning blue until the year 2000 and green thereafter.¹

The ability to think clearly about novel situations is important for creativity, and for countless situations in life.

My 3^rd grade experience occurred because my thinking inhabited the bottom level of Bloom's Taxonomy, a classification of thinking tasks.

I submit that flexible thinking is required in greater degrees in the upward direction of Bloom's Taxonomy. Often, people who rely on convention get left behind.

This is non-trivial. My evidence is that people make millions or billions by incorporating flexibility in their thinking. It's worth a lot, literally.

1. "A Vision Of Creativity"

Conversational Magic

Synopsis: Be real

Once, my cousin Daniel told me something that I quite liked. When I repeated the idea back to him much later, he was initially impressed with the fact that I knew it. I explained that I had learned it from him, which fact amused him.

I have not read the book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, but I'd like to talk about it. The idea is all in the title, and it turns out the author focuses on classic literature. I learned this by using the reading hack I described in an earlier post. You can talk about Balzac with zero work. Magic.

A combination of the two is to reuse people's vocabulary on them in a conversation. You get the benefit of appearing knowledgeable while you acquire knowledge. In addition, you are guaranteed to dwell on topics that interest the other person.

The problem, to me, is that the previous actions involve slight dishonesty. Couldn't the solution be to admit when you don't know something? Give people credit for their ideas? I think so. It's disappointing to feel like your knowledge is common, it's fun to explain concepts that seem new to people. If you're interested in what people say, people like it. You can still use people's vocabulary on them, after giving them credit for exposing you to it.

For some reason there is a desire to appear knowledgeable, which desire some people absolutely cannot suppress. If you start to say something they've heard, they can't let you finish the sentence, they've got to interject. It's a difficult urge to quell. I'd say it's worth quelling.

Honesty is the best policy, and in this case it might be the best policy even in absence of morality.