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.

Minimalism

Synopsis: Minimalism can be a powerful tool or an effective aesthetic hedge.

In-N-Out Burger arrived in Provo a while back, and the drive-through lines are still long. In-N-Out Burger might be the Apple of fast food; sometimes people seem obsessed with it. There are probably numerous reasons for the popularity, but I would like to suggest that minimalism is one of them, specifically with regard to the menu.

The benefits of minimalism in the In-N-Out menu:

a) People don't have many choices, so they buy more
b) It looks nicer, cleaner, more inviting
c) It's easier to replicate and remember

There is plenty of research available about the effects on consumers of too many choices. The usual result is that people with more choices buy less, as a result of "decision paralysis."¹ Decision paralysis is the notion that people faced with an informationally heavy decision may not decide at all. ² In the book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz even claims that too much choice is hurting individual consumers and thus society at large. I think In-N-Out would sell fewer burgers if they added more to their visible menu. ³

Minimalism in appearance is a method of hedging. People praise it less, but they also criticize it less. In a fast food place, it's likely nobody will think hard about what In-N-Out could have added to the menu to make it look more appealing. However, when I look at the McDonald's menu, there is a lot of ugly clutter. It's not usually conscious, but I'd guess people think a minimalist menu looks better, which leads to a better feeling about the restaurant.

In-N-Out's are more standardized across the chain, in my opinion, than other restaurants. People like familiarity, and I think in this case more is still better.

As mentioned, In-N-Out and Apple share a trait or two. Maybe the link is partly a result of similar aesthetics? Other factors weigh-in, I'm sure, but minimalism in both contributes to mass appeal, sometimes obsession. Listen to an apple ad with the intent to spot minimalist thinking and I'll bet you'll find it. The buzzwords are "simple" and "small." Google is another company that probably benefits from minimalism. No distractions, just a search bar.

Minimalism clearly has limits. Plenty of smart businesses decide against a minimalist approach, probably to cater to varying needs and demand. As usual, the interesting questions are: how much? when? It's probably worth thinking about.

Update 7/22/2010: I recently read about what is called the "aesthetic-usability effect." If something looks nicer, people perceive it as easier to use. While minimalism directly reduces decision paralysis, it may also indirectly make products seem easier via good aesthetics.

1. "Medical Decision Making in Situations That Offer Multiple Alternative" by Donald A. Redelmeier and Eldar Shafir, "Analysis of Paralysis" by Chip and Dan Heath.

2. People can put themselves in decision paralysis by delving deeper into possibilities behind choices, rather than proceeding with trial and error or other methods. See analysis paralysis on wikipedia.

3. In-N-Out still allows customers to ask for special orders, or items from the secret menu. (Or the not-so-secret menu, as they call it.) This way, they cater to people with special desires without having to display what most people would ignore.

Mechanized Creativity

Synopsis: Creativity can be achieved in formulaic ways.

Recently, I wondered about how ideas are created. I realized that most of my new ideas are old ideas with one new element. Since I've thought about this, my concept of creativity has changed. I came to the conclusion that some creativity may be attained by following formulas. This seems a little counterintuitive. I think it's both true and useful.

There are probably multiple formulas that produce creativity.¹
For the one I stumbled upon, you need a schema and a list. The schema can be any schema. The list is just a set of objects, ideas, people, places, techniques, etc. that could replace one element inside of the schema.

Think about the schema for surfing. It's a board upon which you stand to ride on top of water. Think of a list of things you could replace with water. Snow, grass, road, air. This is exactly how skateboarding and snowboarding were invented.² Airboards are used in skydiving, and I'm sure someone has invented a grass board, or used a snowboard on grass. Making the list longer, how about ice? Metal? I imagine ice boarding would have a track similar to a bobsled or luge track. Metal boarding could be done on a huge slide. Maybe those already exist, but they illustrate the idea. You start with the schema, replace an element, and then figure out how it would work.

Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres wrote a book called Why Not. It is from a lecture ³ by Nalebuff himself that I took the title of this post, "mechanized creativity." The lecture and the book are expansions of the idea described above, with numerous specific examples. In the lecture, Nalebuff proposes ideas like pay-per-mile car insurance, opt-out organ donation and upside down banana peeling.

I theorize that the ability to use this idea is restricted by the level of flexibility in imagination. You might never be able to think of "metal" as a surface that a board can be ridden upon. A way around this would be to generate a list of surfaces independently of the schema, and then see if any work. Change from a direct, analytical approach to trial and error.

1. In a book called Switch, the authors Chip and Dan Heath explain a concept called "bright spots" which is related to appreciative inquiry. The idea is to approach a problem by asking what someone else does to solve the problem or what someone has done in the past to solve the problem. In the "list-schema" method above, you also look at something someone is doing or has done in the past, the difference being that you change one element and use the new idea. This leads to a formula for generating creative processes, or a formula for formulas. In bright spots you change 0 elements and transfer the idea, in "list-schema" you change 1 element and transfer the idea. You could change 2, 3, 4 elements and so on. You could preserve all the elements and add a new one. Chocolate chip cookies become oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Notice, the formulas can be thought of as recursive.

2. Skateboarding history, snowboarding

3.

Watch it on Academic Earth

Tradeoffs

Synopsis: Trade-offs exist, but people like to ignore them.

It's tempting to ignore trade-offs. A group of us made a music video to the song "Africa" by the band Toto. My friend has wanted to do so for a long time, and we finally helped him satisfy the urge. The video turned out relatively well considering our low-end equipment and knowledge. I did the editing for the video, and once finished, wanted to share it.

It turns out there is a fair bit of knowledge necessary to get a video from an editing program like Final Cut (the one I used) to the Internet or onto a DVD. I had done this before, but forgot about the trade-offs. The trade-off involved is usually quality vs. convenience. Small files are faster to encode and easy to send via the Internet but usually look worse.

In economics, the phrase 'perfect information' means essentially that the people in a market know the trade-offs of the choices they make. Information is important for a market to work well. Businesses need to know the trade-offs just as consumers do, to decide how to price, and what and how much to stock.

The job of a salesperson, despite being often disguised as "to proliferate information," is to distort trade-offs. A truly good salesperson succeeds in instilling lasting confidence in the consumer about the transaction. The interesting thing to me is that so many customers allow the confidence to be instilled, at the cost of money, sometimes a lot of it.

Salespeople sometimes use deceit to distort trade-offs. The incentives to lie can be powerful. Why do people listen to salespeople? Stepping away from economics, it's probably because of the desire to ignore tradeoffs. My dad once told me it's unhealthy to fantasize, because it can make reality disappointing. It would, after all, be nice if those emails claiming to have $1,000,000 for you were true. As obvious as they are though, enough people fall for the ruse to make it worth doing. I overheard my uncle Daren theorize that people give into greed so much that they become stupid.

Maybe greed, maybe laziness? Maybe lying salespeople? The desire to ignore trade-offs is strong, and can be very costly. I finally decided give up quality to share the music video.

Update 7/10/2010: Youtube allows larger file sizes for upload than the hosting site for this blog. The higher quality video may be embedded into the blog. Third parties can ease choices about trade-offs. (This version also has a credits/bloopers video, which is probably more interesting to the group who made it than to anyone else.)

P.S. In case anyone wonders, "Four Very Different Looking Guys" has no real significance.