"Not all practice makes perfect"

"I have devoted my career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those people who have used practice to become among the best in the world at what they do. And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these “expert performers,” to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.

...

[people] assume that someone who has been driving for 20 years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for 20 years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five, that a teacher who has been teaching for 20 years must be better than one who has been teaching for five.

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who’s been at it for 20 years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who’s been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve."

 

http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/not-all-practice-makes-perfect

 

Build your own AI

... and play Go with it.

...AI is actually in the process of leaving the lab. Google open sourced its AI framework called tensorflow on November 2015. The ecosystem around tensorflow has since grown to the point where easy, step-by-step tutorial on installing and running your own AI model are now available (see, for example, here).
 
These tutorials are not exactly for everybody. A minimum knowledge of Python and the basic principles of machine learning are required (which, by the way, can also be easily acquired by reading few tutorials or following an online class). Still, it is a huge step in democratizing access to AI.
 
What will bright entrepreneurs do with it? We already saw few virtual assistants/schedulers. But how about a “candy crush” crushing algorithm? A challenger for “alpha-go”? Or, finally, a towel-folding robot? 

from https://teamupstartup.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-for-almost-everybody-what-would-you-do-with-it/

"You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine"

One of the most interesting articles I read recently: all you wanted to know about the placebo effect. What I learned:

  • The placebo effect works in reverse: if you think you are receiving a poison (when in fact you are not), you may actually die.
  • The placebo effect works also in animals.
  • The immunitary system associates harmless substances (i.e., sugar pills) with either drugs - in which case it triggers an immunitary response - or poisons - in which case it suppresses its normal immunitary response.

Here is the passage I found most fascinating:

In 1975, a psychologist in New York was studying taste aversion in a group of rats and got an utterly mystifying result.

Robert Ader, working at the University of Rochester, gave his animals saccharin solution to drink. Rats usually love the sweet taste but for this experiment, Ader paired the drink with injections of Cytoxan, which made them feel sick. When he later gave the animals the sweetened water on its own they refused to drink it, just as he expected. So to find out how long the learned aversion would last, he force-fed this harmless drink to them using an eyedropper. But the rats didn’t forget. Instead, one by one, they died.

Though Cytoxan is toxic, Ader’s rats hadn’t received anything close to a fatal dose. Instead, after a series of other experiments, Ader concluded that when the animals received saccharin and the drug together, they hadn’t just associated the sweet taste with feeling sick, they’d also learned the immunosuppression. Eventually, they’d responded to the sweetened water just as they had to the drug.

also:

[...] a similar discovery had already been made in Russia. In the 1920s, researchers at the University of St Petersburg were following up on Pavlov’s work, to see which other physiological responses could be conditioned.

Among them was the immunologist Sergey Metalnikov. Instead of suppressing the immune system, like Ader would, Metalnikov wanted to boost it. In one series of experiments, he repeatedly warmed guinea pigs’ skin at the same time as giving them injections (small doses of bacteria, for example) that triggered an immune response. Then he gave them – and another group of guinea pigs that hadn’t had this conditioning – a normally lethal dose of Vibrio cholerae bacteria, at the same time as warming their skin. The unconditioned animals died within 8 hours, Metalnikov reported, whereas the conditioned ones survived an average of 36 hours, and some of them recovered completely. Their response to a learned cue – the feeling of heat – appeared to have saved their lives.

 

 

Your daily "dose of crypto conspiracy theorizing"

Cryptography is not exactly my thing. But I really enjoyed this article. Basically, the NSA spent the last 20 years pushing for the adoption of a set of cryptographic standards called Suite B "the first public cryptography standard to include non-classified algorithms certified for encrypting Secret and Top Secret data."

Then, all of a sudden, in August the agency freaked out, and "updated the Suite B website to announce a rapid transition away from Suite B, and to a new set of quantum quantum-resistant algorithms in the coming years."

However, experts agree that there has not been any major breakthrough in quantum computing, and hence the official justification is not believable. So why such a sudden transition away from a standard that they pushed so hard for? Is it possible that this standard had some weaknesses--by design--that now are known not only to the NSA but also to someone else?

 

 

"The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery"

Knausgaard follows neurosurgeon Henry Marsh to Albania, where he performs a new type of surgery in which the patient is awake the entire time.

"His job is to slice into the brain, the most complex structure we know of in the universe, where everything that makes us human is contained, and the contrast between the extremely sophisticated and the extremely primitive — all of that work with knives, drills and saws — fascinated me deeply. "

Beautiful pictures too. By the way, my own thoughts on Henry Marsh's book "do no harm"

The Nazi war on Xmas

"Jesus had been taken care of, but Santa Claus was not so easily forgotten. Tracing his roots to St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century Greek Christian bishop from Turkey, Santa was both explicitly Christian and very definitely not Aryan. Even so, Santa was so beloved that not even the Nazis felt that they could wage a war against him. Instead, they changed his name. Nazis argued that the white-robed and gray-bearded figure who came to people’s houses and gave them gifts on Christmas Day was really the pagan god Odin. Christians had merely stolen him, but now he had been reclaimed"

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3024022/how-hitler-redesigned-christmas

 

Hot or not? Definitely not

"... how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines"

http://themonkeycage.org/2009/01/hotness/

The blockchain, disruption and money

Last week the Economist joined the groups of blockchain enthusiasts, announcing that the blockchain will change everything.  I fully agree with this forecast. However, contrary to what most people think, who will make profits – and if there are profits to be made – is far from obvious.

What is the blockchain

The blockchain is the technology that powers the bitcoin network. Think of a huge spreadsheet with two columns: a name (or an ID) and a number representing the number of bitcoin owned by each name. This spreadsheet is continuously updated to reflect transactions being made across the network.

The problem with such spreadsheet is how to make sure that all the transactions are legitimate, voluntary and there is no double spending. Before the invention of the blockchain, the only way to maintain such spreadsheet was to have a trusted (often regulated) intermediary that maintains a “master” copy, and strictly regulates who has access to it, when/how transactions can  be recorded.  The blockchain instead allows to perform these same tasks is a fully decentralized way, where all people participating in the bitcoin network verify and record transactions. 

Why it matters

The blockchain matters because it can be applied to all situations in which a “central trusted party” is necessary for the market to function. For example, the second column may represent USD, or stocks in a company, or ownership of a car, .... Hence, the blockchain has the potential of radically change the allocation of market power in many industries.

To understand why, consider these two pictures.

 

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StarNetwork.svg

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StarNetwork.svg

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FullMeshNetwork.svg

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FullMeshNetwork.svg

The first one represents a so called “star”: a network in which all the transactions among different nodes must go through a central node. The second picture instead is a “fully connected network” in which each node can communicate directly with all other nodes. The important thing to note is that, in the star network, the central node has market power. Because all parties trust the central node but do not trust each other, the central node becomes the only enabler of transactions and therefore can charge a fee for its service. In the “fully connected network” instead each node can deal directly with every other node and a “trusted third party” is not needed. No node has market power.

The blockchain will transform the structure of several markets from a “star” to a “fully connected network”. Interestingly, this transformation is not new: it has already happened in the market for information with the advent of the internet. Before the internet, the central nodes (traditional medias such as newspaper, TV, Radios) where controlling the information flowing across the network. In other words, if you wanted to get a piece of news across, or wanted to know about it, you had to go through these traditional media. The internet completely transformed this market: now every person can communicate directly with everybody else. The blockchain will bring about the same type of change in the financial sector (no more swift, western-union, credit card networks, …), public services (registry of ownership),  platforms (amazon, uber), ...

Where is the money?

The point I want to make is that it is far from clear who will make money out of this disruptive process (and if there is money to be made!). To illustrate my argument, suppose it is the late '80s and someone is pitching you the following business idea: 

“We are planning to use this awesome new technology (the internet) to deliver information way more efficiently. Think of all the costs that traditional media companies have to sustain to print, air, distribute their content. We can achieve the same outcome basically for free. Our goal is to replace these incumbents and make tons of money.”

This pitch is incorrect, because it fails to realize that the introduction of a new technology will reshape the market. In other words, the pitch assumes that there will still be a “central node” regulating the flow of information, and is planning to replace this central node. The problem is: such central node won't be there anymore. There is no money to be made by simply delivering information. Many blockchain proponents sound a lot like the above pitch. Simply replace “traditional media companies” with “credit cards”, “swift”, “central exchanges”, “platforms”, …

So, is there money to be made with the Blockchain? And where is it? Honestly, I do not know. But a parallel with the market for information is, again, useful. As it turns out, when information is available to everybody for free, the scarce resource becomes people's attention. Hence, the companies making money in the internet age are the ones that can control this new scarce resource: your attention. In the blockchain era, trust will not be a scarce resource anymore and no trusted third parties will be needed. What will be the scarce resource then? Who will make money in the new blockchain era depends on the answer to this question. 

Working more, producing less.

We already knew that, in most professions, people work to the point of negative productivity – in the sense that had they worked less they would have produced more. Myself and a coauthor even have a paper about this, in which we speculate that workers signal their ability at the expenses of current output - think about signing up for a new project when you are already fully committed to other stuff and unable to properly do it, in order to add an extra line to your CV and become a better candidate for a future promotion or future job.

Unsurprisingly, I very much enjoyed a recent article which nicely summarizes the scientific evidence regarding the optimal length of the work week (as it turns out, it is around 40 hours). Thanks to the article, I also discovered some interesting studies dealing with the perception of productivity. As it turns out, people are quite bad at measuring objectively the quality/quantity of their output, and they become worse at it the more they work. Hence, as they extend their work week, they think they are still producing something valuable well beyond the point in which they stop being productive. 

This evidence seems to confirm casual observation. However, the puzzle remains: workers' judgment is bad in many dimensions (estimating risks, staying awake, …) and there are many systems to compensate for this. Think about systems to prevent drivers from dozing off, or mandatory health and safety regulations. So the question is: why are long working hours actually encouraged in many workplaces, if not explicitly via peer pressure? Isn't the problem rather that employers are bad at estimating their workers' productivity?

UPDATE: an interesting development from Sweden.

 

The Ashley Madison hack, common knowledge, and the explosion of coordinated actions.

Two events last week: I finished the book "rational rituals" by Michael Suk-Young Chwe, and the Ashley Madison data started circulating. A fortunate coincidence, because I think one is very informative with respect to the other. 

The end of privacy: government's secrets have been leaked multiple times (same for firms and various organizations). What is new about the Ashley Madison hack is that it exposed the secrets of millions of common people. In other words, your neighbor's secrets (and maybe yours as well) are now in the open. Far from being a one-off event, these types of leaks will become more and more common.

Knowledge and common knowledge. In my opinion, the end of privacy has less to do with knowledge, and more to do with common knowledge. Suppose you become suddenly aware that your neighbor is having an affair. Unless his/her spouse is someone you are very close to, you probably keep quiet and mind your own business (or, at least, I would). After all, we all know that affairs are hardly something rare. 

Things really do not change much if the entire neighborhood knows that your neighbor is a cheater, because most likely they would all behave like you. Hence, the knowledge of the affair is not particularly disruptive of the life of the neighborhood.

Now, imagine that someone runs through the street shouting loudly that your neighbor is a cheater. This is a disruptive fact because, at this point, everybody realizes that everybody else must know about the affair. They also realizes that everybody in the neighborhood know that they know about the affair, and so on. In other words, the affair becomes common knowledge in the neighborhood.

Common knowledge is required for coordinated actions. Why is moving from knowledge to common knowledge so disruptive? The book "rational rituals" by Michael Suk-Young Chwe is all about the following observation: knowledge is not enough in order to achieve coordination, what is required is common knowledge.

Here is an example. Suppose you live under an oppressive regime. You also suspect that other people in your country know that the regime is oppressive, but you are not fully sure. Would you go out and protest? Well, probably not because you risk being the only one there – nobody is sure that other people also know that the regime is bad and therefore nobody is willing to make the first step and start a protest. If instead there is some well publicized event – for example, images of police brutality bouncing all over Facebook and Twitter – the fact that the regime is oppressive is common knowledge. Everybody knows that everybody saw the images of brutality. Furthermore, everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody saw the images of brutality. All of the sudden, common knowledge of political oppression emerges, and coordinated actions against it become possible.

The above example follows closely the narrative of the Arab spring, but can be applied to many other contexts. For example, advertising can be seen as a tool to create common knowledge about products – especially those that require some coordinated adoption to be successful. The book has a tons of other examples.

The end of privacy and coordinated action. Going back to our unfaithful neighbor, what happens once the affair moves from knowledge to common knowledge? My speculation is that coordinated actions against your neighbor become all of the sudden possible. For example, a minority of your neighbors may have strong religious feelings and decide to camp in front of the cheater's door until he/she moves out. Note that this kind of coordinated actions against a common individual are not exactly new, see for example the protests against the dentist who shot Cecil the lion. My point is that the end of privacy will make coordinated actions against normal people more common.

Is this bad? Common knowledge and coordinated actions are not necessary bad. To start,  tons of people constantly release information publicly in the hope to generate common knowledge (or “make it go viral”). There are also cases in which the involuntary creation of common knowledge about politicians and governments was instrumental in bringing democracy to many countries. 

However, I note here that:

(1) those involved in the Ashley Madison hack did not want these secrets to become common knowledge – probably because they anticipated some negative consequences for them.

(2) In addition, we are talking here about normal people who can be productive members of society despite their secrets. Hence, I do not see here any “greater social good” coming from naming and shaming bus drivers, accountants, secretaries, …

On the other hand, maybe having someone protesting in front of your door because you eat meat, you have a pet parrot, you live in an open relationship, and what not will be the norm in the future, and nobody will care about it. Who knows.

p.s. just a clarification: clearly the Ashley Madison hack also generated knowledge -- for example a wife may discover that her husband is a cheater. However, the post is not about that. It is instead about the creation of common knowledge.

 

Note to self: "crazy like us, the globalization of the american psyche" by Ethan Watters

Notes to self is the place where I write about interesting stuff that I happen to read/watch/listen. It is less about writing a review and rather about recording my thoughts and considerations.

The book is about the use of the American (or western) concept of "mental health" or "psychiatric disorders" in non western contexts. It is divided into 4 case studies, each of them describing the introduction of a particular "disorder" in a particular country. The overall theme is that non-western cultures have their own way to deal with mental illness, and the introduction of the "western" way typically causes great damages.

Anorexia in Hong Kong: a form or anorexia had existed in Hong Kong long before the arrival of the western mental categories. It had very different symptoms and causes from the western one, and a meaning that was close to the local culture. After a highly-publicized death for anorexia, a large prevention/awareness campaign followed. Except, this campaign was targeting anorexia in its western sense. What followed was an epidemic of western-style anorexia. The campaign had effectively added a new element to the pool of symptoms available (within the local culture) to express distress. Interesting "endogeneity" problem in which identifying a disorder creates the disorder - relevant mechanism in mental health.

Schizophrenia in Zanzibar: In many non-western societies, mental health illnesses are not disorders but conditions/individual characteristics. I'm tall, you are short, he likes to strawberries, she likes to shout for no apparent reasons. A "condition" does not imply any guilt - everyone is what he/she is. A "disorder" implies that there is something wrong with the person. A "condition" does not require any cure. A "disorder" needs a cure. 

Before the introduction of the "western" way of thinking about schizophrenia in Zanzibar, families with a schizophrenic member were generally accepting, patient, resigned. After the arrival of the "western" way, families started looking for a cure, being frustrated (implicitly at their schizophrenic family members) for the lack of progress, attaching stigma to the person who is ill. Ultimately, patients were worse off, because  schizophrenia gets worse in emotionally-charged environments.

Question: should we call diseases or disorders only things that actually have a cure? After all, what is the point of calling something a "disorder" rather than a "condition" if there is no cure? I'm thinking about, for example, down syndrome. Also, if tomorrow someone invents a pill to become tall, will being less than 180 cm be considered a disease?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) in post-tsunami Sri Lanka: first of all, it is striking how none of the most common treatments for PSTD (based, by en large, on "re-experiencing the traumatic experience" shortly after the events) have shown any effectiveness, even in the western world. Despite this, thousand of western "experts" travelled to Sri Lanka after the tsunami to provide PSTD treatment to the people affected, especially children. Except that, in the local culture, (a) mourning and healing is a social process, (b) talking explicitly about a traumatic experience risks generating violence and revenge within the community. Hence, local people were used to talk about their traumatic experience only indirectly, using metaphors. Western experts were, in fact, destabilizing local communities and preventing the process of healing.

Depression in Japan: something similar to "depression" has long existed in Japan. It was something close to "deep melancholy", and was considered with respect. It was not considered a "disease" but rather a condition associated with a particularly sensitive soul. Japan was not a great market for antidepressant.

Therefore, a bunch of pharma companies organized a congress, where they engineered a strategy to "import" western style depression (and its cure) to Japan. They enlisted leading scientists (local and foreign), started a media campaign, convinced the government, massaged data and results. They succeed.